Lasting Impressions: 'For All the World to See,' at National Museum of American History
Maurice Berger spent nearly seven years amassing objects for his exhibition “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights.” But unlike typical museum collections, most of Berger’s artifacts are not on loan from institutions. They’re from eBay.
“I was able to find everything from church fans to Black Panther newspapers to Nation of Islam newspapers” on the online marketplace, Berger says. “I was able to find the Jet magazine that had a photo of Emmett Till’s mutilated body. Basically, I built an archive.”
Rather than present what he calls “some august museum version of civil rights,” the research professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture wanted to show how images from magazines, political pins and other ephemera “operated in the everyday lives of Americans, black and white,” he says. “How did these images actually alter prevailing ideas about race?”
His carefully assembled archive forms the core of “For All the World to See,” now on view at the National Museum of American History (and co-sponsored by the National Museum of African American History and Culture). The exhibit covers both positive and negative representations of African Americans that proliferated from the 1930s through the 1960s. During that time, “there was this effluence of films and advertising in which black people were portrayed as servants,” Berger says.
To counter such harmful stereotypes, civil rights leaders emphasized positive images through black-owned newspapers and magazines, whose covers featured celebrities
such as Jackie Robinson and Louis Armstrong.
“If you’re able to put a new image of blackness out in the world,” Berger says, “you could empower black people by giving them a sense that they belong. You could, in a sense, send out the message that black people in their inner lives were no different than white people.”
The exhibition, which was already displayed in Chicago and New York, has prompted very emotional responses in visitors.
“It was amazing to see people in tears as they remembered their own past,” Berger says. “It’s important that people realize that when they come to see the show, their reactions to these images complete the story that we’re trying to tell.”
» National Museum of American History, 1400 Constitution Ave. NW; through Nov. 27, free; 202-633-1000, Americanhistory.si.edu. (Smithsonian)
Written by Express contributor Stephen M. Deusner
Photo courtesy of Ernest C. Withers
