In the simplest of terms, this nation’s history of memorializing Black figures consists of two phases: before photography arrived in the United States and ever since. From the introduction of the daguerreotype in 1839 up through the twentieth century, Blacks and non-Blacks used photography to signify, cement, and remember the importance of Black figures. Examples include Harriet Tubman, Dred Scott, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Huey Newton, and Barack Obama. Studio portraits and photojournalistic images of these Black activists and political figures are among the most celebrated images of Black Americanness from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars have commented on the cultural and political significance of most, if not all, of these images as important representational events. This paper considers the significance of a commonality visible across the lot: sitting. All Black figures listed above are seated in one or more of the photographic images that we, in the U.S., rely upon most to learn about and venerate them. Why African Americans sit in these images is a question that can be – and has been – answered through contextualization. The concern here is how these iconic photographs – representative of Black people, the Black past, and Black protest – function in the aggregate as an archive of Black iconicity, the central motif of which is the seated Black subject.
Dr. Brenna Wynn Greer is an Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. She is a historian of race, gender, and culture in the twentieth-century United States. She explores historical connections between capitalism, social movements, and visual culture and teaches topics in U.S. and African American History. Her first book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press), examines the historical circumstances that made the media representation of Black citizenship good business in the post-World War II era. A recipient of several teaching awards and major fellowships, Greer is working on her second book, Issues of Color, a cultural and business history of the post-World War II Black magazine publishing industry.
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Image credit: Detail view of Frederick Douglass by an Unidentified Artist, 1856. Collection National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. NPG 74.75