Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks

Childhood joy, pleasure, and creativity are not often associated with the civil rights movement. Their ties to the movement may have faded from historical memory, but these qualities received considerable photographic attention in that tumultuous era. Katharine Capshaw’s Civil Rights Childhood reveals how the black child has been—and continues to be—a social agent that demands change.

Because children carry a compelling aura of human value and potential, images of African American children ...