Home Photo Gallery Classroom Documents "12,000,000 Black Voices"--A Folk History of the Negro In the United States. Reviewed For Photo Notes by Sid Grossman December 1941
Text by Richard Wright. Wright says, each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or upon the hard pavement Of the city street, you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stronger shall you suspect, and we are not what we seem." "Our outward guise still carries the old familiar aspect of which three hundred years of oppression in America have given us, but beneath the garb of the black laborer, the black cook, and the elevator operator lies an uneasily tied knot of pain and hope whose snarled strands converge from many points of time and space." "-----Standing at the apex of the twentieth century, we look back over the road we have traveled and compare it with the road over which the white folk have traveled, and we see that three hundred years in the history of our lives are equivalent to two thousand years in the history of the lives of whites!" And finally," The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope which we all have traveled has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims. Look at us now and you will know yourselves, for we are you, looking back at you from the dark mirror of our lives!" "12,000,000 Black Voices has the kind of photographs that you have to look at; they have so much more depth, visually and emotionally, than those in most other picture books; they create new concepts that we need to understand Rosskam has a marvelous way of using photographs in the right place, to the mutual heightening of text and photograph. Sometimes a photograph culminates two or three pages of text so that the heart of the passage is dramatized with that convincing power which is so peculiar to photography. The practice of suiting the photo to the text has, unfortunately, resulted in the absence, from this book of a number or existing fine photographs of Negro life. The book is so much richer because photographs are used to particularize general statements. An example: Wright says, "From 1890 to 1920 more than 2,000,000 of us left the land" We see Arthur Rothstein's photo of an evicted sharecropper's family with the feeling that here is the human reality; the bitterness and the hope of 2,000,000 people seeking a new life. There is something of dignity in the standing and sitting figures, something of the patience and bewilderment that adds a fine element The collaboration of Wright and Edwin Rosskam in combining text and the F. S. A. photographs, results in splendid integration. We must give credit to Rosskam's experience over a period of years of editing photo books and of editing for the F. S. A. to the results achieved in this latest book. Rosskam achieves complete integration of photos and text, not only in terms of idea and sequence, but visually in layout and book design. Rosskam's photo books are probably the only ones we can't scan in the bookshops and then feel we've read. This is a book for grown-ups to read. Now, when it is so necessary for us to find unity of all of our nation; and the will to defend our essential rights, is particularly the time to understand, and to bring into the fight with us, this one tenth of our people. Most of the photographs are from the files of the Farm Security Administration. The exceptions are several of Edwin Rosskam's photograph, one each by Richard Wright and Louise Rosskam. The F. S. A. photographers are:--Dorothea Lange, Jack Delano, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, Marion Post, John Vachon and Walker Evans. Not all of these photographers are currently with the F. S. A.
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