Book ID: CBB095170601

Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship (2019)

unapi

Greer, Brenna Wynn (Author)


University of Pennsylvania Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: ix + 336
Language: English

In 1948, Moss Kendrix, a former New Deal public relations officer, founded a highly successful, Washington, D.C.-based public relations firm, the flagship client of which was the Coca-Cola Company. As the first black pitchman for Coca-Cola, Kendrix found his way into the rarefied world of white corporate America. His personal phone book also included the names of countless black celebrities, such as bandleader Duke Ellington, singer-actress Pearl Bailey, and boxer Joe Louis, with whom he had built relationships in the course of developing marketing campaigns for his numerous federal and corporate clients. Kendrix, along with Ebony publisher John H. Johnson and Life photographer Gordon Parks, recognized that, in the image-saturated world of postwar America, media in all its forms held greater significance for defining American citizenship than ever before. For these imagemakers, the visual representation of African Americans as good citizens was good business. In Represented, Brenna Wynn Greer explores how black entrepreneurs produced magazines, photographs, and advertising that forged a close association between blackness and Americanness. In particular, they popularized conceptions of African Americans as enthusiastic consumers, a status essential to postwar citizenship claims. But their media creations were complicated: subject to marketplace dictates, they often relied on gender, class, and family stereotypes. Demand for such representations came not only from corporate and government clients to fuel mass consumerism and attract support for national efforts, such as the fight against fascism, but also from African Americans who sought depictions of blackness to counter racist ideas that undermined their rights and their national belonging as citizens. The story of how black capitalists made the market work for racial progress on their way to making money reminds us that the path to civil rights involved commercial endeavors as well as social and political activism.

...More
Reviewed By

Review Brandon K. L. Winford (Spring 2021) Review of "Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship". Business History Review (pp. 159-162). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB095170601/

Similar Citations

Book Marcia Chatelain; (2020)
Franchise: The golden arches in Black America (/isis/citation/CBB808329644/)

Book Ellen C. Scott; (2014)
Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era (/isis/citation/CBB195877199/)

Book Gretchen Sullivan Sorin; (2020)
Driving while Black : African American travel and the road to civil rights (/isis/citation/CBB659523141/)

Book Candacy A. Taylor; (2020)
Overground railroad : The Green Book and the roots of Black travel in America (/isis/citation/CBB999795465/)

Book Brian C. Odom; Waring, Stephen P.; (2019)
NASA and the Long Civil Rights Movement (/isis/citation/CBB430573888/)

Book Anke Ortlepp; (2017)
Jim Crow terminals: the desegregation of American airports (/isis/citation/CBB518023416/)

Book Shennette Garrett-Scott; (2019)
Banking on Freedom: Black Women in U.S. Finance before the New Deal (/isis/citation/CBB092555130/)

Book Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor; (2019)
Race for profit : How banks and the real estate industry undermined Black homeownership (/isis/citation/CBB700561085/)

Book Carlo Mari; (2021)
A business history of the bicycle industry: Shaping marketing practices (/isis/citation/CBB519526639/)

Book Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor; (2016)
Colored travelers: mobility and the fight for citizenship before the Civil War (/isis/citation/CBB521196674/)

Book John Claborn; (2017)
Civil Rights and the Environment in African-American Literature, 1895-1941 (/isis/citation/CBB305948767/)

Book Allyson Nadia Field; (2015)
Uplift Cinema: The Emergence of African American Film and the Possibility of Black Modernity (/isis/citation/CBB405198642/)

Book Adam Winkler; (2019)
We the corporations : how American businesses won their civil rights (/isis/citation/CBB665728432/)

Book Monica M. White; LaDonna Redmond; (2019)
Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement (/isis/citation/CBB970559485/)

Article Washington, Harriet A.; Baker, Robert B.; Olakanmi, Ololade; Savitt, Todd L.; Jacobs, Elizabeth A.; Hoover, Eddie; Wynia, Matthew K.; (2009)
Segregation, Civil Rights, and Health Disparities: The Legacy of African American Physicians and Organized Medicine, 1910--1968 (/isis/citation/CBB001032033/)

Authors & Contributors
Carlo Mari
Candacy A. Taylor
Berney, Barbara
Parker, Traci
Allyson Nadia Field
Odom, Brian C.
Concepts
African Americans
Civil rights
African Americans and science
Business history
Segregation
Technology and race
Time Periods
20th century
20th century, early
19th century
21st century
20th century, late
Places
United States
Richmond, Virginia
Southern states (U.S.)
New Orleans (Louisiana, U.S.)
Institutions
McDonald's Corporation
American Red Cross
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment