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7. Gordon Parks, Life's most celebrated African-American photographer, did not begin work with the magazine until 1945.

8. While the late 1930s marks the beginning of this transitional period in media treatment of African Americans, Karen F. Huck rightly points out that it was the war years of the 1940s that hastened this change in the media's approach to persons of color. From her analysis of Life magazine from 1938 to 1947, she concludes that the magazine gradually turned “from blatantly negative racist representations… to the representation of them as capable of being like the typically white middle-class reader of the text” (“White Minds and Black Bodies in the War for Democracy: Race, Representation, and the Reader in Life Magazine, 1938–1946” [Ph.D. diss., University of Utah, 1993], 3Google Scholar).

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10. An airline industry ad with the caption “Should Husbands Fly?” in Life, 10 30, 1939, 35Google Scholar.

11. For further discussion of the rhetoric of advertising, see Dyer, Gillian, Advertising as Communication (London: Methuen, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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13. Sequence pictures in advertisements, a format capitalizing on the comic-strip craze of the 1930s, became increasingly common during this period. See Marchand, Roland, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 110–15Google Scholar.

14. Pepperell Fabrics advertisement, Life, 10 4, 1937, 89Google Scholar.

15. Pieterse, , White on Black, 130Google Scholar.

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18. “Life Goes to a Party… With the Sidney Legendres on a Deer Hunt in South Carolina,” Life, 01 24, 1938, 54–57Google Scholar.

19. Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York, Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 186Google Scholar.

20. “Ickes, Man of Wrath,” Life, 11 21, 1938, 59Google Scholar.

21. Natanson, Nicholas, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1992), 18Google Scholar.

22. “Speaking of Pictures… A Movie Sea Lion Goes to Work,” Life, 06 13, 1938, 5Google Scholar.

23. Boskin, , Sambo, 115Google Scholar.

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28. For a discussion of P. T. Barnum's presentation of African-American performers as freaks, see Cook, James W. Jr, “Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescripts: The Strange Career of P. T. Barnum's ‘What is It?’ Exhibition,” in Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body, ed. Thompson, Rosemarie Carland (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 139–57Google Scholar.

29. Boskin, , Sambo, 14Google Scholar.

30. In the section “Speaking of Pictures,” with the first two words of the caption emphasized: “Black babies posed with a sailor are always good for a big laugh back home,” in Life, 10 28, 1940, 127Google Scholar.

31. “50 Million Watermelons Go to Market,” Life, 08 9, 1937, 50–52Google Scholar.

32. Natanson, , Black Image, 17Google Scholar.

33. Frederickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 253Google Scholar.

34. “Africa's Belgian Congo Sets the Style in Hats for American Women,” Life, 09 13, 1937, 53Google Scholar.

35. “Camera Supplemented Gun on Macnab-Snyder Safari,” Life, 10 10, 1938, 45Google Scholar.

36. “Pictures to the Editors: Tanganyika Triplets,” Life, 06 13, 1938, 72Google Scholar.

37. Osofsky, Gilbert, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 184Google Scholar.

38. “Spreadin' Rhythm Around,” Life, 12 28, 1936, 30Google Scholar.

39. “Life Goes to a Party… At the Savoy with the Boys and Girls of Harlem,” Life, 12 14, 1936, 64–68Google Scholar.

40. Gaskins, , “The World,” 15Google Scholar.

41. “Life Goes to a Party… At the Savoy,” 64–67.

42. Reddick, , “Educational Programs,” 369Google Scholar.

43. “Tennessee Puts a Chain Gang on Its Levees,” Life, 02 15, 1937, 12Google Scholar.

44. Wright, Richard, “Down by the Riverside,” in Uncle Tom's Cabin (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), 97Google Scholar.

45. “Portrait of a Chain Gang,” Life, 03 22, 1937, 48Google Scholar.

46. While I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang focused primarily on white prisoners, Tannenbaum, Frank observed in Darker Phases of the South (New York, 1924)Google Scholar that the “colored population of the Southern prison is predominant” (83), and Spivak, John L. detailed the hardships of African-American chain-gang prisoners in Georgia Nigger (New York, 1932)Google Scholar. In Forced Labor in the United States (New York, 1933)Google Scholar, Walter Wilson commented that, after the Civil War, the chain gang had been “one of the devices consciously developed by the former slaveholders to put the newly ‘freed’ Negroes back into bondage” and that, although the “number of white prisoners on the chain gang has grown considerably” since the Great War (68), the chain-gang system remains primarily a “weapon to enforce white ruling-class domination and peonage” (83).

47. “Portrait of a Chain Gang.”

48. Ibid., 48, 50.

49. Lichtenstein, Alex, “Good Roads and Chain Gangs in the Progressive South: ‘The Negro Convict Is a Slave,’” Journal of Southern History 59 (02 1993): 93Google Scholar.

50. Goodman, James, Stories of Scottsboro (New York: Pantheon), 156Google Scholar.

51. “Scottsboro Boys Once More on Trial,” Life, 07 19, 1937, 30–31Google Scholar.

52. Ibid., 30.

53. Chisholm, Anne, Nancy Cunard: A Biography (New York: Penguin, 1981), 286Google Scholar.

54. Reprinted in Boyle, Kay, Testament for My Students and Other Poems (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), 69Google Scholar.

55. “Scottsboro Boys Once More on Trial,” Life, 07 19, 1937, 30–31Google Scholar.

56. “Americans Have Died Fighting for Democracy in Spain: These Are Some of the Fascist-Haters Who Came Back Alive,” Life, 03 28, 1938, 56Google Scholar.

57. “Speaking of Pictures… Camera Catches Emotions,” Life, 10 31, 1938, 4Google Scholar.

58. “The South of Erskine Caldwell Is Photographed by Margaret Bourke-White,” Life, 11 22, 1937, 52Google Scholar.

59. Natanson, , Black Image, 24Google Scholar.

60. “Faces in the Flood,” Life, 02 15, 1937, 9Google Scholar.

61. “Out of the Deep South: A Lynching, Oil & Feathers, The Ku Klux Klan and Mr. Justice Black,” Life, 08 30, 1937, 30–31Google Scholar.

62. “Klan Marches Again in Florida” and “Steers Kick Up in Nebraska Rodeo,” Life, 09 12, 1938, 22Google Scholar.

63. Ibid.

64. “Miami Klan Tries to Scare Negro Vote,” Life, 05 15, 1937, 27Google Scholar.

65. While the majority of African Americans in the Deep South were disenfranchised, as they had been for four decades or more, those people of color who could vote abandoned the party of Lincoln for the Democratic Party of Franklin — and Eleanor — Roosevelt. In June of 1938, Life summarized the findings of a Fortune survey of American voters. While the responses of the white electorate were grouped by income level, those of the African-American participants were lumped into a single category of “Negroes.” The magazine allocated each group one page, with the page for black respondents next to the one featuring poor whites and a single headline running across the double-page spread: “Negroes Like Roosevelt and the New Deal [and] Most Poor White People Like Him Just about as Well.” The photographs show black sharecroppers and urban laborers being interviewed by well-dressed, well-fed, and presumably middle-class white women. One wonders just how forthcoming the African Americans were under such circumstances. “To every question about the President and his policies,” Life tells us, an Atlantan asphalt worker dutifully “answered an emphatic ‘Yes, ma'am. Ah likes everything Pres'dent Roosevelt does.’”

It was clear to many political observers that African-American support was helping to forge a new Democratic coalition, and Life continued to cover the issue, especially in the months leading up to the national election of 1940. In April of that year, for instance, the magazine asserted that the Democrats' quest for black support had led the chairman of the Democratic National Committee Jim Farley to Tuskegee, Alabama, to unveil a postage stamp of Booker T. Washington, the “first Negro ever to appear on a U.S. stamp.” Although Life featured no African Americans at the Chicago National Convention of the Democratic Party in July — presumably because none of the delegates were black — the magazine did cover black election efforts in Sedalia, Missouri, in a preelection article entitled “The Elections of 1940” and, three weeks later, featured one African-American wife of a WPA worker among the twenty-seven people interviewed in a postelection survey.

The African Americans in these articles are not presented as vividly as those stepping up to the Miami polling booths in the Klan story previously discussed. As in Life's coverage of blacks below the poverty level, the magazine's approach to African-American voters remained distant from its subjects, the weekly's use of dialect in transcribing people's remarks and its use of small photographs further isolating them from its white readers.

66. “Private Lives,” Life, 11 30, 1936, 60–61Google Scholar.

67. “Private Lives,” Life, 02 15, 1937, 62Google Scholar.

68. “Life on the American Newsfront: Negro Congressman Jim Crowed, Sues Railroad,” Life, 05 24, 1937, 29Google Scholar.

69. “Letters to the Editor: Jim Crowism,” Life, 06 21, 1937, 7Google Scholar.

70. Ibid.

71. “Slave-Born Negro Scientist Is Honored in Alabama,” Life, 03 22, 1937, 37Google Scholar.

72. “Pastors Pick Negro President,” Life, 06 27, 1938, 60Google Scholar.

73. “Life on the American Newsfront: In Richmond, Virginia,” Life, 12 7, 1936, 14Google Scholar.

74. Life, August 22, 1938, 19. In fact, most contemporary scholars believe this to be true. See Watts, Jill, God, Harlem U.S.A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

75. Mead, Chris, Champion — Joe Louis: Black Hero in White America (New York: Scribner, 1985), 186Google Scholar.

76. Brown, Earl, “Joe Louis: The Champion, Idol of His Race, Sets a Good Example of Conduct,” Life, 06 17, 1940, 52Google Scholar.

77. Mead, , Champion, 296Google Scholar.

78. “Great Singer Tours America,” Life, 02 22, 1937, 21Google Scholar.

79. “A Great Negro Singer Comes Home: Marian Anderson Performs in Philadelphia,” Life, 06 13, 1938, 21Google Scholar.

80. “Life on the Newsfronts of the World: Roosevelt Resignation,” Life, 03 13, 1939, 18Google Scholar.

81. Black, Allida M., “Championing a Champion: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Marian Anderson ‘Freedom Concert,’” Presidential Studies Quarterly 20 (Fall 1990): 727Google Scholar.

82. Sandage, Scott A., “A Marble House Divided: The Lincoln Memorial, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Politics of Memory, 1939–1963,” Journal of American History 80 (06 1993): 149CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83. Ibid.

84. Ibid.

85. “In Front of the Lincoln Memorial Marian Anderson Performs in Philadelphia,” Life, 04 24, 1939, 21Google Scholar.

86. Sandage, , “Marble House Divided,” 148Google Scholar.

87. “Negroes: The U.S. Also Has a Minority Problem,” Life, 10 3, 1938, 49Google Scholar.

88. Ibid., 48.

89. Ibid., 54.

90. Ibid., 53.

91. Ibid., 57.

92. Karen Huck also asserts that the “referential code would lead many (if not most) readers to think about the daily 15-minute radio show that had been one of the most popular entertainments since 1931, Amos ‘n’ Andy. Much of the humor on this program grew from the shenanigans of the lead characters and their lodge brotherhood in the Mystic Knights” (“White Minds,” 121)

93. “Negroes: The U.S. Also Has a Minority Problem.”

94. Ibid., 49.

95. Ibid., 50.

96. Ibid., 51.

97. Natanson, , Black Image, 18–20Google Scholar.