Civil Rights Childhood

Katharine Capshaw is associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. She is the author of Children’s Literature of the Harlem Renaissance, winner of the Children’s Literature Association’s 2004 award for best scholarly book.

"Katharine Capshaw’s new study-intersecting photography, children’s literature, and the civil rights movement-is a rich and strikingly original addition to the growing scholarship on African American childhood. Many scholars will appreciate and be indebted to this important work." -Gerald Early, Washington University in St. Louis"Capshaw’s analysis and contextualization of the works in question break entirely new ground, offering original ways of thinking about how the photographic book operated as a medium particularly suited to African-American authors, child readers, and messages about civil rights." -Julia Mickenberg, University of Texas at Austin "This is an important and engaging book that offers one of the few extended discussions of depictions of black childhood. "-International Review of Children’s Literature"Civil Rights Childhood will no doubt be an influential text in our understanding of the visual representations of black childhood now and in our future."-MELUS"A fascinating, well-conceived and empirically rich study."-Visual Studies"To read Capshaw is. . . to receive a lesson on the cultural importance and responsibility of literary scholarship. Civil Rights Childhood not only advances our scholarly understanding of the politics of childhood, but also enables readers to better contextualize so many of the images and injustices we continue to encounter."-International Research Society for Children’s Literature"Deeply researched and engagingly written."-Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth"Civil Rights Childhood is notable for its steadfast and vocal commitment to its political project. Capshaw’s continual engagement with the real implications of the work she analyzes and also of her own would make this book a useful one to use in the classroom."-CAA Reviews"Impeccably researched. Capshaw does some incredibly impressive literary recovery work, shedding light on texts completely unfamiliar to many contemporary scholars of either children’s literature or African American studies."-Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

• ContentsIntroduction1. Friendship, Sympathy, Social Change2. Pictures and Nonfiction: Conduct and Coffee Tables3. Today: Framing Freedom in Mississippi4. The Black Arts Movement: Childhood as Liberatory Process5. Blurring the Childhood Image: Representations of the Civil Rights NarrativeConclusion: A Text for TrayvonAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex