12 Million Black Voices: A Book Review
By: Aminah Bazzell-Smith, Nyah Hoskins, and Shaquawnna Vinnett
Published in 1941, the highly acclaimed 12 Million Black Voices (TMBV) is a documentary photobook that details the difficulties of living while Black in the time immediately following the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, up through the 1940s.
The book explores the ways in which over two-hundred years of slavery and servitude have impacted the lives of Black people in America. The photobook also appeals to the privileged, asking that they not only acknowledge the plight of Black people in America, but also that they take action to ameliorate these injustices.
Controversy and Audience Reception
Many fail to realize that TMBV is actually a collaborative project: Richard Wright wrote the prose and Edwin Rosskam — a White German freelance photographer who worked on the Farm Security Administration’s (FSA) documentary photo-project — chose and captioned the photographs in the book.
This often brushed-over fact is critical to bear in mind, as it may help account for the exploitative depiction of the subjects in the book. It is also important to keep in mind that the disparate reception of the book between Black and White audiences reflects the reality of a work produced that speaks for a people as opposed to making space for the people to speak for themselves.
In 1941, Ralph Thompson ( a White book critic) wrote in his review of TMBV in the New York Times book review:
“A more eloquent and belligerent statement of its kind could hardly have been devised. Admittedly one-sided, it is a very effective protest.”
However, in the 2008 edition of TMBV, Thompson’s full quote is truncated to the point of losing its original meaning:
“A more eloquent statement of its kind could hardly have been devised…flawless prose that takes on at times the quality of a folksong.”
In 1949, James Baldwin, after becoming outraged at the prevalence of caricatures of Black people presented in the novels of Richard Wright, penned an essay entitled Everybody’s Protest Novel. In the essay, Wright wrote:
“The ‘protest’ novel, so far from being disturbing, is an accepted and comforting aspect of the American scene, ramifying that framework we believe to be so necessary. Whatever unsettling questions are raised are evanescent, titillating, remote, for this has nothing to do with us, it is safely ensconced in the social arena, where, indeed, it has nothing to do with anyone, so that finally we receive a very definite thrill of virtue from the fact that we are reading such a book at all. This report from the pit reassures us of its reality and its darkness and of our own salvation; and ‘As long as such books are being published,’ an American liberal once told me, ‘everything will be all right.’ (p. 19)
It is through reading Baldwin’s quote above that we bear witness to the gravity of the unintended consequences of Richard Wright and Edwin Rosskam’s attempt at a documentary photobook: a photobook that quickly descended into the realm of a protest novel.
In a New Yorker review on the back cover of the 2008 publishing of TMBV, the photobook is referred to as a “short text and picture folk history of the Black American.” It is important to note here that folk histories are histories constructed by those who have bore witness to a reality, but have the means of choosing how to depict that reality. Folk historians reproduce the history of a people and through their reproduction insert their own biases, prejudices, ideologies, and intentions.
Reductionism in 12 Million Black Voices
The three-word caption “The black sharecropper” serves as an astonishingly one-dimensional approach of introducing the individuals pictured in the photograph to the reader. The photograph and caption take up the whole of the page. There is no other text accompanying the photograph than the caption itself.
The identification of the two individuals depicted in the photograph as “The black sharecropper” — as not two people, but one person (or type) — is suggestive of Rosskam’s simplification of the Black experience. It also shows how the White public could come to believe that TMBV is, as a “folk history of the Black American,” a singular embodiment of an entire people.
If we ignore the caption and look instead at the people in the photograph, we see them standing close together, in a way indicative of a close relationship: the two individuals depicted in the photograph are more, then, than just “The black sharecropper” — they are something to each other.
The relationship of the image to the text is redundant on the surface, but entirely juxtapositional upon closer reading.
The Farm Security Administration (FSA) and the Black Sharecropper
It is entirely possible that Rosskam’s decision to caption the photograph on page 23 of TMBV with “The black sharecropper” was influenced by the chief goal of the FSA’s photo-documentary project: to serve as an impetus for sociopolitical change by documenting the hardships of “the oppressed” (a term which in and of itself groups billions of people worldwide into a one-dimensional personification of ‘the abused’).
The intention of the FSA’s photo-documentary project — to shock a privileged audience into sociopolitical awareness and action — without a doubt carried over into Rosskam’s selecting and captioning of FSA photographs, and, unfortunately, into the prose created by Wright to accompany Rosskam’s photographs.
The Intended Audience of TMBV: White People
When commenting on Wright’s caricatures in Native Son (1940), Baldwin wrote:
“Wright knew this, of course — his characters were purposely exaggerated, in part to elicit a white audience’s sympathy and to shock it into racial awareness and political action. But where does that leave his black subjects?”
The photograph and accompanying text on page 92 reflect one of the most prevalent stereotypes of Black people during the early to mid 1900s. It is important to note that the text accompanying the photo is not a caption, but prose: the text was written by Wright. The people in the photograph — pictured reaching toward the sky — along with the eight sentences punctuated with exclamation points at the beginning of the paragraph work together very well for a white audience that is completely divorced from the lives of Black people and dependent upon stereotypes to understand a people ‘so distant from their own.’
The accompaniment of the photograph on page 92 along with the prose beneath it cements the notion in the minds of the intended audience that although emancipation has already happened, although The New Deal (relief, recovery, and reform for the American people) was in progress, the people in the photograph remained conflicted about leaving the area where the “Lord of the Land lives.”
There is a clear infantilization of Black people in America that is being targeted and exploited by Wright and Rosskam in TMBV. This reality is furthered by the photograph and captions on pages 94 and 95 of the book.
While pages 94 and 95 of the book appear to reflect the message contained in the captions on the surface, they also reflect an augmented reality often presented to white and/or privileged audiences, wherein the people who are being used to advance a political agenda are portrayed as needing to be “saved.” In the book, both Wright and Rosskam are guilty of advancing such a dangerous rhetoric.
The image on page 94 portrays a family posing for a photograph to be taken with the children looking on in the background. The image on page 95 portrays people at church with a preacher standing behind a podium and church attendees reading and taking notes in what are presumably bibles. The captions beneath the photographs introduce an added layer to the photographs, which may or may not be true, since neither the Wright nor Rosskam were present when the photographs were taken. The captions argue that those pictured lack reasoning and social awareness, and are in need of Eurocentric values. Wright and Rosskam are directly informing the intended audience — a white audience — that only they can save these naive people.
The Illusions of a Singular Lived Experience
The growing use of Kodak box cameras in the time when TMBV was first published, and these cameras’ ability to capture images of life as it occurred, may have suggested to readers of the time that the people in the photographs were caught in candid shots. This, along with the intentional picking and choosing of such “candid” shots represents a rhetorical tactic that forces the reader to falsely believe that every aspect of the photobook is candid and thus represents an undeniable truth.
The intended audience is led to believe that the pages of the book must be true because the text is accompanied by photographs and the author of the prose is a Black man. So, surely he has the authority to speak for all Black people.
This rationalization is further depicted in the forward of the 2008 publishing of TMBV, in which the historian David Bradley wrote:
“But it is only accurate to say that in using ‘we’ Wright was not involved in mere artistic conceit. He had followed the ebb and flow of the river of black life in a way that no other writer had. He alone had the right to say ‘we.’ (XIX)
The “Sympathy-Evoking” Imagery of Hope and Hard Work
Toward the end of the photobook, Wright and Rosskam begin to introduce the hopes and dreams of Black people and the ability of Black people to “remain positive” in a dark world.
The photograph on page 126 depicts a well-dressed and happy group of people as they presumably enjoy themselves at a dance. The text atop the image, however, juxtaposes the joy in the photo with statements of a dreary reality. The positioning of the text on top of the photograph reads as a precaution taken by Wright and Rosskam, alerting the intended audience that ‘even though we are including this joyous photo, these people are still in need of saving.’ The strategy of which is intended to show the ‘what could be’ as opposed to the ‘what is’.
The photograph on page 142 depicts a group of women engaging in protest as they fight for their rights. The image of the women protesting represents a social action: the taking of one’s own life and existence into one’s own hands and fighting for it. The text beneath it serves as a reminder of why the women in the photo have taken to the streets to continue their fight for equality. The strategy on page 142 is to draw the reader back into the societal problems against which Black people have to fight.
Pages 126 and 142 utilize tactics which appeal to the “American psyche” of individualism: that if one wants to advance in life, one must fight for oneself. The rhetoric that one must prove oneself deserving of help is an ideology that Wright and Rosskam appeal to in the final pages of the photobook. This appeal cements the reality that the intended audience of the photobook is indeed a white one.
Takeaways from TMBV for Writers
Despite the deeply problematic issues we have raised, writers can learn some lessons from TMBV. The photographs chosen for the book are just as important as the text that goes along with it. Wright and Rosskam’s use of “candid” photographs convinces the reader that they are receiving a well-rounded look into the lives of the subjects. Rather than just having photos with the subjects posed in front of a camera, this method gives a much more authentic feel and makes the work more approachable and believable. As we have suggested, however, there are ethical perils that accompany this technique.
The combination of photos of homes, living situations, hard labor, and joyous occasions are effectively used to juxtapose depictions of hardship and hope. Showing both the good and the bad makes the subjects easier to relate to and empathize with. During this time, many did not understand the graveness of the situations of Black folk in America, hence the reasoning behind the publication of this book.
Wright and Rosskam’s creation of a narrative arc from this set of photographs is also instructive for writers working with photographs. With this method, the reader has something to look forward to and therefore continues reading. Wright and Rosskam also chose to end an emotionally demanding piece with a hopeful ending, which is a staple in American storytelling. Wright and Rosskam played to their audience in a way that is reflected in the imagery and accompanying text, as well as the overall construction of the book’s story line.
The above methods are integral to producing a piece that is both appealing and engaging. Yet perhaps the most important lesson for writers from TMBV is that despite their political agenda, they must consider the ethical obligations that they have to the people represented in the photographs that they write with.
