2013/09/01 by Davi Johnson Thornton · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Photography and Visual Culture #Participatory Visual Research Methods #Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis #White (mutation) #Rhetoric #Conversation #Race (biology) #Sociology #Civil rights #Event (particle physics) #Media studies #Law #Gender studies #Political science #Philosophy #Linguistics #Communication
paper · doi:10.14321/rhetpublaffa.16.3.0457
published in Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16(3), 457-488 (Michigan State University)
openalex publication_date 2013/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This essay analyzes visual and verbal media discourses surrounding James Meredith's 1966 March Against Fear as a microcosm of national tensions surrounding race and place in mid-1960s America. Specifically, I analyze Jack Thornell's famous photo of Meredith, taken seconds after he was felled by a sniper attack on the second day of his march. Thornell's photograph, I argue, functioned as the centerpiece of an intensive national conversation on race and place, carried out in captions and accompanying news stories and editorials. The image condenses conflicting discourses working to reconcile acceptance of the inevitability of integration with deep-seated fears about the movement of black bodies into white spaces. These tensions were worked out at least in part through languages of emotion that “placed” black and white bodies in social relationships and defined their respective fitness for public spaces. Because Thornell's photograph captures an intensely emotional scene and depicts an event defined as fundamentally about emotion (a march “against fear”), it is an especially powerful visualization of the conflicts surrounding race and place in the 1960s.