Henry O. Tanner's charcoal drawing depicts an exceptional event: black and white soldiers lining up together at an American Red Cross canteen during World War I, a time when most of the U.S. armed services were segregated, even in mess halls. The drawing is itself exceptional because of the viewpoint Tanner assumes. Sketched from inside the darkened canteen and behind the server, his drawing opens out onto a bright area where soldiers have gathered to receive their meal. The contrast between inside and outside, between light and dark, echoes in the faces of the soldiers. One black soldier in a line of white ones stands out. But there is more. Part of another black face appears in the upper corner of the window. In addition, the race of the server standing in the shadows is unclear, though he could be African American. Tanner's handling of charcoal in all three of these figures is more detailed than in the others. Unlike the broad hatching that composes the interior or the vague contours that suggest the white soldiers' faces, Tanner delicately modeled the central black soldier, giving him physical depth and detail. Although many American artists created images of wartime during their service, including Red Cross activities during World War I, Tanner is unique among them for drawing attention to the presence of black soldiers.

In late 1917 Tanner, who was already an established African American painter living in Europe, enlisted in the Red Cross at the rank of lieutenant. He was quickly promoted to an assistant director position after instituting a successful morale-boosting program for convalescing soldiers in France. In return for his excellent service, Tanner also got permission to depict some of the Red Cross's warfront activities. Although Tanner's dedication and leadership won him the respect of many white peers, he also experienced racial intolerance during his service. As Tanner recalled, he attended a dinner where a captain, who Tanner once considered a friend, launched into "a tirade against the Negro," disregarding the fact that Tanner was there.

In light of this prejudicial treatment, Tanner's drawing seems poignant. Accentuating the black soldier in the serving line asserts his presence. Yet doing so comes at a cost. In calling attention to the soldier, Tanner also separates him from the other troops, suggesting his own experience of isolation and difference. The drawing's perspective, rendered from deep within the tent, slso suggests Tanner's mixed feelings. While patriotic and dedicated to the war effort, Tanner is removed from the action, relegated to the sidelines.

This pair of photographs vividly documents the highs and the lows in the long fight for African American voting rights in rural West Tennessee that culminated in 1960. In one picture, a young woman beams, her delight unmistakable, as she proudly displays her new voting registration card. The woman beside her smiles with some reservation. On this bright, warm day, as the sun flickers through the trees and sunlight and shadow play across the women’s faces, Withers captures the complex mood of exhilaration tempered by weariness, maybe even worry or impatience artfully disguised. The other photograph stands in stark contrast. A family poses in a line, as if for a formal family portrait, but outside a tent amid a barren landscape. Several young children, bundled against the cold, address the photographer warily. Their clothes are worn, in some cases too small to button properly, suggesting the hardship of their situation. Yet the two adults standing along with them express two strategies that might lead the family through their experience: the father, with a hint of a smile, suggests perseverance and optimism; the mother, with her stern look at the camera, suggests fortitude and determination.

While the moods of the two photographs are different, their subjects are closely related. In 1959, two groups of black citizens filed organizational charters for the Fayette County Civic and Welfare League and the Haywood County Civic and Welfare League. The Fayette County organization aimed to coordinate the first comprehensive voter registration drive among black citizens in the rural South. Trying to prevent African Americans from voting, members of the Fayette County Election Commission resigned, but the U.S. Justice Department named new commissioners to replace them. Hundreds of African American county residents, mostly sharecroppers, were forced to stand in line outdoors in blazing heat to wait for a single registrar to process all the applications. Eventually many received their voter registration cards. This triumph is the subject of the first image.

Some white residents retaliated, evicting black families from their homes on white-owned farms. After black residents voted in November, white landowners stepped up their efforts to throw black sharecroppers off the land, and white merchants refused to sell them the food and goods they needed. Hundreds of desperate families took refuge in tent camps. The second photograph was taken in the first and most famous camp, “Tent City,” which was set up on land in Fayette County owned by a white farmer, Shephard Towles. The standoff in Fayette County received national attention, but it was not resolved until early 1962, when a federal court forbade anyone from interfering with someone’s right to vote. Unlike the famous protests in Mississippi, Alabama, and even nearby Memphis, the struggles in Fayette County and Haywood County are remarkable because they were borne mostly by local citizens without the direct assistance of national civil rights leaders or organizations. By picturing these everyday citizens, Withers’s photographs speak to the dedication, trials, and triumphs of those who stood up for their right to vote.

Painter William H. Johnson twice depicted what was a watershed moment in American social, political, and artistic history: singer Marian Anderson's concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday, 1939. Earlier that year, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) denied Anderson, a world renowned opera singer, the opportunity to perform at their concert hall in Washington, D.C., because of the color of her skin. The story of the DAR's refusal appeared in local, national, and international newspapers, causing debate and outrage. Washington civil rights activists, including lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston, organized a formal protest. Ultimately, they convinced members of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration to help arrange a free public concert featuring Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial, a site chosen because it would recall slavery, the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln's support for black freedom. On April 9th of that year, around the anniversary of Lincoln's Good Friday assassination, she performed before seventy-five thousand people assembled on the National Mall, and the radio broadcast reached millions. In 1956, Ms. Anderson reflected on her decision to perform: "I said yes, but the yes did not come easily or quickly .... As I thought further, I could see that my significance as an individual was small in this affair. I had become, whether I like it or not, a symbol, representing my people."

Having resettled in the United States less than a year prior, after spending much of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, artist William H. Johnson immersed himself in predominantly African American subjects and adopted a consciously naive painting style. Based in New York and working for the Harlem Community Art Center, Johnson used newspaper photographs as sources for the 1939 painting, which emphasizes the presence of Lincoln, casually reclined behind Anderson. Far from a marble sculpture, Abraham Lincoln seems to be listening and moving his hands to the historic concert. Johnson painted the subject again several years later, focusing on Anderson's global influence and popularity. The European and South American flags and landmarks surrounding the central figure suggest that increasing international attention to segregation often helped to both shame American politicians and encourage them to live up to the nation's founding ideals of liberty and equality.

It is likely that Johnson also recognized parallels between Anderson's career and his own. Like Johnson, Anderson enjoyed greater freedom, opportunity, and success abroad than she experienced in the United States, where both artists saw their professional careers compromised by Jim Crow segregation, prejudice, and racism. Nevertheless, painter and singer both chose to return home to face the struggles of black life and celebrate their culture.

These two portraits use juxtapositions of light and shadow to present their subjects as self-aware, powerful, dignified, and serious men. One sitter seems to focus on a distant point, while the other gazes into the camera's lens, addressing the viewer directly. Both photographs were taken about a century ago, when racist caricatures of African Americans circulated in popular culture, the mainstream press, and early cinema. Such images often cast black people as comic or savage figures. In contrast, these sophisticated pictures, taken by a black photographer, allow us to explore the deep ties between African American portrait photography and the rise of the early Civil Rights movement.

Both of these portraits were taken by Cornelius M. Battey, who was an instructor and photographer at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and later lived and worked in New York and Cleveland, Ohio. The photograph on the left shows Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), an educator and founder of Tuskegee Institute. Washington was arguably the most influential African American leader of his era. In the face of racial hatred, segregation, and disenfranchisement, it was unrealistic, Washington contended, to expect African Americans to gain entry into America's white-collar professions. Instead, he advocated hard work, self-help, and economic improvement through vocational work within a socially segregated environment. Advancing these causes, he believed, would "uplift" the black race, and discrimination would gradually disappear. In 1881 Washington put this theory to the test, becoming the director of the newly created Tuskegee Institute. At the time of this 1908 photograph, Washington's emphasis on vocational education and accommodation to racial prejudice was being challenged by a new generation of leaders.

The portrait on the right shows W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), founder of the Niagara movement. Du Bois was one of the younger leaders who sought to confront racism more directly than had Washington. In 1903, Du Bois famously declared that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line," and he came to oppose the policy of racial accommodation favored by Washington, insisting that African Americans receive full civil and political rights. Du Bois argued that those rights would best be advanced by an intellectual and professional elite that he dubbed the "Talented Tenth." In 1909, Du Bois helped to found the interracial organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Washington and Du Bois designed the architecture of what would become the modern Civil Rights movement. Between them, they defined the two avenues of action that African Americans could take to ensure equality and justice for all.

Battey's photographs demonstrate the integral role of photography in crafting a vision of a new black self for a new century. The NAACP's magazine, The Crisis, between 1915 and 1927 featured many of Battey's photographs of other black statesmen, artists, activists, and community members, all of the images conveying racial pride and dignity. The artists and intellectuals they photographed displayed their accomplishments and marked their frustrations with the status quo. In the early 1900s, black photographers like Battey not only used their cameras in the struggle against discrimination but also participated in a broader art photography movement known as pictorialism. Emphasizing soft focus and painterly techniques inspired by impressionism, pictorialism elevated subjects and imparted an artistic sophistication. Such portraits, keys to how African Americans wished to be known and remembered, testify to the sitters' and the artists' dreams and aspirations.

Robert McNeill took this New York City photograph on a bright, chilly day in 1938. The sun cuts sharp silhouettes of three African Americans—two women and a man—onto a wall. One woman, wearing a feathered hat, glasses, a long coat with a fur collar, and gloves, stands back on the heels of her sturdy shoes and leans against the wall. The other woman, wrapped in a heavy winter coat, sits on an upturned potato crate and bends forward to read a newspaper. The man, wearing a cap and a dusty jacket, holds a pail. He stands propped against the wall, facing the women. Above him a billboard reads "Make a Wish," an advertisement for the popular 1937 film by that name.

As McNeill's subtitle indicates, these people are at the so-called Bronx Slave Market, a place where African Americans would wait for white people to choose workers for day-long jobs. Many felt this process was particularly demeaning, largely because it evoked the slave auctions of the past. Nonetheless, because many African Americans had an especially hard time finding work during the Great Depression, they endured this indignity, hoping to eke out an income.

Images of down-and-out workers had become commonplace in the Depression, thanks in part to the federal agencies charged with documenting the period. A 1938 Works Progress Administration (WPA) report could have almost described McNeill's photo when it sketched the Bronx Slave Market in this way: "There, seated on crates and boxes, were a dejected gathering of Negro women of various ages and descriptions... [As] the November wind swept and whistled through them, they ducked their heads and tried to huddle within themselves as they pushed close to the wall." This report helped effect changes, in this case by raising awareness and shaming the city into creating an official Day-Work Office for the area. However, even as such projects sought to help African Americans, they also promoted a stereotype. By showing black people as exploited laborers persecuted by racism, such descriptions suggested a passive role for black workers, when in fact many were successful in shaping their own lives.

By frankly exposing the conditions workers faced, McNeill's photograph takes part in this documentary convention. Yet Make a Wish also resists condescension by capturing the lighter mood created by the people awaiting work: the standing woman smiles as she looks ahead; the man seems to join her, smiling in her general direction; and the seated woman is immersed in her paper, perhaps scanning the listings for a job. The day may be cold, the outlook may seem bleak, but this is hardly the "dejected gathering" described by the WPA report. As a result, Make a Wish strikes a balance between the realities of the Depression and the workers' heartening expressions of self possession and amusement.

Moreover, unlike many documentary photographers, McNeill resists enlisting Make a Wish in any sort of propaganda. Instead, he uses irony to convey the ambiguity of the workers' situation. In referencing the movie ad in his title, McNeill invites viewers to speculate on its relationship to the photo. Make a Wish was an uplifting comedy in which white child-star Bobby Breen (named in the billboard) overcomes life's difficulties through lighthearted songs and youthful pluck. Does such a theme provide relief from life's troubles, or is it a wry commentary on futility? Do the workers seem wishful? Or are they engaged in the rigors of life? McNeill leaves the thoughts and motives of his subjects private—and the photo's interpretation to us.