Visual Literacy

I chose to examine themes surrounding the divisive and unifying events of Richard Wright's Black Boy. I wanted to show Wright's personal experiences through a visual display of moments in time, song, and artwork. Together, these images reflect the social powers that directly challenged Wright's sense of individuality. He is labeled a "Nigger" in the South and a "Trotskyite" in the North; nowhere is he free to define himself as a free and independent thinker.

Visual Impact
"Strange Fruit" is a terribly visceral piece, combined with the subsequent images of "separate but equal", the first half of the essay illustrates the racial hatred of the South. The last two images portray the unifying forces behind the Communist Party, Wright's words add to the impact. In a longer piece, I would show his eventual disillusionment.

Visual Coherence
I used solely black and white images, partly because of the time period and partly because of the visual effect.

Visual Organization
I used Wright's experiences as a means to chronicle the images. He flees the Jim Crow South for northern opportunity. In Chicago, he faces disaster during the depression and for various reasons falls in with the Communist Party.

I hope that my students would be able to construct a similar project in order to achieve a visual understanding of a work's historical/social context. I believe these images are every bit as powerful as a piece of writing and should be interwoven with the text, not regarded as auxiliary information.