Lecture: Steven Hoelscher, Photographic Witnessing Along Georgia's Jim Crow Roads

This talk explores a crucial moment in the turbulent history of American race relations, when post-emancipation hopes for African American civic equality and economic independence were crushed by disenfranchisement, lynching, and a vast array of legal structures aimed at black suppression. Central to that white supremacist project was the South's notorious penal system that coerced incarcerated African Americans into a new form of state-sponsored slavery. Among critics was the radical investigative journalist John L. Spivak, who exposed the atrocity of racially-based forced labor through the act of photographic witnessing. Cosponsored by the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.