Media Literacy Exercise

Looking at the photo “Game of Lynching” by Vivian Cherry (1947) for the first time I did not quite get it. Pictured is a young boy standing in front of an old wall that has been vandalized. You cannot quite make out what any of the graffiti on the wall says but that does not seem to be important. The boy, who is wearing a pea coat with the collar turned up, stands in front of some graffiti containing a long line. This long line paired with his up turned collar gives the appearance that he has been hung. The little boy plays along letting his body go limp playing the victim in a lynching game. This shows that either lynching is something that he has not seen for himself therefore making the severity of the matter or that because of the times he may believe that it is only a matter of time before he is next. I mean next in a way that he may not see lynching as a game but pokes fun here at how maybe Whites might or must do it for almost a sort of sport when you think of cases like Emmitt Till. At that time lynching images were made into postcards and then were promoted at the hanging site. Black activist used the photos to gain help for their cause, whereas white supremacists thought of them as confirmation that whites had the power.In the photo, “Graduation Dress” by Roy DeCarava (1949) there is a girl walking from most likely her graduation in a beautiful graduation dress, but looks out of place on this rundown street. You can tell the girl is uncomfortable because she lifts her dress off the ground to keep it from getting dirty. Walking with what appears to be some hesitation out of a sunlit section of the street toward a shadowed area, the picture doesn’t show you what is ahead of her. In a way it is could be a metaphor for the girls future. Now that the girl is about to graduate what is in store for her, she is walking from the light into the darkness. In the background there is a large billboard advertising Chevrolet, it seems as it is there to mock the neighborhood. By the street being all run down you know that the neighborhood is poor and that a new car is something that they could only dream of. This picture could be symbolic of what Blacks could expect during this time period, that even with schooling they still had to return home to nothing.