Black and White and Red All Over: Photography Between Race and Class in the American Communist Press, 1928–32

Abstract

In the years around 1930, photography emerged as a key mechanism of the US Communist Party (CP) efforts to unite Black and white workers around a shared political programme. Central to this programme were two seemingly incompatible aims: revolutionary Black nationalism and working-class solidarity. This article examines the role that press photography played in this organisational framework, along with the theories and debates that animated its use. Reading this imagery alongside the CP’s contentious ‘Black Belt’ thesis, I argue that party editors employed photography as a means to renegotiate established views of race and class, pulling signifiers of race closer to a Marxist–Leninist discourse of nation while picturing Black and white workers as comrades in arms. I also consider W. E. B. Du Bois’s contemporaneous critique of Communist solidarity building, which viewed the CP’s position on racism as a fatal misprision of US dynamics that mistook the ‘colour line’ as a primarily ideological force. I argue that this historical debate opens onto opposed views of photographic identity that have significant implications for how we conceptualise photography’s relationship to political organisation versus capitalism’s ‘scopic regime’.