I've been thinking about this photo. Jack Delano, a member of the famed Farm Security Administration documentary project & a political progressive, made it at a "convict camp" in Greene County, Georgia, in May 1941.

In his memoir, Photographic Memories, Delano described the making of the photograph. A local writer, Arthur Raper, had opened doors for him in the county. One was the door to the convict camp. The guard who escorted Delano ordered the prisoners to "dance for the photographer."

Delano remembered that he "began snapping pictures as fast as I could, fearful that the guard might change his mind. ...I was so nervous and excited... that I blocked out all my personal feelings. I had only one thought in my mind: I must not fail to get these pictures!"

But Delano had second thoughts. "It was only afterward, relaxing back in my hotel room, that the realization of what I had witnessed came upon me. The bitter irony of the striped prison attire combined with song and dance seemed almost surrealistic."

"How humiliating it must have been," he continued, "for those men to be obliged to perform for me, as if they were trained animals!"

Delano understood that the young Black man danced for him, not for himself, & only under implicit, but very real, coercion. The young man danced because he was a African American, living in conditions of racial tyranny. He was powerless in the face of the threat of violence.

Yet there's more to it than this. Delano admitted that he was "excited" to make photos of the young man & that he snapped away as fast as he could. I think he was so excited because he thought he was seeing a racial stereotype come to life -- the happy-go-lucky dancing Negro.

He thought he was seeing something authentic & true about Black people & their culture. After all, the young man seemed to confirm everything that the racist ideas & visual culture of white supremacy had taught him about African Americans.

Delano's photo shows the young man during a split second of his dance. Although he would have continued to move, the photo has immobilized him. Coincidentally or not, he's trapped in a pose that mimics a famous c. 1835 cartoon of Jim Crow, the blackface minstrel character.

The stock character of Jim Crow was a devastating stereotype that persisted from the early 19th century well into the 20th. It's purpose was to entertain whites with his dancing & his foolishness, while confirming the idea that Blacks were inherently inferior to whites.

Jim Crow is one of the stereotypes that was so functional in US culture. It allowed white people to believe the barbarism of slavery, the brutal racial violence that continued long after the Civil War, & the denial of human rights & Constitutional rights were just & necessary.

I'm sure that Delano was familiar with Jim Crow. Virtually all Americans of his era were. Did he pose the young man? We'll never know for sure. I hope not. But he did know the young man had been coerced into embodying a damaging stereotype & that he himself caught it on film.

I believe Delano's knowledge of what he had done accounts for the shame he felt & that he expressed many years later in his memoir. But...

But, despite whatever he felt about the photo of the young man, Delano dutifully sent it back to the Farm Security Administration's offices in Washington, DC, where they were placed in its archive. They were free, & are, free for anyone to use.

One of the people who used it was the writer & sociologist Arthur F. Raper, in his book, Tenants of the Almighty, a study of Greene County, Georgia. In fact, Delano was in Green County specifically to make photos for the book.

Raper was what passed for a white southern liberal, which, in truth, meant that his racism was a little softer & more paternalistic than most white southerners. Here's how he used the photo in his book. The caption is Raper's.

In case you can't read the caption, here it is: "Colored convicts work on the public roads. They sleep and eat behind bars, and will dance like the dickens for your dime."
The stereotype was hard at work.

The End.

PS You can read Raper's Tenants of the Almighty online. It's an interesting book. He tells the story of Greene County three ways: in a very compressed form; through pictures, using Delano's photos & his captions; & as a standard work of sociology. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015013772440