Represented

Brenna Wynn Greer reveals how corporations and professional image-makers gave us some of our earliest photographic visions of freedom, showing how they captured, in the process, our most iconic snapshots of the black freedom struggle. Black capitalism and black activism have long been part of a single history. Represented now gifts us that history-timely and transformative-in a single, important book. -N. D. B. Connolly, author of A World More Concrete: Real Estate and the Remaking of Jim Crow South Florida A wonderful and pioneering book that raises fresh questions about business, civil rights, and African American history. Complicating what it means to be a black capitalist, Brenna Wynn Greer charts a new path with her innovative framing of 'Civil Rights work.' -Quincy Mills, Vassar College Represented presents a powerful, critical, and wholly original analysis of the relationships between race, capital, and citizenship. Through a sophisticated and subtle reading of history, and a close examination of prominent black media makers, Brenna Wynn Greer offers an interpretation that rightly positions black people as shapers of American economy and postwar public culture. The book is a sorely needed contribution to the literature on black capitalism, media culture, and civil rights activism. -Marc Lamont Hill, author of Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond Beautifully written and meticulously researched, Represented is a groundbreaking, exemplary book that makes a field-defining intervention into the relationship between visual culture, capitalism, and citizenship. -Elspeth Brown, University of Toronto Greer's book tells the story of black civil-rights-era entrepreneurs who cajoled American corporations into catering to black people-for better or for worse. Her scholarship helps readers reframe the protest-centric narrative of the civil rights movement by teasing out how black capitalists' products and public relations campaigns leveraged major corporations like Standard Oil and Coca-Cola to support racial justice. However, far beyond the purview of voting rights and desegregation, this history also illuminates the origins of the racialized marketing that companies have employed to profiteer off black communities for generations. The Nation