It has been often noted that the history of Black American activism from slavery to the present has been catalyzed by developments in communications technology. This has been especially true in moments of crisis when activists and intellectuals have moved quickly to take advantage of sudden shifts in the media environment to convey their message and organize themselves. The posters and pamphlets that detonated the British movement against the transatlantic slave trade were signal expressions of late eighteenth-century culture made possible by a new kind of printing plate produced from plaster molds. Likewise the abolitionist movement in the United States was amplified in mass-produced pamphlets and newspapers made possible by cheaper costs of steam-powered printing. The civil rights movement in the United States was expanded and strengthened by unprecedented and widely circulated photographic evidence of atrocities committed against Black Americans, including images of Emmett Till’s corpse published in Jet magazine...
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