yes, there are color photos of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. there just aren’t as many. why not? because news photographers at the time mostly shot in black and white. color photography was a thing, obviously, but it was still not the default. most black and white images you see of this era started out that way, simply because of where photographic technology was
I can’t speak to why any individual textbook prints a photo in black and white or color. and the Civil Rights movement has definitely been distorted in a lot of ways in the intervening decades. I don’t want to minimize the attempts of an inherently racist society to hamper black people’s fight for their rights
but this is another situation where the specific theory put forth seems to be (unintentionally) ignoring historical reality
this is totally working backwards, this is making a conclusion first and then cherry-picking to try to make it make sense, instead of assessing the information and then concluding from it. i wish people saw this as insidious and perverted, instead of saying that it’s for a good cause and so all is fair in love and war.
It takes a pretty staggering amount of ignorance to think that the only reason you would still see black-and-white photographs taken after the invention of color photography is because of a conspiracy to fool you into thinking the events were longer ago than they actually were lmao.
Like, do you not even know the years these events happened? Is “1963 March on Washington” not even something you’ve heard of? You can only vaguely guess at when these major historical events happened based on whether the photographs are in color or not? We have big anniversaries and memorials every year for all kinds of events. The 50th anniversary of the March on Washington back in 2013, and the 50th anniversary of MLK’s death back in 2018 were all huge media events. No one was hiding the big number 50 from you on magazine covers and TV shows to tell you the exact number of years that have passed.
Most people aren’t qualified to do media criticism. Most people’s “media criticism” takes the form of QAnon-style free-association, just churning out laughably incoherent hypotheses that superficially make sense if you don’t know any facts whatsoever.
I mean civil rights photos were mostly received in black and white because news photography of the time was largely published in black and white
Like, you know how period comic books had incredibly shitty color? Because that was the level of color printing that low-cost mass-circulation periodicals afforded you!
Life Magazine, one of the flagships of the Time-Life media empire, was just like, a week’s worth of well-printed color photography. That was the entire concept! It stood out enough to be a thing!
