INSIDE RICHARD WRIGHT’S: 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States

About the Image: The photograph deftly captures the individual personalities of each family member. This image appeared in Richard Wright’s 1941 photo-text book, “12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States,” where the acclaimed author of “Native Son” and “Black Boy” combined New Deal-era photographs with his own words to trace African-American history from slavery through emancipation, sharecropping, and the Great Migration, up to the contemporary issues of joblessness and racial prejudice.

Image Credit: Public Domain | U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Arthur Rothstein. African American Family at Gee’s Bend, Alabama. n.d. The Met.