| As one of America's most popular national news magazines, Life magazine played an integral part in bringing the fight for civil rights into the public discourse. It helped to educate and inform the nation with regards to visual imagery and the events of the times. This study, beginning in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court's historic Brown v. Board of Education decision, and ending in 1965, the year that Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, examined every issue of Life for civil rights-related articles. By applying the concepts of geography and discussing images and events with regard to space, this study discussed race and the conflict between African Americans and racist white citizens in the fight for equal rights.;This dissertation found that the Life magazine was both a leader and follower in the debate for equal rights, publishing photographs that intimately recorded the battle for space on a variety of levels including: a physical, a metaphorical, and a symbolic level. The significance of this study is that there are new and deeper ways to examine media texts, their frames, and the issues involved. On the surface, Life portrayed a street-level battle for fixing historic injustices. But, on another level, which spatial and geographic theory helps us to understand, Life magazine revealed a much deeper, ongoing debate over the rightful place of the African American in American society. |
