The United States Office of War Information and World War Two Propaganda
Photographic Images of Black Schooling in Washington, D.C.
Abstract
This essay examines photographic images of African American schoolchildren in the racially segregated schools of Washington, D.C. during World War II. Our sample derives from a collection of images taken by the U.S. government’s Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942 intended to document how Black schools were contributing to the war effort on the American Homefront. Through a semiotic analysis of the signs and symbols embedded in visual meaning, we argue that these photographs simultaneously illustrate African Americans’ educational and civic aspirations while also foreshadowing their growing discontent and civil rights activism that would emerge a generation later.
Downloads
References
Allen, W. R., & Jewell, J. O. (1995). African American education since An American dilemma. Daedalus, 124(1), 77–100.
All About Photo. (n.d.). Marjory Collins. https://www.all-about-photo.com/photographers/photographer/1647/marjory-collins
Anderson, J. D. (1988). The education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935. University of North Carolina Press.
Austermuhle, M. (2016, September 23). When Blacks fled the South, D.C. became home for many from North Carolina. WAMU 88.5. https://wamu.org/story/16/09/23/when_blacks_fled_the_south_dc_became_home_for_many_from_north_carolina/
Barthes, R. (1977). Image–music–text. Fontana Press.
Bieze, M. (2008). Booker T. Washington and the art of self-representation. Peter Lang.
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
Brown, F. B. (2000). NAACP-sponsored sit-ins by Howard University students in Washington, D.C., 1943–1944. The Journal of Negro History, 85(4), 274–286. https://doi.org/10.2307/2649077
Carson, J. C. (1995). Interpreting national identity in the time of war: Competing views in the U.S. Office of War Information (OWI) photography, 1940–1945 (Doctoral dissertation, Boston University).
Cohen, R. D. (1992). Schooling Uncle Sam’s children: Education in the USA, 1941–1945. In R. Lowe (Ed.), Education and the Second World War: Studies in schooling and social change (pp. 46–58). Falmer Press.
Cole, E. R., & Omari, S. R. (2003). Race, class, and the dilemma of upward mobility for African Americans. Journal of Social Issues, 59(4), 785–802. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.0022-4537.2003.00088.x
DC Historic Sites. (n.d.). John Mercer Langston School. https://historicsites.dcpreservation.org/items/show/713
de Saussure, F. (1916). Course in general linguistics. McGraw-Hill.
Delmont, M. L. (2022). Half American: The epic story of African Americans fighting World War II at home and abroad. Viking.
Digital Public Library of America. (n.d.). The Great Migration. https://dp.la/primary-source-sets/the-great-migration
Dorn, C. (2007). American education, democracy, and the Second World War. Palgrave Macmillan.
Fairclough, A. (2001). Teaching equality: Black schools in the age of Jim Crow. University of Georgia Press.
Fultz, M. (1995). African American teachers in the South, 1890–1940: Powerlessness and the ironies of expectation and protest. History of Education Quarterly, 35(4), 401–422. https://doi.org/10.2307/369513
Gosnell, H. F. (1946). Obstacles to domestic pamphleteering by OWI in World War II. Journalism Quarterly, 23(4), 360–369. https://doi.org/10.1177/107769904602300405
Gregory, J. N. (n.d.). The second great migration. University of Washington. https://faculty.washington.edu/gregoryj/second_great_migration.htm
Grosvenor, I., & Macnab, N. (2015). Photography as an agent of transformation: Education, community and documentary photography in postwar Britain. Paedagogica Historica, 51(1–2), 117–135. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2014.997594
Hall, S. (1980/2003). Culture, media, language: Working papers in cultural studies, 1972–1979. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203381182
Harley, S. (1982). Beyond the classroom: The organizational lives of Black female educators in the District of Columbia, 1890–1930. Journal of Negro Education, 51(3), 254–265. https://doi.org/10.2307/2294908
Hudson, J. B. (2008). Abraham Lincoln: An African American perspective. The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 106(3–4), 513–535. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23388015
Kandel, I. L. (1948). The impact of war upon American education. University of North Carolina Press.
Koppes, C. R., & Black, G. D. (1977). What to show the world: The Office of War Information and Hollywood, 1942–1945. The Journal of American History, 64(1), 87–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/1899666
Library of Congress. (n.d.). Lot 216, “Washington, D.C. March 1942. Activities in Negro elementary, junior high, and technical high schools” [Photograph]. Prints and Photographs Reading Room.
Library of Congress. (n.d.). Works Progress Administration posters. https://www.loc.gov/collections/works-progress-administration-posters/
Miller, F. M., & Gillette, H. (1994). Race relations in Washington, D.C., 1878–1955: A photographic essay. Journal of Urban History, 21(1), 57–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/009614429402100103
Miquel-Lara, A., Sureda Garcia, B., & Comas Rubí, F. (2021). Photography and education in Republican soldier newspapers in Spain (1936–1939). Paedagogica Historica, 57(5), 588–610. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2020.1722851
Owen, C. (1942). Negroes and the war [Pamphlet]. Office of War Information.
Peirce, C. S. (1931). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Harvard University Press.
Perry, E. L., Jr. (2002). It’s time to force a change: The African-American press’ campaign for a true democracy during World War II. Journalism History, 28(2), 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00947679.2002.12062620
Porter, A. (2013). Paper bullets: The Office of War Information and American World War II print propaganda (Doctoral dissertation, Boston University).
Priem, K. (2017). Beyond the collapse of language? Photographs of children in postwar Europe as performances and relational objects. Paedagogica Historica, 53(6), 683–696. https://doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2017.1300927
Rury, J. L., & Hill, S. A. (2012). The African American struggle for secondary schooling, 1940–1980: Closing the graduation gap. Teachers College Press.
Schweitzer, A. M. (2016, September 23). When Blacks fled the South, D.C. became home for many from North Carolina. WAMU 88.5. https://wamu.org/story/16/09/23/when_blacks_fled_the_south_dc_became_home_for_many_from_north_carolina/
Siddle Walker, V. (2001). African American teaching in the South, 1940–1960. American Educational Research Journal, 38(4), 751–780. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312038004751
Stanford University School of Education Faculty. (1943). Education in wartime and after. D. Appleton-Century.
Studebaker, J. W. (1942). What the secondary schools can do to help win this war. The Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, 26(101), 11–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/019263654202610103
Sutherland, G. (2020). Civil rights and the Black experience during the New Deal era: Limitations and possibilities, 1932–1948 (Master’s thesis, Bard College). https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/history_mat/10
Tinkler, P. (2013). Using photographs in social and historical research. SAGE.
Tolley, K. (2003). The science education of American girls: A historical perspective. RoutledgeFalmer.
Weinberg, S. (1968). What to tell America: The writers’ quarrel in the Office of War Information. The Journal of American History, 55(1), 73–89. https://doi.org/10.2307/1890975
Winkler, A. M. (1974). Politics and propaganda: The Office of War Information, 1942–1945 (Doctoral dissertation, Yale University).
Copyright (c) 2025 Phillip Cheng, Bruna Garcia da Cruz Canellas, Sevan Terzian (Autor)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Os direitos autorais pertencem exclusivamente aos autores. Os direitos de licenciamento utilizados pelo periódico consistem na licença Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0): são permitidos o acompartilhamento (cópia e distribuição do material em qualqer meio ou formato) e adaptação (remix, transformação e criação de material a partir do conteúdo assim licenciado) para quaisquer fins, inclusive comerciais.
Recomenda-se a leitura desse link para maiores informações sobre o tema: fornecimento de créditos e referências de forma correta, entre outros detalhes cruciais para uso adequado do material licenciado.
