El Correo Grafico, August 1964: the Civil Rights Act in an Alliance for Progress bulletin

The August 1964 issue of El Correo Grafico, the U.S. Embassy information service's picture bulletin in Costa Rica, marks three years of the Alliance for Progress. Among its photographs of aid, space, and diplomacy is President Johnson shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr. after signing the Civil Rights Act (NAID 6949242).

The bulletin

A single Spanish sheet headed with the date of the Alliance's third anniversary, 17 August 1964, and a line saying who published it: the information service of the United States Embassy. Ten photographs with captions fill it. Ranger 7's pictures of the Moon. Two donated trucks and a weather radar for the volcano and flood emergency around Irazú. A university agreement with the Agency for International Development. Costa Rica's President Orlich at the White House. Scouts leaving for a jamboree in Pennsylvania. Johnson signing loans with thirteen Latin American countries. Foreign ministers who had voted sanctions on Cuba. A street sweeper from one San Jose to the other.

17 de AGOSTO de 1964

3er. Aniversario de la ALIANZA PARA EL PROGRESO

EL CORREO GRAFICO

BOLETIN PICTORICO DEL SERVICIO DE INFORMACION DE LA EMBAJADA DE LOS E.E.U.U. DE NORTE AMERICA

The civil rights photograph

One of the ten is not about Latin America. FRAME's English summary of its caption says Johnson shakes the hand of Dr. Martin Luther King, called the "leader of the people of colour," after signing the Civil Rights Act at the White House on 2 July 1964, a law the caption says was designed to help end racial discrimination across the country. The caption then quotes Johnson. In FRAME's translation of the Spanish:

Let us close the springs of racial poison, let us pray that our hearts may be right and understand; let us put aside our differences and work to make our nation whole.

How to read it

The bulletin says who made it, and FRAME classes it as openly sourced. A reader in San José could see from the masthead that it came from the embassy.

FRAME's tags are transfer, glittering generalities, and testimonial. The layout does the transferring. A Moon probe, an aid truck, a signed loan, and a civil rights law share one masthead and one anniversary, and each borrows standing from the others. The Civil Rights Act is presented as part of the same national success story as Ranger 7, which made sense for an embassy selling the Alliance. It also left out what the law was a response to. In the same years, this site's Citizens' Councils case study records a Mississippi state agency voting the Councils public money, and its COINTELPRO page records an FBI directive of September 1964 opening a covert program against the Klan, followed in 1967 by one that counted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference among its first targets. None of that was a fit for a picture bulletin.

Credit belongs where it is due. A government that passes a law against discrimination and then tells the world about it, with the movement's leader in the photograph, is telling the truth about something it did. What can fairly be faulted is the frame around it. Johnson's own "war against poverty" made the same trip abroad the next year in a Manila sheet, A New Quest for Union. The period is gathered on US civil rights era messaging, 1954–1969.