Criminal Housing: Photographs of African American Dwellings and the Visualization of Structural Violence in the Black Radical Press of the 1960s and 1970s

This article studies the modes of visibility of housing in the Black radical press of the 1960s and 1970s, in Muhammad Speaks and The Black Panther, and how this site/sight relates to violence, which it makes tangible in the landscape. An object of particular attention in the political and social discourses of both the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party, the distressed dwelling is also visual capital that can be put to use in the visual editorial practices of both publications, and woven within textual, conceptual, and narrative engagements with both acute and chronic forms of racist violence.