Black Meme: A History of the Images That Make Us 

Author: Legacy Russell
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2024
Pages: 192
ISBN: 978-1839762802

In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, award-winning author of the groundbreaking Glitch Feminism, explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, mining both archival and contemporary media.

Russell argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form. These meditations include the circulation of lynching postcards; why a mother allowed Jet magazine to publish a picture of her dead son, Emmett Till; and how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma changed the debate on civil rights.

Through imagery, memory and technology Black Meme shows us how images of Blackness have always been central to our understanding of the modern world.