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Photographer and curator Lee Tanner created a distinctive archive of jazz performance photographs from the 1950s to the 1970s when not working full-time as an accomplished metals scientist. His use of available light and closeups, photographed mostly in the clubs of his native Boston, were a hallmark of his work. But it was as a curator in his retirement from the 1980s to 2005 in California that he made perhaps his most important contribution to the visual documentation of the music. Beginning with an informal gathering of images for saxophonist and friend Zoot Sims’ memorial, Tanner created The Jazz Image for the licensing of his own work but also for the curation of a series of exhibitions in the United States. These brought striking images made by a loose network of subgenre photographers to the attention of jazz and fine arts audiences. Tanner’s curation of JazzTimes magazine’s Indelible Images galleries in the 1990s brought even wider attention to this cohort, an art world he had essentially called into being. His book The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz Photography (2005) revealed stylistic change over time in the photography of jazz while highlighting the work of the genre’s most important practitioners.

Duke Ellington and his orchestra premiered an all-black musical revue, Jump for Joy, in Los Angeles in 1941 that addressed racial inequality while celebrating the possibility of a more democratic future. The musical was a cultural expression of the activist work of black Angelenos during the war years and highlighted African American demands for fair dealing. The article also demonstrates how unrecorded music can serve as a significant historical artifact.

The photography of jazz created a visual rhetoric that argued for racial inclusiveness in the 1930s, racial equality in the 1940s and 1950s, and black cultural nationalism in the 1960s. The identification of the music as culturally African American had to be constructed over time by the interaction of musicians with visual representation in the contexts of depression and war, record business economics, the evolving civil rights movement, and the dynamics of interracial collaboration and black self-assertion over the course of decades. Although these goals were often complicated by the racial discourse in the jazz press and by the claims made upon the music by competing political and economic agendas, photographs describe the social and political significance of jazz in American cultural history. In the 1930s and 1940s, photojournalists Charles Peterson and Gjon Mili challenged Life's racial template, promoting an inclusive social vision. They visually represented the significance of African American musical culture in their images of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and others even as the magazine exerted editorial control that served segregationist and U.S. nationalist agendas. In the late 1940s, William Gottlieb's and Herman Leonard's photographs gave dramatic visual form to bebop's strong African American identity. They could not save the music from commercial failure—despite Dizzy Gillespie's camera-ready approach to publicity—but created long-neglected archives of canonizing photographs. In the 1950s, the long-playing record album developed by Columbia Records temporarily revived jazz's fortunes. Miles Davis, recording for the major label, achieved uncompromising control of his image on album covers while being broadly marketed as an international pop star. Sonny Rollins challenged a black/white racial dichotomy in the album covers of small independent labels on the east and west coasts, engaging established cultural tropes and asserting the moral necessity of a politics of equality. As the jazz audience declined in the 1960s, Roy DeCarava's images of John Coltrane drew inspiration from the music to create a black aesthetic in photography. In the context of 1960s black cultural nationalism, he constructed jazz as a predominantly African American art form while retaining the essential humanism of his work.

In an interview by Benjamin Cawthra, excerpted from Miles Davis and American Culture, edited by Gerald Early, bassist Ron Carter recalls his work with Davis.

Local leader Ernest Calloway endorsed the tactics of the labor movement to achieve the goals of the civil rights movement. Benjamin Cawthra explores his career in the trenches of the struggle for African American civil rights.

Twentieth-century St. Louisans faced many challenges, and their city was as variable as the hues in the Gateway Arch, as Benjamin Cawthra explains. With sidebars on dress designer Alice Topp-Lee and the Disabilities Rights Movement.