In his magisterial and award winning new book, The Slave Ship: A Human History, maritime historian, Marcus Rediker, documents the role played by emotional and especially visual appeals in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The visuals were indispensable because, as the abolitionist James Field Stanfield argued, the terrible truths of the slave trade "had been withheld from the public eye by every effort that interest, ingenuity, and influence, could devise."

In particular, the images of life aboard the slave ship Brooks were "among the most effective propaganda any social movement has ever created." The viewer's empathy, psychological identification and moral outrage were engaged by graphic depictions of the wholesale violence, barbarity and torture that routinely accompanied this link in the slave trade.

Reading Rediker's book prompted me to think about powerful images that affected my own political consciousness, beginning with the civil rights Movement and later, Vietnam. Arguably, although I didn't see it at the time, the most important photograph of the early civil rights era was that of the hideously mutilated face of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. Till, from Chicago, had been visiting his cousins in rural Mississippi. After allegedly whistling at a white woman he was abducted, beaten, shot, and lynched. His mother insisted on a open coffin viewing and photographs appeared in Jet Magazine. Their impact was incalculably important to African-Americans but to my knowledge the images never appeared in any mainstream media outlets.

Photos that I vividly recall making an impression on me include 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford being viciously taunted by a young white girl as she attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School on September 4, 1957. And I will never forget the faces of the four little girls killed in the terrorist bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama or those of three young civil rights workers killed by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964. As a 17-year-old, my earliest memory of Vietnam was the self-immolation of Buddhist monk, Thich Quang Duc, on a busy Saigon street in 1963. I can still recall his dignified stillness as the flames enveloped him. Because he was protesting against the U.S.-backed Diem dictatorship I began to question the official story about Vietnam.

Ron Haeberle’s photo of terrified women and children in My Lai, Vietnam, just before they were massacred by U.S. Soldiers and the June 8, 1972 image of naked, burning, nine-year-old Kim Phuc, fleeing down the highway after a napalm attack on her village, still remain imprinted on my brain.

But that was another era. Today the limitations placed on exposure to powerful images that might stir our deepest emotions would impress a modern day Dr. Goebbels. We know that photographers are banned from the Iraqi battle zone while too many others are pressured into self-censorship. The Pentagon forbids media coverage of the remains of soldiers departing Ramstein Air Base in Germany or coffins returning to Dover, Delaware. Landstule regional medical center in Germany, which routinely receives horribly maimed soldiers from Iraq is off-limits for photos and reporters are closely monitored by military escorts. An acquaintance of mine volunteers as a counselor at the center and recently told me the heartbreaking story of trying to comfort a blind quadruple amputee, the victim of a roadside bombing in Iraq. I went away with the impression that if a photo journalist could document her daily rounds, the public wouldn’t tolerate another day of U.S. occupation.

And therein resides both an intractable indictment and a vexing question. Would images of an Iraqi Emmett Till or Kim Phuc be published today? Photo journalist Mary Anne Golon asserts that images have power because they “serve as evidence for accusations of wrongdoing.” Given that we now have irrefutable proof from neuroscience that human brains are hard-wired for empathy, that we are morally predisposed toward identifying with the “other,” we might speculate on the potential impact such images would evoke within American society.

I would argue that the tremendous amount of deception and fraud expended by U.S. elites on behalf of dampening or denying opportunities for empathic engagement is based on a real fear of the public. This is compelling testimony on behalf of the subversive power of images, not so unlike exposing the unconscionable reality of the Atlantic slave trade. One lesson may be that in resisting 21st Century human trafficking, wage slavery, and empire, we shouldn’t shy away from visual appeals. If anything, we need to be more creative in obtaining the public’s eye and heart.

BlackCommentator.com Guest Commentator, Gary Olson, Ph.D., chairs the Political Science department at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Click here to contact Dr. Olson. Click here to contact Dr. Olson.