The cultural campaigns of the NAACP: 1910-1955
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) used a wide range of strategies for securing racial equality. These included some perhaps surprising tactics: it encouraged black writers and artists, published poems and plays, organised an art exhibition, picketed cinemas and dined with Hollywood moguls. This thesis explores the NAACP's involvement with and use of the arts and popular culture between 1910 and 1955. It asks why the NAACP developed a culturalf strategy, what this strategy was and how it was implemented, and what it reveals about the NAACP as an organisation during the first half of the twentieth century. 
 
The NAACP believed that racial inequality was caused by racial prejudice. In other words, African Americans suffered political, social and economic discrimination because of the attitudes of white Americans toward the race. These attitudes were formed in large part by the depiction of blacks in American culture. Therefore, the NAACP hoped that if it could change the representation of the race then it could alter white prejudices and achieve racial equality. The NAACP challenged what it considered to be negative cultural representations of African Americans and sought to replace them with positive images. It saw the creation of 'high' culture as a signifier of a group's status and believed the production of fine art and literature could be used to prove that African Americans 'deserved' equal rights. Furthermore, it used culture to instil racial pride and to forge a sense of a collective black identity. The arts were also utilised to change attitudes on specific issues, most notably to encourage anti-lynching sentiment amongst whites. The NAACP believed that culture could be used as a weapon in the fight for racial equality.
Lynching and Antilynching: Art and Politics in the 1930s
Lynching became a fact of American life after the Civil War, but it only became an important subject for writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and a subject for visual artists in the 1930s. During the Depression, antilynching works were first a reaction to the widespread outrage over the Scottsboro case and then part of the political and legislative efforts to make lynching a federal offense. In early 1935, both the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Communist Party's John Reed Club held competing art exhibitions that not only condemned lynching but also supported their legislative objectives. After World War II, when Civil Rights legislation became the main priority, images of lynching continued primarily in the works of African-American artists. But in these later works, lynching became the prime symbol of American racism, springing from a black perspective rather than from particular political campaigns or from contemporary experience.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.