This first inside page is all clarity and boldness, the high contrast between black and white tones and the selected typographical form generating an aura of aestheticized factuality.  Just inside this page is another double page that, although achieving a similar result, constructs itself rather differently.  A collage of newspaper clippings and letters that refer to specific incidents in the 1950s and 1960s documenting the black fight against segregation within the architectural educational system across America is intended to testify to, and to ground, this particular reality, while also providing a varied aesthetic field to visually complement the all-black cover.  The newspaper clippings evidence a historical factuality that forms a foundation for the more current personalized stories that follow.  The composition of the collage strategically highlights particular headlines, incidents, dates, and detailed passages, while laboring to disguise its artifice.  This process, which is as common to photojournalism as it is to advertising, desires to aesthetically seduce, yet conceals this seduction by appealing to the transparency of a reality factor needed for its legitimation.  In this particular circumstance, such reality is underlined by promoting the appearance of randomness over textual composition.  The various-sized clippings and letters used to constitute this collage are aesthetically organized to construct an imperceptible depth by their overlap, and an indefinite territory by the way they bleed off the edges of the page.  This archive is thus experienced as infinitely deep and infinitely vast.  We as spectators believe that we are grasping only a portion of its content, a particular layer in space and a particular section of this layer; only a fragment of the memory of this struggle is being represented to us. 
 
At perhaps a deeper level, this collage also serves to signify a value system that supports and reaffirms the officiality of the law.  Reality is presented to us by investing in those institutions (the newspaper and the official letter) that claim to embody the substance of fact and official authority.  The struggle itself is thus represented as entirely contained within this code of respectability, as if the law itself were a neutral body to which one could appeal for civil rights.  To believe in the value of the outcome therefore necessitates subscribing at least partially to the validity of this ideological terrain, as if the devices employed to rationalize its structure of oppression were not somehow intrinsically connected to its image of reality and respectability.  Further emphasis is given to the official tone of this documentation by exhibiting the only piece of writing that stands in contrast to it: a piece of hate mail sent to John Chase after he was finally admitted as the first black graduate student to the University of Texas school of architecture.  This note, which is entirely racist, abusive, and illiterate, serves to complete the inversion of the black-white stereotypical opposition, providing convincing evidence of the inferiority of white bigotry while demonstrating by contrast the superiority of black achievement within the official code of this struggle.  In this equation, however, the value system embedded in the form of the law and the nature of authority itself remains entirely unchallenged, the collage itself serving to promote the (WASP and male) ideological status quo, while sustaining an image of black assimilation.