A Response to Elizabeth McHenry

Abstract

The many lengthy anthologies of African-American literature currently available for classroom instruction in the US obscure the prejudicial exclusion of African-American writers from the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century history of American print culture that Elizabeth McHenry's essay makes poignantly clear. Her argument for scrutinizing the unpublished articles, correspondence, and short stories of Mary Church Terrell as a means of developing a broader understanding of the racial politics at the root of editorial decisions at major literary journals of the day, such as Harper's Magazine, achieves two things. First, it proves the significance of print culture controlled by African Americans during that time as an alternate venue for defying the dominant racial ideologies and literary paradigms. Second, it prompts us to consider why even the few African-American writers published by the white literary establishment at the time were not recognized for the full body of their work. As to the significance of the print culture controlled by African Americans, journalists such as T. Thomas Fortune, Phillip A. Bell, and Victoria Earle Mathews all gained their reading audiences via this route. Ida B. Wells, an activist and contemporary of Terrell, edited her own newspaper, The Free Speech, out of Memphis, Tennessee from 1890 to 1892. Wells initiated her antilynching campaign in her editorials and printed the first of many investigative reports on various lynchings that took place. She invoked the ire of local whites, who eventually destroyed her press. Then Wells co-authored and published a pamphlet titled The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition (1893) that she and her co-authors