Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield

Abstract

Reviewed by: Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield Stephen M. Monroe Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America. Edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield. Foreword by Alex Lichtenstein. The History of Communication. (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2021. Pp. xviii, 344. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-252-08615-1; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04410-6.) One appealing American myth is that the mainstream press is objective and unbiased. One disappointing American reality is that the mainstream press has often been subjective and prejudicial. Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield are interested in the consequential nuances between the myth and the reality. They have assembled a powerful collection of essays exploring how white journalists helped create Jim Crow and how Black journalists fought for something better. Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America is a valuable book for historians, journalists, language scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers interested in the United States and the U.S. South during the decades after Reconstruction. The book contains ten engaging essays from junior and senior scholars. Additionally, Alex Lichtenstein contributes a quotable foreword, and the editors add a sweeping introduction, plus a generous epilogue replete with ideas for future research. All parts of the book are grounded in relevant scholarship and polished for clarity. The editors have organized a coherent group of essays that collectively prosecute a fresh and provocative argument: “After Reconstruction, white publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South,” while “Black journalists fought these regimes” (p. 1). The authors make a cogent case. Compelling (and oftentimes disturbing) examples abound. We learn about major players in the white press who were motivated by racism, cronyism, and other forms of ethnic and material greed. Henry W. Grady earns much attention for his entrepreneurial corruption while leading the Atlanta Constitution in the 1880s. Grady used his power—and his newspaper’s pages—to defend Georgia’s brutal and racist convict-leasing program. He also promulgated the “New South,” a simplistic concept that framed oppressed African Americans as happy servants cared for and protected by honorable whites. Members of the white press, like Grady, spent decades writing and distributing tropes of American racism that are still plaguing us today. But white journalists went even further. In one of the volume’s best essays, “The Press and Lynching,” W. Fitzhugh Brundage analyzes the unsettling [End Page 174] interplay between the white press and the bands of white murderers who lynched hundreds of Black people during this period. Papers such as the Atlanta Constitution not only sensationalized lynching to sell papers, but also sometimes promoted or even catalyzed the horrible events. For example, in 1899 the paper forecast the site and time of one Black man’s lynching, thereby giving its white readers the opportunity “to catch specially scheduled trains to participate in the spectacle” (p. 88). The book also contains inspiring stories of resistance. Black journalists were working during this period, too, often risking their lives to publish counternarratives. Ida B. Wells, John Mitchell Jr., W. Calvin Chase, and other Black journalists wrote valiantly to correct the wrongs of mainstream white messaging. While the resulting victories were few, the Black press did successfully rally many African Americans to the cause of civil rights. As Robert Greene II shows in an excellent essay about the infamous Mississippi Plan, Black journalists built a sturdy foundation of protest, enriching “a legacy of African American resistance through newspapers, periodicals, and books.” Along the way, they “revitalized Black print culture and used it to rally opposition to those who would deny civil, political, and social rights to African Americans” (p. 116). Such examples are uplifting. Journalism can be a boon to democracy. In sum, Journalism and Jim Crow is a valuable book that delivers a convincing argument built on solid historical research. Many white American journalists used their power and platforms to actively assist in the construction of Jim Crow. Their...