Journalism and Jim Crow

Abstract

After Reconstruction, white publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South that lasted for generations. Black journalists fought these regimes as they were being built. The stakes could not have been higher: The future of liberal democracy in the newly restored United States was on the line. Journalism & Jim Crow is the first extended work to examine the foundational role of the press at this critical turning point in U.S. history. It documents the struggle between two different journalisms—a white journalism dedicated to building an anti-Black, anti-democratic America and a Black journalism dedicated to building a multiracial, fully democratic America. The southern white press and its political and business allies carried the day, effectively killing democracy in the South for nearly a century and crafting a racial hierarchy that inflected modern America and endures today. This study of journalism, democracy, and race during a tragic, consequential moment in our nation’s past, as the ideology of the New South spread throughout the country, will help readers think in new ways about two important concerns: the complicated relationship between journalism and power in American democracy and the systems and structures of white supremacy in American life. The unpleasant truth is that journalism in America has often not been devoted to democratic values.