The Black Press and a Mass Black Readership

Abstract

This chapter examines the mass movement of southern African Americans to Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century and shows how it dramatically altered the Black Press. After 1920, black newspaper editors covered more news that they believed would appeal to working-class African Americans. In charting the development of the early-twentieth-century Black Press, chapter 1 presents a comparative analysis of five different newspapers: The Amsterdam News, The Baltimore Afro-American, The Chicago Defender, The Philadelphia Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Courier. These five newspapers demonstrate how the Black Press fostered and imagined an African American readership’s interest in sexuality through its sensational coverage of the variegations of black life throughout the 1920s and 1930s.