The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox by Gerald Horne

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox by Gerald Horne D'Weston Haywood The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox. By Gerald Horne. (Urbana and other cities: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. [viii], 258. $95.00, ISBN 978-0-252-04119-8.) While there has been an explosion in recent years of well-written histories and biographies examining the complex lives and work of activists at the grass roots of the local and global twentieth-century black freedom struggle, Gerald Horne's The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox returns historians to analyzing the critical but fraught roles black elites played in shaping the long fight for black liberation. Claude Barnett led the Associated Negro Press (ANP), the most successful national black news wire service for much of the twentieth century, launched in 1919 by Barnett in Chicago. Yet Horne argues that Barnett was much more. At once producing a biography and business history that relies heavily on archival materials drawn from Barnett's personal correspondence over some five decades, Horne presents Barnett as a Pan-African businessman, working for the political and financial potential of the global black freedom struggle, only to be undercut by what Horne calls the Jim Crow paradox. Whereas other historians have centered Barnett's activities primarily in a context of black cultural politics in Chicago and the United States, Horne repositions Barnett in an international, diasporic, Pan-Africanist, and anticolonial milieu that reached beyond Chicago to Haiti, Ghana, and Liberia, for example, in ways that made Barnett something of a "powerbroker" and his ANP a "megaphone of the movement" (pp. 121, 8). Revisiting some familiar points in black press historiography, Horne argues that the ANP became a vital [End Page 1036] black institution instrumental to covering racial injustice, promoting black consciousness, and framing black people's freedom struggles in global terms. But Barnett's position later contracted considerably, shrinking to an Americanist paradigm shaped by the Republican Party and business networks that he carefully cultivated as he tried to use the ANP to leverage social change sometimes for personal gain. Horne shows that Pan-Africanism and black business were not mutually exclusive categories for Barnett. Attempting to balance racial and personal advancement by both covering African news and investing in the continent's business opportunities, Barnett found success in promoting the U.S. and international black freedom struggle but eventually confronted a critical challenge from integration, one of his goals, like other black leaders and activists of his day. And this was the "paradox of Jim Crow" that Horne points to: the ANP, along with the broader black press, lost talented black writers and reporters to the white press as the Republican connections Barnett built with U.S. government officials increasingly wanted him to reject leftist politics in his coverage, especially during the Cold War (p. 108). And reject these positions he eventually did. This paradox spelled the ANP's demise. Horne succeeds in showing that Barnett was a contradictory figure, though some of the book's points remain somewhat unresolved. At times, it is not altogether clear that Barnett's connections with policy makers, dignitaries, and heads of state necessarily translated to tangible power and influence. Some of these connections seem to shape him more than the reverse. Moreover, the author argues that Barnett profited from a decent "investment portfolio" while struggling to see clearly the ANP's impending demise amid strides in integration, but it is not exactly clear how much in terms of actual figures Barnett ultimately gained or lost financially (p. 138). Still, Horne's work is useful to historians and students interested in recovering the complex role of black elites and the institutions they controlled in helping broker black freedom struggles throughout the African diaspora, as they faced deep quandaries in working to win benefits for the race, and sometimes for themselves. D'Weston Haywood University of Louisiana at Lafayette Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association