African American Newspapers Research Articles

Benjamin Fagan. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation.

Benjamin Fagan bases The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation on the primary narrative thread of black chosenness. He defines and defends this premise as a connecting theme present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American newspapers. Working from this standpoint, Fagan pinpoints black newspaper publishers, several of whom were ministers, as the proponents of his black chosenness argument. The author also advances a secondary theme, arguing that a black nation existed within the American nation through the auspices of black newspaper articles and editorials. According to Fagan, the black chosen nation was alternately the New Israel, Babylon, or the wilderness, depending on the timing of the Civil War years (before, during, and after) and the readership of the individual black newspapers. Fagan’s unique text, which includes comparative American literature excerpts and biblical illustrations, primarily focuses on five African American periodicals, four printed in New York and one published in Canada. The author begins his study of black newspapers and black newspapermen by looking at Freedom’s Journal, America’s original African American paper, and its co-founders, the Reverend Samuel Cornish and the abolitionist John Brown Russworm. Fagan argues that the goal of their newspaper was to bring the Lord’s word to black readers by educating them in the social proprieties of white elite society. The author interprets Cornish’s didactic editorials as tutorials on “how to act chosen” (22). Expounding on this idea, Fagan uses biblical passages to suggest that Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper had the same intent: promotion of the black chosen nation. The author cites Douglass’s reporting of the French Revolution of 1848 as an example of the renowned abolitionist disagreeing with American exceptionalism but still supporting black chosenness. Fagan deduces that the North Star offered proof of the chosen black prophecy of deliverance, similar to the Israelites fighting against their Egyptian oppressors. The author insists that the North Star showed an interest in successful European revolutionary strategies in France and the British West Indies because it wanted to imitate these uprisings in slave-owning oppressive America. Fagan makes transnational connections throughout the pages of the North Star, including the formatting of newspaper columns and the ancestry of Douglass’s Scottish printer. The author, clarifying his black nation theme with examples of scripture, determines that the North Star had “uncoupled the promise of black chosenness from American identity” (94). Fagan could have strengthened this engaging historical position by situating the North Star’s Rochester newspaper office inside its western New York burned-over district. Free Soil Party newspapers, such as the Seneca County Courier, a paper Douglass supported because of its antislavery, temperance, and pro–woman’s rights stance, could have offered further contemporary interpretations of black chosenness.

Presidential greatness in the black press: ranking the modern presidents on civil rights policy and race relations, 1900–2016

ABSTRACTRankings of presidential leadership based on retrospective surveys of experts are a staple of the literature on American politics. We develop an alternative method – the editorial opinion score (EOS) – for ranking the leadership of the modern presidents based on content analyses of editorials published in African-American newspapers between 1901 and 2016. The advantage of the EOS method over retrospective surveys is that it provides real-time evaluations of presidential leadership over multiple issue areas. We make leadership in the areas of civil rights policy and race relations the key component of our ranking of the modern presidents. Finally, we use regression analyses to determine the contextual factors shape editorial opinions of presidential leadership in these areas. The end result of our analyses is a significant reordering of extant presidential rankings.

Black Internationalism's Shifting Alliances: African American Newspapers, the White Australia Policy, and Indigenous Australians, 1919–1948

AbstractAfrican American newspapers frequently ran reports and stories about Indigenous Australians and Australia's racial governance between 1919 and 1948, except for the years during World War II when thousands of African American servicemen were stationed in Australia. The black American press was extremely critical of “White Australia.” African American newspaper writers used the phrase “White Australia” to refer both to the famed or notorious Australian immigration laws and to prevailing race relations in labor management. When they reported on Indigenous Australians, they took careful note of conditions that were akin to American slavery and its aftermath and remarked upon the similar regimes of racial governance. As far as the black American press was concerned, Indigenous Australians were one of the many nodes that comprised a worldwide alliance of colonized people; black internationalism included them, too. From 1942 to 1944, however, the press placed that alliance on hold. Newspapers instead focused on the surprisingly benign treatment they said black American troops received from white Australians. As it became clear that the Allies were likely to triumph, black American newspapers returned to criticism of “White Australia” and to an abstract bond with Aboriginal Australians, as they pressed forward with claims to universal human rights and with agitation to end all colonization as part of the worldwide return to peace.

‘Strange Rendering:’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish and the Staging of Race at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

‘Strange Rendering:’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish and the Staging of Race at the Turn of the Twentieth Century1 Rachel Rubinstein (bio) While the scholarly literature on Black-Jewish relations continues to expand, its archive has remained remarkably unchanged. Although recent explorations of representations of African Americans in American Yiddish literature and American Hebrew literature have newly revealed the ways in which immigrants in the early twentieth century engaged critically and creatively with race in the United States across languages, much work remains to be done.2 Curiously, while many scholars mention in passing the translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin into Yiddish, very few have elaborated further on the consumption of this iconographic national text among Yiddish readers.3 There is even further silence on the subject of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Yiddish stage, first in Yiddish literary and theatrical criticism at the time and consequently in contemporary Yiddish studies scholarship, reflecting historical biases against performances deemed middlebrow or lowbrow and the subsequent gaps in modern scholarly accounts.4 As theater historian John Frick notes, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not just a popular piece of abolitionist fiction; rather, it became a “cultural, commercial, ideological, and theatrical phenomenon,” arguably super-intending [End Page 35] representations of racial difference and racial justice for a full century to come.5 For this reason, seemingly narrow considerations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin can, in fact, open up broader histories of racialization, racial representations and interracial interactions in American culture. Yiddish performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the turn of the twentieth century received increased attention from drama critics in English, because they coincided with a large-scale theatrical revival of the original 1853 melodrama in Anglophone American theaters, even as bowdlerized Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows were ubiquitous. Even African American newspapers took note of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish, with the Freeman noting in 1902: “‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ in Yiddish again last Saturday at the People’s Theatre. Big hit.”6 And again, a few weeks later: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin was produced in Yiddish again Saturday 19, at the People’s Theatre. Sherman H. Dudley was in charge of the colored contingent.”7 In this essay, I begin the work of situating the Yiddish versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the context first of the publication history of Stowe’s novel and the many plays that were adapted from it, and then in the context of the broader history of racial performances on the popular stage at the turn of the twentieth century. Taken together, the Yiddish translations and adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (particularly the discourse in English around Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Yiddish), and black performances of Jewish voices and bodies further illuminate Jewish engagements with American national mythmaking, the positioning of Jews and blacks, and the relationship of language to bodies, in the turn-of-the-century racial imagination. Literary Translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin While Yiddish literary scholars often cite Yiddish translations of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin as evidence of Jews’ “special interest” in the fate of African Americans, the truth is that these translations were belated in comparison to the translation history of Stowe’s novel. In its first year of book publication, translations appeared in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Flemish, Polish, and Magyar. These [End Page 36] translations weren’t meant only for an overseas readership; in the 1850s, both Stowe and her publishers understood that the novel would have to be translated for the roughly 15 percent of American readers who were foreign-born.8 Stowe herself commissioned the first German translation in 1852, understanding that for the novel to wield its full political power, even within the nation, she would have to rely on translation. By 1860, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been translated into twenty languages and was the most widely circulated work of American literature.9 In fact, American literary scholar Colleen Boggs argues that Stowe’s efforts to control the rapidly proliferating translations and adaptations of her novel helped to form the basis for international copyright law.10 Eastern European...

The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism by Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand

Reviewed by: The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism by Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand David S. Nolen The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism, by Wayne A. Wiegand and Shirley A. Wiegand. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018. 280 pp. $38.00. In May 1954, the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling in the landmark case of Brown v Board of Education of Topeka. That ruling upended the legal concept often summed up as "separate but equal," which had undergirded laws establishing segregated public services and facilities—especially public schools—for decades. The Court's decision finally acknowledged the grim reality that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal," and ushered in the era of integration of public schools and, eventually, other public facilities as well. In The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South, authors Wayne and Shirley Wiegand chronicle the desegregation of another facility intimately linked to American educational values: the public library. The authors set out to shine a light on the African Americans who made sacrifices on behalf of desegregation of public libraries across the South. Though various civil rights organizations were involved in desegregation efforts centered on public libraries, the authors focus specifically on the stories of the individual protestors—most of whom were teenagers or young adults—and their experiences in attempting to use public library facilities. The Wiegands begin the book with a helpful introduction that contextualizes the desegregation of public libraries within the context of the broader civil rights movement. The first full chapter sets the stage for the discussion of desegregation by describing the various ways African Americans in the South established their own libraries, or sought access to resources despite the limited library access afforded them because of Jim Crow laws and discriminatory social practices. The chapters that follow present a catalog of library desegregation efforts preceding the monumental Brown decision. The story continues into the six years immediately following the decision as legal challenges [End Page 378] to segregated library services sprang up across the South. These challenges to segregated public libraries formed an important (but often overlooked) part of the overall civil rights strategy, depending on the context of the local community. The authors add to this narrative in subsequent chapters by focusing on descriptions of the various attempts to desegregate public libraries—and the varying levels of resistance those efforts encountered—that occurred in specific towns and cities across the South after 1960. Those chapters focus on cities in Tennessee, South Carolina, and Virginia, with overall assessments of desegregation and opposition in the states of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The authors conclude the book with a brutally honest assessment of how the American Library Association, whose members were deeply divided over how or even if to respond to library integration efforts, proved to be a non-factor in the movement to desegregate southern public libraries. The authors' stated objective is to chronicle the efforts of young African Americans to desegregate public libraries across the South. The Wiegands' primary motivation in telling these stories is to identify those who worked long and hard and suffered much to bring attention to the lack of access to library resources for blacks and to remedy the situation. Regarding that stated objective, the Wiegands have succeeded mightily. The reader will be impressed and at times overwhelmed by the sheer number of documented library protests. Equally impressive is the number of local and nationally prominent activists who recognized the importance of the library as a shared public space that should provide equal access to citizens of the community, regardless of race. The authors have compiled a wealth of geographically diverse primary sources, relying heavily on court records, local newspapers, and African American newspapers for public commentary on the events relating to desegregation. The discovery and gathering of the sources included in the endnotes and bibliography make a significant contribution to the literature. The unique focus on the integration of public libraries adds many details that have not otherwise been covered in the larger story...

Black Quotidian: A Digital Humanities Approach to Teaching African American History

Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers [blackquotidian.com] is a digital humanities project designed to highlight moments from ordinary lives in African American history. Each day I post at least one Black newspaper article from that date in history, accompanied by a brief commentary. Taking the ordinary aspects of African American history seriously means recognizing the richness and diversity of Black lives, cultures, and communities. I continue to be surprised by the amazing stories that live in the archives of Black newspapers. Black Quotidian brings several hundred of these stories to web audiences, and, in the process, the project is changing how I think about, write about, and teach African American history.

“Women and Girls in Jeopardy by His False Testimony”: Charles Dancy, Urban Policing, and Black Women in New York City during the 1920s

Troubling partnerships between the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and criminal informants during the mid-1920s adversely impacted urban African American women’s daily lives. Part of multiple hierarchies of municipal corruption, undercover surveillance operations represented one of many apparatuses law enforcers employed to criminalize black women’s ordinary behavior, to reinforce Progressive era images of black female criminality and promiscuity, and to deny women of their personhood and civil rights. Black New Yorker and criminal informant Charles Dancy, identified by local black newspapers as a vicious con artist and serial rapist, figured prominently in undercover police operations. Dancy falsely identified black women as sex workers and had them arrested, and in the process sexually assaulted women. New York blacks were outraged by some NYPD members’ use of informants as well as black women’s erroneous legal confinement. Situating informant work within the context of police brutality, racial inequity, and the denial of American citizenship, New York African American race leaders, newspaper editors, and ordinary folks devised and took part in resistance strategies that contested police surveillance operations and spoke on behalf of those who were subjected to state sanctioned violence.

Conflicting visions of renewal in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, 1950–1968

ABSTRACT:Visual representations of the Lower Hill District created by Pittsburgh's redevelopment coalition and by neighbourhood insiders reveal the conflicting ways redevelopers and residents understood older neighbourhoods and their redevelopment. Redevelopers’ maps and photographs of the Lower Hill documented the neighbourhood's densely built-up blocks and intermixture of land uses as definitive examples of blight that threatened downtown's economic health. Models and architectural sketches of the Civic Arena – the jewel of the Lower Hill's redevelopment plan – promised to wipe away blight and renew the city. Redevelopers distributed their imagery through brochures and the city's daily press. Framed by captions labelling the Lower Hill a ‘blight’ and the Civic Arena a ‘wonder of the modern world’, these images helped sell the public on redevelopment. Lower Hill insiders, most notably the city's African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Courier’s lead photographer, Charles ‘Teenie’ Harris, envisioned the Lower Hill and its redevelopment differently. Harris and the Courier criticized the neighbourhood's dilapidated housing but celebrated its thriving social life. They also supported redevelopment but saw it primarily as a route to new jobs and improved housing for Hill residents. After the Civic Arena opened in 1961, redevelopment failed to deliver more jobs or better housing because redevelopers’ worldview prioritized the built over the social environment. Hill District residents, led by the Courier, reacted to these shortcomings with visual protests pairing redevelopers’ favourite symbol of progress – the brand new Civic Arena – with symbols of racial injustice. By spotlighting the inequalities that undergirded redevelopers’ vision for the city, these protests stopped redevelopment from spreading further into the Hill in 1968.

A Bitter Partnership: The Black Press’ Contentious Relationship with the Negro Leagues in the Struggle to Integrate Major League Baseball

In the 30-year campaign to integrate Major League Baseball, the relationships between African-American newspapers and the Negro Leagues developed in three distinct phases. What began as a harmonious partnership where the two institutions worked together to publicize and improve the quality of the Negro Leagues gave way to bitterness and resentment, as each questioned the other’s role in integrating the sport. By the early 1950s, however, some black sportswriters attempted to revitalize the Negro Leagues after recognizing that the integration of the sport had damaged this distinctly African-American social and economic institution. Analysing the contradictory and complicated attitudes and actions of black journalists as they worked with and later disassociated from the Negro Leagues demonstrates the black press’ shifting relationship with the Negro Leagues and illustrates the conflict among African-American journalists over how to transition from a segregated environment to an integrated one.

Book Review: A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change by Rodger Streitmatter

A Force for Good: How the American News Media Have Propelled Positive Change . Rodger Streitmatter. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 246 pp. $90 hbk. $36 pbk. $35.99 ebk.Following up his previous book on the history of journalism, Mightier Than the Sword, now in its fourth edition, Rodger Streitmatter has written another set of case studies dealing with how the media has influenced American history. This time, though, Streitmatter focuses solely on instances when journalists have, as the subtitle indicates, propelled positive change. In his introduction, Streitmatter considers this usage appealingly vague, providing him with wonderful degree of latitude in the topics covered. While it's tempting to devote an inordinate amount of time assessing the problematic rhetoric of this cringe-worthy turn of phrase, the book's content and structure warrant attention on their own.The chapters range from the late 19th century, beginning with Nellie Bly's undercover expose of mental health facilities in New York City, to today's world, concluding with pieces on media coverage of the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandal and Ellen DeGeneres's coming out. In between, we find accounts of how journalism, to select but a few examples, brought down Charles Ponzi's financial scam; caution against the dangers of smoking; celebrate the first Jewish Miss America; and popularize the availability and benefits of birth control. Chapters flow by in a relatively brisk pace as all 16 of them, plus the conclusion, clock in at 177 written pages, excluding notes, bibliography, and index.Meanwhile, no more than three pages elapse at any time throughout the book without extra spacing and a newly titled section break. Chapter 9, for instance, traces the media's praise for Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, with the following subheadings on three consecutive pages: Portraying Jackie Robinson as Humble, Portraying Jackie Robinson as Congenial, and Portraying Jackie Robinson as Wholesome. Rather than providing a consistent, coherent synthesis in each essay by weaving through the primary news accounts of the day, Streitmatter distracts from the flow of each chapter, short as they are, with many section breaks. He effectively provides examples that prove the subhead titles, mind you, but the book sacrifices depth in such a discontinuous manner and, ultimately, fails to craft carefully constructed arguments.To his credit, Streitmatter, a professor of journalism at American University, focuses on events often neglected in history courses and case studies of journalistic practice that many readers, scholars included, might not be too familiar with. Some of the more novel work in the book include chapters devoted to how African American newspapers in the early 20th century helped spur the great migration of subjugated persons away from the South; the publicity arm of the Justice Department under J. Edgar Hoover, which recruited journalists to portray the heroics of G-Men in the 1930s; and the degree to which television news facilitated democratic changes to the presidential nomination process. …

Setting the Record Straight

Almena Davis Lomax is best remembered as the publisher of the Los Angeles Tribune, an African American newspaper. Writing was her chosen vehicle for a lifetime mission of racial justice. At the cost of hardship to herself and her children, she was an independent-minded participant in the Civil Rights movement and a crusader for fair employment. She pursued a career as a writer with equal determination.

The Platform

This article re-frames the early twentieth-century news partnerships of African-American Pullman porters and the black press as an example of networked journalism that functioned efficiently for decades, well before the Information Age. Networked journalism refers to a twenty-first-century style of reportage that leverages the efforts of many people to tell a story, from local amateurs acting as citizen journalists to professional journalists working for official news outlets. Pullman porters, who served America's wealthy aboard luxury sleeper cars for nearly 100 years, used the railways as an antecedent to computerized social networks. They achieved modern notions of information crowdsourcing and collaborative news editing, which helped shape and convey political thought in the black press after World War I. This historical analysis examines the Pullman porter's alliances with five prominent African-American newspapers from 1914 (at the start of the Great War) to 1939 (the end of the Harlem Renaissance): Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, and Pittsburgh Courier. This study reveals that the Pullman porter's contributions to journalism ranged from clandestine news aggregator and distributor, to men who left the porter profession altogether to become full-time journalists.

The Image and the Perception of the Turk in Freedom's Journal

The importance of Freedom's Journal to African American society as the first African American newspaper in the United States is indisputable. News and articles that were published in this newspaper had great impact on African American society of the nineteenth century. The newspaper had a crucial role in creating consciousness about racism and slavery problems in the United States. Freedom's Journal was also trying to raise awareness within the ranks of African Americans regarding the problem of slavery in other countries and was furthermore committed to enlightening African Americans about those distant countries. The Ottoman Empire was one of those “distant and unknown countries,” especially for African Americans in those years (1820s). In this article, the perception of “the Turk” in Freedom's Journal has been examined through published news, poems, and articles that were especially focused on the Greek Uprising, Islam, the Janissaries, and the role of women in Ottoman society. Literature research techniques have been used as a method of research for this paper. In all, 103 issues of Freedom's Journal that were published weekly from 1827 to 1829 have been searched and all scripts that were related to subjects such as the Ottoman Empire, Islam, and the Greek Uprising have been examined.

Emancipatory Cosmology: Freedom’s Journal, The Rights of All, and the Revolutionary Movements of Black Print Culture

This essay examines the slave-state circulations of the first and second African American newspapers in the United States, Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) and The Rights of All (1829). By recuperating the stories of black circulating agents in the South, and reading accounts of their efforts alongside Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All articles that describe the circulatory movements of printed matter, of history, and of the cosmos, the author suggests that these shortlived periodicals produced an “emancipatory cosmology.” Building on the work of Lloyd Pratt, Britt Rusert, Alexander Weheliye, and others, the author proposes that this emancipatory cosmology offered an alternative to US-style nationhood even as it suggested a nation-like communal black imaginary. In short, the interconnections between text and distribution allowed black writers, readers, and agents to bring into being a mobile, communal network that crossed borders of temporality and geography. The emancipatory cosmology produced by Freedom’s Journal and The Rights of All , moreover, shaped later articulations of black history, literature, and politics, and should in many ways guide our thinking about collectivity and political action today.

Alternative media and normative theory: A case of Ferguson, Missouri

This paper, based on in-depth interviews with journalists at alternative and advocacy papers in St. Louis as well as interviews with live streaming protestors, a new breed of citizen journalist, applies six characteristics commonly associated with the alternative press to coverage of the protests and police crackdown in Ferguson, Missouri between August 9, 2014 and March 2015. Journalists from the alternative newspaper in St. Louis focused on progressive or radical values less than the literature predicted. The African-American newspaper in St. Louis found itself influencing the national and global agenda regarding Ferguson and the ongoing oppression of blacks in the city and surrounding municipalities. Mobile media savvy protestors broadcast police actions from the front lines of dissent in nearly constant live streams day after day from August to November, altering the scope of counternarrative and providing distilled counter­propaganda. In this study, researchers provide a snapshot of the alternative/advocacy press as it rose to fill in gaps in coverage and to find untold stories in one of the most widely broadcast events of 2014.

Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle

Reviewed by: Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South by Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle John C. Inscoe Writing Reconstruction: Race, Gender and Citizenship in the Postwar South. By Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 412.) From Robert Lively’s Fiction Fights the Civil War (1957) to Edmond Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962) and Stephen Cushman’s Belligerent Muse (2014), the literary legacy of the Civil War has long been a scholarly staple. Only within the last few years has similar scrutiny been applied to Reconstruction, with Sharon Kennedy-Nolle’s aptly titled study appearing as the most recent and among the most substantive contributions. Through a series of case studies, each representing one of the five military districts into which the former Confederacy was divided at war’s end (a somewhat contrived framing device), she examines a literary output that dramatized the promise of the federal government’s Reconstruction agenda for a radical restructuring of southern society [End Page 84] in which freedmen and women exercised newly acquired rights and opportunities. Four of her five chapters focus on individual writers and usually a single novel by each. George Washington Cable of New Orleans, and the author of The Grandissimes (1880), is the only native white southerner in the mix. Three others were northern transplants to the postwar south: New England–born Constance Fenimore Woolson, who wintered in St. Augustine, Florida, through much of the 1870s and wrote a series of travel sketches and short stories promoting tourism in that most remote of Confederate states; Ohio carpetbagger Albion Tourgee, who became a judge in Greensboro, North Carolina, and wrote a series of novels based on his contentious experiences there, including his first, Toinette (1874); and the lesser-known Iowan Octave Thanet, who based her novel Expiation (1890) on her part-time residence on an Arkansas plantation in the 1880s. Kennedy-Nolle provides very close, insightful readings of these works, devoting much of her analysis to their African American or mixed-race characters (including Seminoles and Minorcans featured in Woolson’s sketches and both black and white Creoles in Cable’s novel), who emerged after the war as vital and vibrant parts of newly acculturated communities in both urban and rural settings. She is especially attuned to strong female characters, whose agency and influence in both private and public spheres these authors saw as integral in shaping this promising new social and political order. Breaking from this pattern of single writer case studies is a far more expansive fifth chapter that will be of particular interest to readers of this journal. In it, Kennedy-Nolle turns to Storer College, established in 1867 for newly freed African Americans in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, to examine more academic and journalistic contexts for this advocacy of a lasting Reconstruction legacy. She focuses on three individuals—Sarah Jane Foster, a white Baptist freedmen’s teacher who faced considerable harassment during her brief tenure there, and two former Storer students (then alumni), John Clifford and Coralie Franklin (curiously the only black writers featured in the book). Through Clifford’s The Pioneer Press, the era’s longest-running African American newspaper, and other outlets, the two urged Harper’s Ferry’s black community to defend their civil rights while also pushing an agenda of socioeconomic and cultural uplift. Throughout Kennedy-Nolle makes clear that the impact of these literary and journalistic moral imperatives was reliant on an expanding and diversifying American (and largely northern) print culture in the later nineteenth century. Yet their endeavors to inspire and sustain long-term commitments to the ideals of Reconstruction were ultimately overpowered by Lost Cause, Redemption, and Jim Crow imperatives, driven by even more effective rhetorical and literary forces, as chronicled by an equally valuable counternarrative to Kennedy-Nolle’s study, K. Stephen Prince’s Stories of the South: Race and the [End Page 85] Reconstruction of Southern Identity (2014). Despite such setbacks, she fully demonstrates that “in fashioning their stories into fictional test cases of the Reconstruction Amendments,” her writers “helped limn the nation’s future while reconstructing its past” (22). In making that case, she provides us...

African American Women in the Newsroom: Encoding Resistance

Previous studies have examined the experiences of either women or minority journalists to determine whether newsroom diversity makes a difference in news content, concluding that the gender and race of newsworkers does not substantially alter the news. However, they have not looked at the work practices and experiences of African American women journalists to determine whether their newswork challenges or reinforces dominant journalistic constructions concerning race and gender. Drawing on the cultural studies model of encoding/decoding, as well as the concept of intersectionality and standpoint theory, this study asks whether the social location of journalists as African Americans and women affects their work practices in ways that increase racial and gender diversity in the news, challenge stereotypes, and otherwise resist normative news constructions of race and gender. Interviews were conducted with 10 African American female TV and newspaper journalists in a major metropolitan area with a majority Black population. This study found that these journalists employed a variety of strategies to resist normative constructions of race to provide positive Black images and voices in the news, but did not similarly feel the need to intervene in news constructions involving gender.

Introduction: Black Periodical Studies

Introduction:Black Periodical Studies Eric Gardner (bio) and Joycelyn Moody (bio) This introduction summarizes the contents of this special issue and situates it among a host of exciting developments in black print culture studies. We offer the original articles that follow as exemplary models of the range of topics and methodologies representative of this growing field, and specifically of the nexus of African Americanist inquiry and periodical studies embodied in the phrase “black periodical studies.” We call for the expansion of scholarship on black print cultures, as, despite the prevalence of this scholarship now, we all have so much more to seek, gain, and know. We thus see this special issue as very much in dialogue with broader interventions in the study of black print cultures. Joycelyn Moody, to cite one example, is co-editing with Howard Rambsy II a special issue on black print culture for MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. The essays in that issue alert us to some of the new research emphasizing such understudied print forms as antebellum black women’s friendship books, slave narratives circulating in transatlantic newspapers and “little books,” and ephemera surrounding the institutionalization of African American Studies in the academy, among other forms. With respect to black periodical studies, the MELUS special issue includes essays devoted to serials ranging from the Christian Recorder before the Civil War, and the Cleveland Gazette after the war, to the Crisis of the twentieth century.1 We thus see an organic, informal synergy between the special MELUS issue and this issue of American Periodicals, and we invite editors, organizations, and scholars to explore ways to formalize and make even richer such collaborative efforts. Our work on this issue certainly builds from other collaborative efforts, too, including panels at a number of major conferences as well as other print and online publications. The Research Society for American Periodicals (RSAP) has offered deep engagement that has fostered our efforts. Initial [End Page 105] discussion of the special issue came out of an RSAP roundtable on “New Directions in African American Periodical Research” at the 2013 American Literature Association Conference in Boston, which featured work by Koritha Mitchell, Hollis Robbins, Andreá N. Williams, Nazera Wright, Arika Easley-Houser, and Ellen Gruber Garvey. RSAP offerings since have included a panel on the intersection of visual culture and African American periodicals, held at the 2015 ALA convention, and a panel on ethnic American women and illustrated periodicals at the 2015 meeting of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. A 2014 session at the Modern Language Association convention, “Early African American Print Cultures: Reflections and Directions,” organized by Ben Fagan and including talks by Rian Bowie, John Ernest, Barbara McCaskill, Fagan, Gardner, and Moody—planned for late 2016 publication as a forum in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers—similarly featured lively discussion of the intersections between African American literary studies and print culture studies, with concentrated attention to black periodicals. All of these efforts have shaped our thinking. Diverse contributors, submitters, and readers also drew both inspiration and knowledge from the University of Wisconsin’s September 2014 Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture’s conference on “African American Expression in Print and Digital Culture” organized by Brigitte Fielder, Anne Palmer, Jonathan Senchyne, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, and Ethelene Whitmire. The two-issue Legacy feature in 2013 and 2014, beginning with P. Gabrielle Foreman’s important essay, “A Riff, A Call, and A Response: Reframing the Problem That Led to Our Being Tokens in Ethnic and Gender Studies,” and concluding with a curated collection of responses, offered even more exigent and engaged consideration.2 Select online initiatives have also highlighted black print cultures and especially black periodical presences. The “Just Teach One: Early African American Print” site, co-sponsored by the American Antiquarian Society and Commonplace, for example, chose “Theresa,” a short story serialized in the first known African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, for its initial text.3 In addition, the Colored Conventions Project promises to change approaches to black print cultures, and both its website and its 2015 symposium at the...

A Calculus of Color: The Integration of Baseball's American League by Robert Kuhn McGregor

Reviewed by: A Calculus of Color: The Integration of Baseball's American League by Robert Kuhn McGregor Thomas Mueller Robert Kuhn McGregor. A Calculus of Color: The Integration of Baseball's American League. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015. 214 pp. Paper, $39.95. A Calculus of Color should not only be required reading in every baseball history class, but every twentieth-century American history class. It is an outstanding piece of work as the author examines the integration of baseball, in the American League, utilizing the racial history of America as a backdrop. For example, there are sections on the great African-American migration and how racism is interconnected with the economic structure of the United States, which the author connects to baseball history. The author focuses on the American League to answer why it was a "poor second when it came to claiming black stars … [and] … home to the last team to integrate" (15). The author begins with a comprehensive summary of racism against African American players and the rise of the Negro Leagues with a discussion of the "colored line" that barred African Americans from playing in the majors. [End Page 234] The Negro Leagues had some of the best baseball players of all time and the author also provides a glimpse into their stories. One of the most interesting parts of the book was the discussion of Negro Leagues' business plan. There were the obvious economic issues due to the "buying power" of African Americans being less than that of whites, and team owners increasing salaries to keep their players from jumping to other teams or leagues. Also, very few Negro League teams had their own stadium, which meant some teams had to pay rent to play in stadiums of the white-only major leagues. This rent obviously cut into the profits of the Negro League teams. Besides economic issues, there were issues with the media. White newspapers were not covering the Negro Leagues and the high-profile African American newspapers were weekly and focused more national coverage. This meant fans did not have a daily update of their favorite Negro League team. This part hit home with the reviewer. He remembered reading the sports page every day of child to follow his baseball team, reading the box scores, etc. Without that constant coverage of every game the reviewer wondered one would lose touch with team and thus minimize the fan base. As the narrative continues the author analyzes the integration of the American League from a business framework. The author separates the teams into championship teams, just below championship teams, and the cellar dwellers. Integration was tied to the power structure of the American League teams that would complete for the AL title versus those below them. The author examined the salaries, profits, and attendance and posited that Chicago, Baltimore, and Cleveland benefitted from integrating by vaulting past the other teams (Detroit and others) who were slow to integrate. The author then examines each of the American League teams' road to integration. The first team was the Cleveland Indians with the signing of Larry Doby. The section compared owner Bill Veeck's "integration policy" with the Dodgers general manager, Branch Rickey. Veeck did have discussions with Rickey on integration, however Veeck had his own way of doing things. Veeck compensated the Negro League team for Doby's services, unlike the Dodgers, but kept the signing of Doby secret. Rickey's approach was more out in the open, so the whole team was brought along. The author continues with the Indians' signing of Satchel Paige which helped relieve the pressure on Doby. The Cleveland story intersects with the Chicago White Sox and Minnie Minoso, a Cleveland signee who would be remembered because of his time with the White Sox. However, his story adds another layer to America's racial history. Minoso was Cuban but the prejudices against African American ball-players [End Page 235] were extended to include black Latino players. The author explains that the "roots" were different but the discrimination was the same. The book continues by examining the rest of the American League's integration by describing three teams, the Philadelphia Athletics, Washington Senators and...

The Civil War’s Contested Past

The Civil War’s Contested Past William A. Link (bio) Barbara A. Gannon. The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. xiv + 282 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $42.00. Caroline E. Janney. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xii + 451 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Thirteen years ago, David Blight’s Race and Reunion argued that the Civil War fostered a struggle among three competing memories—reconciliationist, white supremacist, and emancipationist. Seeing memory as contestation, Blight argued for a triumph of reunion over race. The “forces of reconciliation,” he wrote, “overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, . . . [and] the inexorable drive for reunion both used and trumped race.”1 Race and Reunion was so compelling that, in many respects, it forestalled further work about Civil War memory. How could further work break out of the Blight paradigm? Two new books by Barbara Gannon and Caroline Janney seek to answer this question. Gannon, writing about the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), and Janney, offering a new general synthesis of Civil War memory, conclude that the relationship between race and reunion was far more complicated than Blight suggests. Using both black and white war veterans and their families as subjects, they see the war’s lasting meaning through concepts of Union, comradeship, and contrasting views of nationhood. Both dispute Blight’s notion that old sectional antagonisms disappeared; if anything, Gannon and Janney maintain, these sentiments strongly endured, with full reconciliation failing to overcome wartime animosity. Like Blight, these historians portray race as central, though they disagree with his categorization and characterization. Memories of slavery and sectional division were not mutually exclusive, Gannon and Janney argue. In The Won Cause’s fourteen chapters and four parts—and less than 200 pages of text—Gannon explores race and memory in the GAR, the most important and largest Union veteran organization. Previous studies, she says, relied too [End Page 678] much on national records and thus emphasized “the controversial, and less typical, involvement of black veterans in the GAR” (pp. 9–10). Instead relying on African American newspapers, Gannon fully explores black involvement. Rather than collective memory, Gannon considers “personal memory”—the differing perspectives of individuals and how they remembered events. In the personal memory of veterans, she finds that sentiments about Union and about comradeship trumped everything else. Gannon defines comradeship as “the shared experience of suffering,” with anyone serving on behalf of the Won Cause a comrade. Union regiments and brigades were segregated, but, at the divisional and corps level, black and white soldiers served together. Even soldiers not serving in combat—most African Americans worked in support units—were considered comrades. Comradeship served as the most important ingredient of “personal” memory, but it also permitted veterans, within the arena and space of the GAR, to “overcome racial separation in an era defined by the color line” (p. 118). Gannon convincingly argues that white veterans, especially in the North, accepted black veterans into membership, with full rights. “An examination of day-to-day life in integrated posts,” she writes, “reveals that African Americans, like their white counterparts, attended meetings, participated in post activities, and accomplished the essential, but often mundane, work of their posts” (p. 107). The GAR officially welcomed all veterans without regard to race, and whites welcomed blacks based on shared service and comradeship. Posts existed across the country. Many were integrated, if white veterans permitted black veterans to join. Integrated posts provided a tenuous forum for black veterans. They “could not either literally or figuratively represent the race,” writes Gannon (p. 113). The true story of the African American experience in the GAR lies instead in the establishment of all-black posts across the country. Some two hundred all-black posts, which Gannon meticulously documented, were located in twenty-four states and the District of Columbia. These units were concentrated in small towns and cities, mostly in the North; Maryland and Pennsylvania alone claimed forty units. The black posts proved important, moreover, in how they shaped Civil War memory...