Atlanta Constitution Research Articles

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

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...

Spitting at Jim Crow

Spitting at Jim Crow

The Death Penalty in Black and White: Execution Coverage in Two Southern Newspapers, 1877–1936

In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, coverage of executions in the Atlanta Constitution and the New Orleans (Times-)Picayune occasionally portrayed African Americans executed by the state as legally, politically, and spiritually similar to their white counterparts. But as radical white supremacy took hold across the South, the coverage changed. Through an analysis of 667 newspaper articles covering the executions of Black and white men in Georgia and Louisiana from 1877 to 1936, I found that as lynching became the principal form of lethal punishment in the South, accounts of Black men’s legal executions shrank in length and journalists increasingly portrayed them as ciphers, nonentities that the state was dispatching with little fanfare. In contrast, accounts of white men’s executions continued to showcase their individuality and their membership in social, political, and religious communities. A significant gap between the material reality and the cultural representation of capital punishment emerged. Legal executions in Georgia and Louisiana overwhelmingly targeted Black men. But on the pages of each state’s most prominent newspaper, the executions of white men received the most attention. As a result, capital punishment was increasingly represented as a high-status punishment that respected the “whiteness” of those who suffered it.

Darktown: Newspaper Coverage of Atlanta’s First Black Police, 1930–1960

When the city of Atlanta hired its first Black police officers in 1948, the milestone was covered by the city’s Black newspaper, the Atlanta Daily World, and by the city’s mainstream newspapers, the morning Atlanta Constitution and the afternoon Atlanta Journal, but in starkly different ways. 1 This study explores what each newspaper omitted and included, and what each emphasized or otherwise deemed important, an examination that also seeks to draw attention to the many roles of the Black press beyond reporting the news. Special attention is given to the strategies and tactics used to argue for and against the Black patrols. Finally, these first Black hires and the newspaper coverage of the integration of Atlanta police are placed into historical context, one that juxtaposes shame and pride, degradation and achievement, fealty to Jim Crow and progress with respect to civil rights.

Fabricating Value between Mint and Studio

Fabricating Value between Mint and Studio Maggie M. Cao (bio) in 1903, a cache of forged paintings was discovered during an investigation of an otherwise insignificant civil lawsuit. Although the group of canvases included imitations of works by such American greats as Winslow Homer and George Inness, it was the falsification of the name Ralph A. Blakelock that most captivated the public. Blakelock, the New York Times explained, was "a victim of incurable dementia, brought on by privation suffered in his struggle for recognition. His pictures once disposed of for a mere song, now fetch high prices, while his wife and several children are having a hard struggle for existence" (1903, 9). Adding insult to injury, the New York Tribune reported that among the forgeries apprehended were paintings by the artist's daughter, Marian Blakelock, which "have had 'R.A.' substituted … in the signature in order that they may seem to be genuine works" (1903, 9). This exposé was just the first of many discoveries of fraudulent Blakelocks that would surface time and again in the press until the artist's death in 1919. The forgeries became so rampant that they eventually prompted an investigation by the New York district attorney. Now largely forgotten, the name Ralph Blakelock was once legendary. Arguably the most famous artist in America during the first two decades of the twentieth century, Blakelock was, according to the print media, as "well known as Rembrandt and Da Vinci" (Atlanta Constitution 1919, 12O). The painter was so respected that when he died, it was reported that even President Woodrow Wilson sent his regrets for not being able to pay his respects in person (New York Times 1919, 11). Blakelock's signature works were nocturnes—dusky or moonlit [End Page 837] scenes executed with a dramatic palette of rich hues and shimmering brushwork. The best of these rose in value during the first years of the twentieth century to become the most expensive paintings by a living American artist ever sold. Brook by Moonlight (Fig. 1), for example, auctioned in 1916 for a record-breaking $20,000, which no doubt invigorated the already active counterfeiting attempts within the art world's criminal underground (Davidson 1996, 195–211). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Ralph Albert Blakelock, Brook by Moonlight, before 1891. Oil on canvas. Toledo Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Drummond Libbey, 1916.4 [End Page 838] As perhaps the most counterfeited artist in American history, Ralph Blakelock has much to teach us about the history of cons and scams. He was a target for such crimes not because his paintings were necessarily worthy of Rembrandt or Leonardo as his fans proclaimed, but because of the public intrigue surrounding the rapidly changing monetary value of his work and its attendant implications. The case of Ralph Blakelock's brief celebrity is revealing of a period-specific fascination with the trustworthiness of representation, both artistic and monetary. Indeed, it would be impossible even to tell Blakelock's story without consideration of economic contexts—both the ways in which markets determined his fate and the ways in which the artist himself was obsessed with matters of money. Blakelock's tale of cons and scams offers a window into the intersection of artistic and economic duplicity that has long been with us. Blakelock's career as a landscape painter began in New York City in the mid-1860s. As a young man, he traveled to the American West in attempts to replicate the success of expeditionary painters who were making huge sums on their grand views of distant places. Unable to cash in on frontier pictures, Blakelock began painting eerie nocturnes, sometimes Western themed, but they received little attention from critics, leaving the artist with few buyers during his most productive years. In 1899, penniless and desperate with a large family to support, Blakelock suffered an emotional breakdown and committed himself to the Middletown Homeopathic Hospital in upstate New York, where he lived for the next 17 years. While confined, his reputation took a dramatic turn. He was branded the "American Van Gogh" (a shorthand for mad genius), and the National Academy of Design inaugurated...

"Fuzzy as a Georgia Peach": The Ford Campaign and the Challenge of Jimmy Carter's Southernness

"Fuzzy as a Georgia Peach"The Ford Campaign and the Challenge of Jimmy Carter's Southernness Zachary J. Lechner (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution With much on the line—but virtually nothing to lose—Ford undertook a halting, intermittently bold, and ultimately ill-fated campaign to undermine Carter's regional credibility. "Peanut Crusher" poster from the 1976 Republican National Convention, courtesy of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library & Museum. [End Page 62] America's bicentennial was supposed to be a year of triumphant celebration. Although the nation could look back proudly on its founding, the present looked grim. Americans, after all, were still reeling from the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon's subsequent resignation from the presidency, and many were feeling beaten down by a dilapidated economy beset by the confusing problem of stagflation—high unemployment, high inflation, and weak consumer demand. 1976 was also an election year. Running as the incumbent, Nixon's replacement and pardoner, Gerald Ford, presented himself as a steady hand: not flashy, but competent, and capable of leading Americans out of their economic funk—at some point. His challenger, Democrat Jimmy Carter, suggested he would do more than offer competent leadership, regain Americans' trust, and fix the economy. He would also usher the nation out of its existential doldrums, and perhaps even move it beyond the racial and political divisions of the '60s. He would, in short, heal its wounds. These were bold claims made all the more remarkable by Carter's assertion that his southern background empowered him to cure the nation's ills. Sensing the American public's fascination with Carter's southernness during the 1976 presidential contest, Gerald Ford's Republican strategists turned to another southerner for advice. Their choice—Frances Kaye Pullen—perhaps revealed their desperation to combat a key part of the former Georgia governor's appeal. The Tennessee-born Pullen had crafted speeches for President Ford before she was transferred to Betty Ford's staff, where she performed the same duties for the First Lady; she was hardly a member of the Ford campaign's inner circle. Nevertheless, Pullen submitted a detailed and carefully crafted memo (more like "an essay," she joked). In it, she concluded that Carter successfully merged different versions of a fantasied South, enabling him to attract fellow southerners hoping to gain nonsouthern respect for their oft-maligned region and using his southernness to charm voters living outside of the region. "Carter," Pullen observed, "is playing upon two essentially conflicting myths—the 'good ole boy' rural South and the 'black and white together' new South." And his "use of the southern mystique" was nothing more than "hoke," a false picture of the region that the news media were all too eager to disseminate.1 Folksy insults aside, Pullen captured one of the central strengths of Carter's campaign: his ability to deploy captivating southern symbols that connected with voters both regionally and nationally. Carter hailed from rural southern Georgia, where he oversaw a prosperous peanut business. His presidential run occurred during a key moment: just after the Civil Rights Movement, when a racially progressive white southerner like himself could be seen as a mainstream figure well-suited to deal with the country's racial divides. He benefited from other accidents of circumstance, as well. For example, the Georgia constitution at the time prohibited the sitting governor from succeeding himself. This meant that when Carter's [End Page 63] single term as the state's chief executive ended in 1975, he was left with unlimited time to vie for the presidency. This last factor, coupled with Democratic Party rule changes on fundraising and delegate selection, made Carter's populist style of one-on-one campaigning incredibly effective. The Atlanta Constitution's editor had ridiculed him as a joke candidate when he first announced his presidential bid; by early 1976, he was a viable White House hopeful.2 In labeling Carter's southernness an asset, Pullen revealed that she had been paying attention to popular culture in addition to politics. By the mid-1970s, the white South had been, in some ways, rehabilitated on the screen and in print. Carter's campaign for the White...

Kayla Sees the Lowcountry

Kayla Sees the Lowcountry E. Kayla (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Living in lowcountry South Carolina feels at times like a dream. As a native Texan, my natural surroundings have been almost exclusively composed of parking lots, sprawling highways, endless flat fields, and the occasional howling winds of a passing tornado. I made my way to Beaufort with the intention of recovering, so to speak, from the chaotic bustle of life in Dallas. And in this gorgeous, quiet, and remote part of the country, I recover. The history of the lowcountry, with all its violence, resilience, and resistance, permeates every aspect of daily living. The past is present. My intention with this series, which is part of a larger body of work titled Kayla Sees America, is to hold what was and what is in tension, in an effort to discover something beautiful in between. [End Page 65] Click for larger view View full resolution “The average Savannah ghost is a young man with a latch-key, and such ghosts are very hard to lay.” The Atlanta Constitution, 1883 Click for larger view View full resolution “It has been reported that there were ghosts in the county jail … the news has been whispered around: ‘The jail is haunted.’” The Atlanta Constitution, 1897 Click for larger view View full resolution “Beaufort seemed a place far away, all by itself and it was hard to think of it as a part of South Carolina.” The Newberry Weekly Herald, 1917 Click for larger view View full resolution “It is no exaggeration to state that … Beaufort resembled a fairyland, whose sights, sounds and salt sea breezes … captured the senses.” The Gaffney Ledger, 1917 [End Page 66] Click for larger view View full resolution “The ghost said—‘But soft—methinks I scent the morning air: Brief let me be.’” The Atlanta Constitution, 1901 Click for larger view View full resolution “‘If you are a man, I shall kill you; if you are a ghost this won’t hurt you,’ and with that the loud report of his pistol startled the night’s stillness.” The Atlanta Constitution, 1882 Click for larger view View full resolution “Where now thy lustrous form, thy shining hair? / Where thy bright presence, thine imperial eyes? / Lost in dim shadows of the realm of Ghosts!” The Charleston Daily, 1871 Click for larger view View full resolution “To Beaufort and its lovely sunset skies [and] laughing waters … I must say ‘Goodbye,’ to get me back to home and duties.” The Edgefield Advertiser, 1894 [End Page 67] Click for larger view View full resolution “A day for poetry and song, a new song. These cloudless skies, this balmy air … are in harmony with the glorious morning of liberty about to dawn upon us.” Douglass’ Monthly, Vols. 4–5, 1861–1863 Click for larger view View full resolution “In accordance, as I believe, with the will of our Heavenly Father, and by direction of your great and good friend, … Abraham Lincoln, … you will be declared ‘forever free.’” The New York Times, 1863 Click for larger view View full resolution “A violent storm prevailed … the wind and waves were so high that it was found impossible to cross the harbor.” The Goldsboro Messenger, 1875 Click for larger view View full resolution “Everybody who went through Sunday’s storm on the island is unanimous in declaring that it was an experience which they are willing not to repeat.” The Manning Times, 1911 [End Page 68] Click for larger view View full resolution “The meeting was held in a beautiful grove … adjoining the camp … As I sat on the stand and looked around … I thought I had never seen a sight so beautiful.” The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke, 1863 Click for larger view View full resolution “The dawn of freedom which it heralds may not break upon us at once; but it will surely come, and sooner, I believe, than we have ever dared hope before.” The Journals of Charlotte Forten Grimke, 1863 Click for larger view View full resolution “The storm was one of the most severe the people of the coast have ever known.” The Anderson Intelligencer, 1893 Click for larger view...

Book Review - A Church, a School: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Civil Rights Editorials from the Atlanta Constitution

Book Review - A Church, a School: Pulitzer Prize-Winning Civil Rights Editorials from the Atlanta Constitution

NRJ Book Review: Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action

Gwyneth Mellinger, Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2013), Paperback, 240 pages, $25.Review by Joseph HaydenInstitutional histories tend not to be very compelling, usually because their authors are burdened by the desire to catalogue everything that ever happened to an organization. That is not the case with this monograph, which tackles only one aspect of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' 90-year life span: the group's stance toward newsroom integration and diversity. The result is a brisk account of an often contentious professional quest. It is also a story of failure.Part of the University of Illinois' History of Communication series, edited by Robert McChesney and John Nerone, this study examines ASNE's attitudes and initiatives concerning social justice in the workplace. Author Gwyneth Mellinger starts her analysis with the recalcitrance of white editors in the 1950s. This was the era of Brown v. Board of Education, and just as schools were asked to open their doors, other sectors of society, including the newspaper industry, were likewise scrutinized. Now editors were being challenged, albeit quietly and usually privately, to do more, too. They usually responded with defensiveness and rationalizations.Thus the association would weather the 1950s with its all-white identity challenged but intact (20), Mellinger writes. Indeed, the group tolerated racist editors like Harry Ayers of the Anniston (Ala.) Star, whose offensive comments about black people embarrassed the organization at its 1956 convention. It gave voice to people such as Frederick Sullen of the Jackson (Miss.) Daily News, who fretted over mongrelism. And it amplified the voice of segregationists who trumpeted southernism and their Confederate identity, motifs often played up in the words and cartoons in the ASNE Bulletin.That is not to say that all southern editors in ASNE were racial reactionaries. Several individuals, such as Virginius Dabney of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, sympathized with the goal of greater inclusiveness. But the foes of integration checked and effectively silenced the more progressive tendencies of their colleagues. Thus, a handful of vocal louts held sway: While few editors openly opposed social integration by the end of the decade, few openly supported the integration of their (45).The one event that may have altered the mindset of ASNE members and eventually influenced them to change was the Kerner Commission's 1968 report blaming recent urban riots, in part, on the nation's monochromatic newsrooms. That impact did not manifest itself immediately, though. Just as the editors' group had utterly ignored the Hutchins Commission report of 1947, calling for the media to exercise greater social responsibility, they at first tried to look the other way in the face of these accusations. At the 1968 convention, speakers...acknowledged it only in passing (48). But coming in the wake of such traumatic national events, which had triggered the report, ASNE members slowly started addressing the issues raised by the study.The years immediately following the Kerner commission were, therefore, a time of transition, when the idea of integrating newsrooms and the ASNE had appeared on the horizon and many editors had begun contemplating its distant inevitability (51).Editors like Norman Isaacs of the Louisville Courier-Journal and C.A. Pete McKnight of the Charlotte Observer were among the first association officers to push hard for the recruitment of minorities. When McKnight became president of the group in 1971, he launched the Minority Employment Committee.By the mid-1970s, more members were behind the goal of diversity, and they were working more aggressively to encourage it. They also sought alliances with people outside their association. Eugene Patterson of the Atlanta Constitution and later the St. …

The Law and Black Folk

The Law and Black Folk Katy L. Chiles (bio) Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery by Bryan Wagner. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 307. $37.00 cloth. Ever since W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, scholars have deliberated over what it means to have a soul, to be black, or to be part of the folk. In Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery, Bryan Wagner gives us a new way to consider these issues that is provocative and, indeed, disturbing. Blackness, Wagner claims, is not something passed down through bloodlines or as a cultural inheritance; rather, it is a certain type of statelessness produced when one is allowed to exist—but only without standing—in the eyes of the state. Furthermore, it is this understanding of blackness (one of statelessness, not of soulfulness) that grounds what we commonly call the black vernacular tradition. Indeed, this version of the black tradition predicates its own emergence on its engagement with the law that would construct the existence of its practitioners only as one of criminality. For Wagner, if we miss understanding this aspect of blackness, we miss the violence recorded in these cultural expressions. Wagner proposes this alternative history of the black vernacular tradition by debunking some of what he calls the central myths of its accepted history and by detailing the ethnographic procedure that made certain kinds of music into folk music (253). He begins by showing the way in which the laws arising out of a natural law tradition [End Page 339] produced a particular notion of blackness. For him, the term police power refers not just to the formalized institution of law enforcement (although it certainly includes that) but also more broadly to the power of the state to produce certain types of subjectivities through the writing and enforcing of law. Indeed, the state's sovereignty relates to its police power, and, in the particular case of blackness, the state's police power sees blackness only "for the presumed danger it poses to public welfare" (6-7). Furthermore, this power was not only consolidated in the state itself, as it was extended as a "racial privilege of all whites over all blacks, slave or free" (7). Because this police power conceptualized blackness only as a threat, it legitimated any effort to eliminate that potential threat preemptively before it could culminate in action. For Wagner, the black vernacular tradition arises out of its interaction with this kind of legal thinking, and we'd be better served by understanding how black culture responded to police power rather than by misunderstanding "the voice's insistence for a positive property such as soulfulness" (21). Indeed, as Wagner states, [M]y aim is to specify the historical statement against which the black tradition has dramatized its own emergence. Whether it is abstracted in codes or embedded in cases, the law leaves a paper trail that can be used to reconstruct the historical coordinates that are invoked in the tradition's representative structures of self-address. (21) One of Wagner's most powerful examples is the history of Uncle Remus, the African American character created by Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta at the close of the nineteenth century. Probably many Americans think of Uncle Remus either as the storyteller featured in Harris's Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings (1880) or as the demeaning narrator featured in Disney's 1946 film, Song of the South. What Wagner reminds us of, however, is the seriousness with which folklorists took the Uncle Remus stories for their "scientific worth" (116). As Wagner details, Remus became structurally important both to the study of black folk culture and to the professionalization of that type of study. Remus, then, influenced folklorists' "theories of black tradition, in particular those theories that would describe the tradition as a cultural inheritance from Africa;" indeed, he "structured the archive through which the tradition has been imagined" (122). By reading through issues of the Atlanta Constitution, the newspaper that initially published Harris's Remus pieces, Wagner links the production of this character with the debate simultaneously...

Royal Match: The Army-Navy Service Game, July 4, 1918

The scene in London stadium was as improbable as polo in Brooklyn: King of England and thousands of loyal subjects, cheering American soldiers and sailors batting horsehide around a diamond wedged onto a soccer field. Largely forgotten today, great Fourth of July baseball match of 1918 was most significant athletic event of First World War. Baseball had gained a foothold in England that year thanks to Anglo-American Baseball League (AABL). The original plan of thirty American businessmen in England was for a six-team circuit of civilian professionals playing in Great Britain and in army camps in France. Promoters even began recruiting players in United States. When this scheme proved impractical, AABL gradually morphed into an eight-team US-Canadian military league. Organizers hoped to continue as a major league following war. The AABL played primarily at sites in and near London, including Arsenal football (soccer) ground at Highbury and Chelsea football ground at Stamford Bridge, with a few games slated elsewhere in England and Scotland. Teams played on Saturdays and holidays from May 18 to August 24, with proceeds going to British war charities. The league constituted what Atlanta Constitution later called the crest of a baseball mania that followed American troops everywhere they went in Europe. (1) Various royals encouraged American national pastime in England. Princess Patricia, King's cousin and a patroness of Canadian troops, had known baseball while living in Canada. She attended an AABL game at Highbury on opening day and a nonleague exhibition game at Chelsea on Memorial Day. The Duke of Portland also supported sport. After throwing out first ball at a nonleague game in Nottingham, he commented, Now that we have seen great American game of baseball we appreciate its excellence. (2) The United States and Canada each contributed four teams to AABL. America had nines from US Army and US Navy headquarters in London, plus Hounslow and Northolt aviation fields outside city. Canada fielded squads from Epsom and Sunningdale convalescent hospitals and from two clerical units: Pay Office and Records. Newspapers applied various names to eight teams, but those used here were most common. The league boasted of considerable talent, especially among Americans. Rosters included former professionals from American, Pacific Coast, New York State, Southern, Western, and Illinois-Indiana-Iowa (3--I) leagues, among others, plus amateurs from semipro and collegiate teams. Many Canadian military teams and a few American civilian nines had been playing ball in England since early in war. AABL games now drew well among Allied troops and curious civilians. The sky-blue uniforms of convalescing British Tommies were especially noticeable amid crowds of khaki, navy blue, and mufti. Colorful posters on lampposts and walls all across London announced games. Ticket prices were as low as 8 pence (16 cents)--a fact noted in America. As AABL began its season, military situation on western front deteriorated. The United States had been at war only a little more than a year (compared with nearly four years for Great Britain). Half a million US troops were overseas by May 1918, including 15,000 air service men in England. These numbers were rising rapidly, but were not yet sufficient. Most American troops were still in training. Commanding General John J. Pershing stubbornly resisted pleas to integrate their regiments into French and British divisions. With Russia effectively out of war following October Revolution of 1917, Germany launched huge spring offensives in France. Pershing reported to Washington that situation was very grave. (3) The British Ministry of Information was responsible for disseminating what upbeat war news there was to America. …

The Creation of a Legend

Legend: A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but unauthenticated.1Legends do not spring forth full grown from a vacuum. Typically, legends are based upon elements-oftentimes only barest shreds-of reality. In order to assess legend's legitimacy these bits and pieces of truth must be ferreted out. This process can also provide insight into origin of legend.The present inquiry is an attempt to determine authenticity of legend of Herman Schaefer's called home run, and especially flamboyant behaviors attributed to him immediately preceding and following his amazing hit. goal is to determine validity of legend's alleged events and, if possible, to ascertain their root sources.BackgroundAn often told baseball legend is that of Detroit's Germany Schaefer's pinch-hit walk-off home run. As traditional tale goes, before stepping into batter's box Schaefer boasted to crowd that he was baseball's premier batsman and was going to give a brilliant demonstration of his unmatched hitting ability. most extraordinary version of legend has him publicly declaring that he was going to hit ball into left-field bleachers. Amazingly, Germany proceeded to do that and his spectacular home run won game. legend then details a series of outrageous behaviors exhibited by Schaefer as he rounded bases, concluding with a self-satisfied speech he made to crowd after arriving at home plate. Apart from those shocking acts, Schaefer's climactic homer is all more improbable because he simply was not a home run hitter. In his lengthy major league career, Germany batted more than 3,700 times and homered on only nine occasions, three of those inside-the-park homers.2The first writer to tell many-faceted tale of Schaefer's spectacular homer was former Tigers manager Hugh Jennings. At end of 1925 season Jennings suffered nervous breakdown and retired from baseball. He had been in major league baseball for nearly 35 years and, by his own estimate, had participated in or witnessed more than 5,000 games.3Jennings decided to capitalize on his wealth of baseball experience. He contracted to write a daily newspaper column, Rounding Third, which was syndicated in major newspapers from coast to coast. Atlanta Constitution proudly announced that the greatest series on baseball ever written would begin on Thursday, December 1, 1925.4 Jennings' column recounted important baseball events of past and depicted famous players he knew so well. All told, over a three-month period Jennings penned a total of 80 columns. mental and physical demands on a man in frail health must have been enormous.Launching LegendJennings first described Schaefer's pinch-hit home run in Chapter 28 of Rounding Third. He opened by saying, When we started our last eastern trip in September, 1907, we had a fighting chance for pennant. His description of Schaefer's pinchhit homer in this chapter was succinct:We were playing Chicago in Chicago and Doc White, famous left-hander of White Sox, was pitching. Schaefer was on bench that day, nursing a sore thumb. Late in game we filled bases with two out. I asked Schaefer whether he thought he could pinch bat and he said he would. He stepped to plate, took a firm hold, swung and drove ball into left field bleachers, winning game for us.Jennings devoted all of Chapter 53, Greatest Comedian of Baseball, to Germany Schaefer. In it, he detailed many of madcap stunts that earned Schaefer title The Clown Prince of Baseball. Here Jennings launched legend of Schaefer's pinch-hit home run in its full glory:I have already told you how Schaefer hit a home run off Doc White with bases filled in Chicago ... but circumstances attending home run were omitted in that chapter. …

Joel Chandler Harris, Catholic

Joel Chandler Harris, Catholic Bryan A. Giemza (bio) He would have felt about as awkward in proclaiming himself a pattern of piety as he would in proclaiming himself a pattern in literature. dr. j.w. lee on Harris’s religiosity Joel Chandler Harris needs reintroduction: he was a meliorist, a staunch critic of the South—and a Catholic. Most would assume that the full-blooded Georgian was a consummate Southerner in his politics and worldview, since, in our time, Harris is generally (if controversially) remembered as the author of the best-known collection of black folk tales ever to be printed. In fact, he was a retiring man who became an unlikely spokesman for the New South and racial reconciliation. As the creator of the Uncle Remus tales and the associate editor of the nationally renowned Atlanta Constitution, Harris put a benevolent face to Henry Grady’s vision of New South politics and brought that vision to the nation in his homespun Southern Uncle Remus magazine. Yet Harris remained something of a Southern outsider until the end of his days. If his stories are taken as a whole, the intensely shy man offered a relentless (if necessarily muted) critique of his region’s racial politics. He kept company [End Page 86] with others who did the same, including Mark Twain and George Washington Cable, both of whom were largely ostracized from the region after writing critically about it. Joel Chandler Harris never went so far, instead framing the Remus tales as parables to subvert the sectional censorship. Harris acknowledged the limitations of his freedom as a writer in the South, where the political climate dictated that the writer might not “draw an impartial picture of Southern civilization, its lights and shadows.”1 W. E. B. DuBois sought out Harris in the wake of the 1899 lynching of Sam Hose, but DuBois abandoned the idea as a half measure in the face of imminent violence in Atlanta. The Atlanta Constitution sensationalized the lynching and predicted that it would happen. Too often frustrated in his conciliatory agenda, Harris found his position as editor more and more untenable, and resigned the following year. Late in life, he explained the difficulty of his position: It seems that there are things we cannot deal with familiarly—things that we cannot touch without our fingertips drawing a blood-blister on the unseemly forehead of politics; and when our writers take their pen in hand, and begin to set forth in fiction the things with which they are familiar, they unconsciously feel that they are under some sort of pledge not to offend the abnormal sensitiveness of their neighbors—that they are bound to glass over certain conditions and circumstances that are a very definite part of their surroundings.2 Harris’s role as a lifetime critic of the South has been utterly eclipsed by the popular if inaccurate notion that he is the dean of racial paternalism. But his greatest instance of apostasy from the Southern fold is, oddly enough, perhaps the least noted: his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Biographers usually described him as a spiritual man, but not conventionally religious, apparently on the strength of these facts: he attended church irregularly, if at all, and he received no particular religious instruction in his childhood, save [End Page 87] what fell to him by way of circuit riders, camp meetings, and his Methodist mother’s desultory Bible readings. Even so, the writer also held deep moral convictions, expressing them frequently in his way; and those who knew him, especially his family, remembered him for his deeply lived, unvarnished loving kindness. Few writers from the period seem to have been so singularly compelled by Kurt Vonnegut’s maxim, spoken bluntly by Mr. Rosewater—“Goddammit, you’ve got to be kind”—and Harris’s astonishing kindness is especially apparent in the letters he wrote to his children. As an orphan, and perhaps as an alcoholic, Harris had seen his portion of adversity and struggled to keep the shadows of depression at bay. The support of his family, and the sustenance of an unobtrusive spirituality, undoubtedly aided him. Unfortunately, he left few tracks by which his path to Catholicism...

Presidential Power, the Panay Incident, and the Defeat of the Ludlow Amendment

Presidential Power, the Panay Incident, and the Defeat of the Ludlow Amendment

Remembering “The Georgia Peach”

Often hailed as the greatest player of the Dead-Ball Era, Ty Cobb was the focus of extensive media coverage throughout the twentieth century. This article explores the intersection of popular culture and collective memory by examining the press’ participation in the shifting legacy of one of baseball's legendary (anti-) heroes. One question guided the narrative: how did the Sporting News and the Atlanta Constitution represent him throughout the century? Overall, more than 325 articles were analyzed from Sporting News, a prominent national periodical, and the Atlanta Constitution, a prominent newspaper in Cobb's home state, in four twentieth-century eras. The study not only explored the transformation of his legacy in print but grappled with print as a site of public memory, the mechanisms through which public memory is invoked, and the interaction of national and local memory.

Reading the Lupton African American Cookbook Collection

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Few libraries in the American South host compelling foodways collections. Texas Woman's University in Denton is a defensible exception. So is the Atlanta History Center, where a researcher can plumb, among other documents, foodways research done as pre-production work for the film, Gone With the Wind. And in New Orleans, the Southern Food and Beverage Museum is collaborating with both the local public library and Susan Tucker of Tulane's Newcomb College. There are, to be sure, other libraries worth exploring, including the University of North Carolina, the University of Mississippi, and Emory University. At the latter, you can read the letters of Julian C. Harris, the son of Joel Chandler Harris of Uncle Remus fame. In 1931, while working as an editor at the Atlanta Constitution, the younger Harris debated U.S. Senator-elect Huey Long of Louisiana, in print and on film, over the relative merits of dunking or crumbling cornbread into potlikker. The South's destination-worthy foodways collection, however, is at the University of Alabama, where the W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library houses the David Walker Lupton African American Cookbook Collection. That cache of 450 volumes is chockablock with culturally rich and relevant primary source manuscripts on African American culture. Those manuscripts just happen to be cookbooks. I recently spent a day at the Hoole, hunched over a table, flanked by dull oil portraits of influential alumni, listening to the whir of electric pencil sharpeners. Upon presenting the second stack of the day, a clerk said, If you cook something from one of these books, let us know how it turns out. At the time, I was trying to wrap my head around a recipe for chitlin patties in Arkansas Soul Foods, a mimeographed pamphlet, written in 1969 by Dorothy Brackin, and published by the Pulaski-Perry Library, in Jacksonville, Arkansas. In that same book, I scrolled recipes for baked macaroni and brains, slick dumplings, and farkleberry pie. All were new to me. All were compelling. All proved to be better cultural artifacts than culinary instructionals. A librarian by vocation, the late Lupton was a cookbook collector by avocation and possessed an expansive curiosity about African American culinary culture in particular. Lucky for us, he had an eye for cookbooks that were more than mere recipe collections. Many of the Lupton books tell a story of African American self-definition, forged, in part, during the Civil Rights Movement. In that vein is the work of Bobby Seale, the onetime Black Panther who left the barricades for barbecue. Barbeque'n with Bobby, with its neon orange cover, is a pop culture classic from 1988, full of aphorisms and instructions for the concoction of vinegar mops. Seale did not, however, retire his ideologies when he quit the barricades. …

Representing Redskins: The Ethics of Native American Team Names

In the fall of 1999, as the Atlanta Braves were facing the New York Mets for the National League Pennant, I wrote an editorial for the Atlanta Constitution denouncing the Atlanta fan tradition of mimicking, with gesture and voice, a Native American war cry (or at least the Hollywood version thereof) (21). The experience proved to be an exhilarating introduction to the South, where I had arrived only months before. A right-wing radio personality spent much of the day calling me a “candy ass liberal.” Two days later in the newspaper’s letters section I was hailed as a pencil-necked-geek and told to get a job that didn’t require deep thinking. Whatever expectation I had that a reasonable argument would win over enough fans to put an end to the “tomahawk chop” proved to be greatly misguided. While its prominence has faded somewhat, no accompanying wave of moral regret has swept the city. And judging from the persistence of such offensive team names as Redskins and such dubious logos as that of the Cleveland Indian’s Chief Wahoo (who bears a striking resemblance to Little Black Sambo), one can hardly point to any change of zeitgeist on this issue. 1 If the experience of my editorial has made me somewhat less sanguine about the power of a good argument to change social practices, I nonetheless remain convinced that the alternative (silence) will forever be an even less attractive option. 2 What follows, then, is a more full account of why North American team names are ethically problematic. More than just offering an ethical argument, however, I wish also to examine a political issue: when faced with an offensive cultural practice, what are the options and obligations of the liberal democratic state? I take up the ethical issue in the following three sections, and in the final section reflect upon this political issue. Before beginning, two quick clarifications are in order. First, my concern here is philosophical, not legal. The current legal standing of Native team names has been discussed elsewhere (e.g., 3; 14; 22), and I make no attempt to add to what has been said there. Second, the issue under examination is the general appropriation of Native American identity, be it in the form of names, symbols or cultural practices. I think there are differences between a team name, a team logo and a mascot doing a war dance at halftime, and that these differences render some such

A Look at Print Media Coverage across Four Olympiads

Although women and are competing in in ever increasing numbers from local youth recreational leagues to the Olympics, many studies show that they have been, and remain, shortchanged in both the quantity and quality of sport media coverage. Relative to the quantity of sport media coverage, work by Graydon (1983) indicated that 90 percent of all reporting was devoted to men's sports. Similarly, research by McKay and Row (1987) revealed that in city newspapers, 98 percent of the available coverage space was devoted to men's sports. In 1991, Duncan, Messner, and Williams (1991) analyzed the coverage of women's in four daily newspapers: USA Today, the Boston Globe, the Orange County Register and the Dallas Morning News. They found [s]tories focusing exclusively on men's outnumbered stories addressing only women's by a ratio of 23:1 (p. 3). Further, their research showed that even when men's baseball and football stories were removed from the mix ... men's stories still outnumbered women's stories by an 8.7:1 margin (p.3). A 1998 study by Kinnick, that reviewed the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Atlanta Constitution, and the LA Times, revealed gender based disparities in sport media coverage that reached as high as 62%:38%. Similarly, Evarts (1996) reported men's dominance in sport media column inch allocations in four Midwestern daily newspapers. A 1996 media study by Shields, Gilbert, and Finkelstein found that in the Tennessean, the New York Times, and USA Today, women's received 11.1 percent of the print media coverage compared with 82.1 percent allocated to the men's sports. This same study found 19 percent of the men's articles had accompanying photographs, while only 4 percent of the women's articles did. In addition to a quantitative advantage, Duncan et al. (1991) found that men's sport stories received better section placement and received more and better accompanying photo coverage. According to Sage (1990), sport media coverage for women has often focused more on personal aspects of sex-appeal, feminine characteristics, and/orstereotypicalrole perceptions, than on athletic ability and performance. In 1990, based on study findings, Duncan, Messner, Williams, and Jensen stated, weight of the evidence clearly suggests that women's are under-reported and that what coverage does exist is inferior to that afforded men's sports (p. 1). A 1994 follow-up study by Duncan and Messner, showed persistent evidence that female athletes were described as less competent than their male counterparts. According to the 1994-1995 Women's Sports Foundation report Words to Watch, When women athletes are the subject of reports and commentary they are sometimes referred to in words that treat them differently than men, often in ways which downplay of trivialize their achievements (p. 3). The report went on to say that identifying female athletes as girls or ladies, using first names instead of last names, and descriptions that emphasize physical appearance or skills not related to performance, are all examples ways women in sport are marginalized as inferior to men in sport (Women's Sports Foundation, 1995). Studies conducted outside the United States have revealed similar sport media disparities. Hall (1997) commented extensively on a sport media study of newspapers, magazines, national television broadcasts and radio stations conducted by the Australian Sports Commission (ASC). The ASC study revealed an overall increase in women's sport media coverage from 2 percent in 1980 to 10.7 percent in 1996. Even so, the men's sport media coverage loomed considerably larger, at 79.1 percent in 1996. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] A more recent study by Eastman and Billings (2000) looked at sports-casting on ESPN and CNN, and print media reporting in USA Today and the New York Times. …

Black Father: The Subversive Achievement of Joel Chandler Harris

Fer all I kin tell you, de man mought er bin ez w'ite ez de driven snow, er he mought er bin de blackes' Affikin er de whole kit en b'illin'. I'm des tellin' you de tale, en you kin take en take de man en w'itewash 'im, er you kin black 'im up des ez you please.--Joel Chandler Harris, Adventures of Simon and Susanna (Complete Tales 459) A century ago Joel Chandler Harris was famous. His first and best known book, Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, sold more than 7,000 copies in its first month in 1880. It's been in print ever since. Remus and Brer Rabbit, the stars of his stories, took their place in the nation's cultural lexicon, and Harris himself was much celebrated. Teddy Roosevelt invited him to dinner at the White House and Mark Twain tried to interest him in joint lecture tour. Children clamored for Remus and were shocked to find that Harris was white. Harris was much too shy to lecture--he couldn't even bring himself to read for children--but he was prolific writer, churning out seven additional Remus collections, fictionalized memoir called On the Plantation, and various shorter and longer fictional works. But Joel Chandler Harris claimed his fame as the creator of gentle Remus, the teller of Brer Rabbit's triumphant underdog tale. They were the ones who made him, in Twain's admiring phrase, the oracle of the nation's nurseries. But then, no surprise, the long honeymoon ended. Harris's stock began to fall. Critics took his world apart, separated storyteller Remus from story hero Brer Rabbit to the disadvantage of the former. Brer Rabbit was in fact elevated in this revision, recognized as a revolutionary black figure from African American traditional lore, the black core of otherwise white work (Songs and Sayings 29). He is, and this is one of the deep roots of his power, Signifying Rabbit, in the fullest sense of that term as carefully described by Claudia Mitchell-Kernan and situated in African American literature by Henry Louis Gates. His situation is understood as echoing that of his anonymous black creators, and his antics are not at their root comic at all, but deadly serious maneuvers allowing his survival and even triumph in world ruled by enemies bent upon his destruction. When Brer Rabbit outwits and eventually destroys Brer Wolf, Brer Bear, and Brer Fox, his victories are interpreted as supplying at least vicarious pleasure and at most pragmatic advice to black audiences whose position in the world is appreciated as deeply analogous. Remus, however, the teller of Brer Rabbit's subversive tale, went down with his author. He was cartoon, offensive stereotype, Tom, the literary creation of white author with obvious regional agenda. Uncle Remus, the creation of Joel Chandler Harris, is one of many masks employed by the Plantation School to justify the restoration of white supremacy, according to Robert Bone's 1975 analysis (Bickley, Critical 139). The old man, it was noticed, was so much creature of his author's nostalgias that he was presented in the first collection's introduction as possessing, preposterously, nothing but pleasant memories of the of (Songs and Sayings 47). Meanwhile Harris himself fell from grace even more precipitously, and much more completely, than Remus. Harris's editorials, and more especially his popular magazine articles, were bursting at the seams with paternalist nonsense and irritating defenses of Southern racial mores. Darwin Turner, in lengthy, meticulous, scrupulously fair, and influential 1968 study, was especially dismayed by the attitudes put forward in Harris's three-part Observations From New England, published in the Atlanta Constitution in 1883. If slavery is muted to benign discipline in the introduction of Remus, Harris in his own voice describes slavery as an institution which, under Providence, grew into university in which millions of savages served apprenticeship to religion and civilization (Editor and Essayist 166). …

Reading, Intimacy, and the Role of Uncle Remus in White Southern Social Memory

You see, my grandmother explained me that when a black woman went into a white family's house as cook and baby sitter, this is role of mother.... [T]hat child is nurtured by whoever that person is, but somewhere that child learns segregate himself, that he's better. She said, So I really believe they hold classes at night. Mazie Williams, Birmingham, Alabama WHEN JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS PUBLISHED HIS FIRST UNCLE REMUS folktales in Atlanta Constitution in 1879 and 1880, white southern readers scarcely waited ink dry before they began offering personal testimonials authenticity of white Georgia author's representations of black character and plantation life. Some, like Barton N. Harrison, also gave impromptu readings. A southern-born lawyer living in New York City, Harrison eagerly clipped reprints of stories that appeared in New York World and Evening Post. Unfolding clippings, which he carried in pocketbook, he read tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and other creeturs, as told by Harris's ex-slave narrator, Uncle Remus, to all sorts of companies, at dinner parties & elsewhere (& always with shouts of laughter), until clippings were fairly worn out. For these white northern audiences, Harris's stories were, as Harrison reported in a March 1880 letter Constitution, the first pictures of genuine negro life in South. (1) Curiously, Harrison had a harder time convincing a white southern politician of accuracy of Harris's portraits. Although Senator Lamar (probably Lucius Q. C. Lamar of Mississippi) enjoyed story, his relish was less keen than mine, Harrison reflected, for single reason, I thought, that he has been so recently negroes as not perceive delicate touches of art in putting them on stage. Lamar's response led Harrison intriguing conclusion that to fully appreciate wonderful skill [Harris] has shown in negro dialect, and rare genius as a dramatist in reproducing scenes, incidents and characters of plantation life, one must perhaps be, as I am, separated by weary years of time and long miles of space from haunts of childhood. (2) Harrison's conclusion seems remarkable given emphasis on authenticity of Harris's work throughout rest of letter. Didn't Harrison realize that he was undercutting own argument by suggesting that both Harris's fiction and own reaction it were essentially nostalgic? And if Harris's work was so graphic and genuine, why must white southern readers be separated from rather than among negroes, as Senator Lamar was, appreciate Harris's depiction of a black character type? Harrison might have explained that he was making a distinction between older and younger generations of blacks, for, as he also put it in letter, the conditions of negro life are so changed since war that, in another generation, negroes themselves will almost have forgotten homely and unpretentious legends of time of slavery that Harris's work had preserved. (3) A better explanation lies in fact that Barton Harrison and other white southern readers of Harris's Uncle Remus stories were in process of constructing social memory--and not simply remembering South of their childhoods. This essay examines that process. Analyzing both production and consumption of Uncle Remus stories, I ask how Harris, a white southern author, was able capture both subversive spirit of African American folklore and hearts of white southern readers. And, given complexity of Harris's texts, I examine how white readers like Harrison were able stitch this material so seamlessly into fabric of their own developing memories of a plantation past. Addressing this second concern, I argue that reading and family intimacy were key components in creation and cross-generational transmission of a white racial fantasy of intimacy-within-hierarchy that was at least as important in shaping white supremacist worldviews at turn of twentieth century as more vitriolic rhetoric that dominated formal politics and other aspects of public sphere. …