Black Newspapers Research Articles

Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (review)

Violent conflict in pursuit of freedom and democracy has served to illuminate the hypocrisy of racial injustice in America since 1770, when Crispus Attucks, a black colonial patriot, was the first to die in the Boston Massacre. Less than a decade later the tenets of the Declaration of Independence—specifically that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights—erroneously led colonials of African descent to believe such noble ideals would be applicable to them in a new political order apart from British rule. Attucks's martyrdom was a clear example of their support of the ideals so nobly articulated by Thomas Jefferson. The prevailing notion was that their participation in the revolution would solidify for them those "inalienable rights" and earn them equal status as American citizens.

Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914-1920

Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914-1920

HIV/AIDS Coverage in Black Newspapers, 1991-1996: Implications for Health Communication and Health Education

HIV/AIDS coverage in five African American newspapers ( Amsterdam [New York] News , Oakland [California] Post , Washington [District of Columbia] Afro American , Atlanta Inquirer , and Chicago Citizen ) was analyzed from 1991 to 1996. During this period, HIV / AIDS became the leading cause of death of young adult African Americans. This study found that coverage of the disease was most prominent in the New York, Oakland, and Washington, D.C., African American newspapers. Although most of the 201 articles analyzed framed the story primarily as a health issue, a large proportion also exhibited a critical attitude toward the government and the "AIDS establishment" about their commitment to saving the lives of minorities. Articles often conveyed the message that fighting HIV/AIDS first requires substantial action regarding the larger contextual issues--economic, political, and social--that cause health inequities. Alternative theories of cause and treatment, such as the possibility that AIDS was created as an extermination plot against African Americans, or that the drug Kemron, endorsed by the Nation of Islam, was the most promising treatment for HIV, generally were discussed as legitimate even though much evidence exists to refute these theories. These frames reflect distrust and rational concerns rooted in the historicaI context of American race relations, including the legacy of the Tuskegee study.

“En Plena Libertad y Democracia”: Negros Brujos and the Social Question, 1904-1919

“En Plena Libertad y Democracia”: Negros Brujos and the Social Question, 1904-1919

Paul Robeson and the Black Press: The 1950 Passport Controversy

In late July of 1950, acting on orders from J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents in New York City set out to find Paul Robeson, ordinarily a highly visible figure. After searching for several days they managed to contact him by phone, and he agreed to meet them at a St. Nicholas Avenue apartment. When they arrived, Robeson was there along with his lawyer, who established a formal tone by asking to see their identification. The agents then told Robeson what he already knew--that the State Department had canceled his passport and they had come to pick it up. The actor replied that he did not have it with him, but offered to meet them the following morning to turn it over--something he had no intention of doing. (1) If you set out to explore the early years of the Cold War through a drama of individual experience--the kind of thing Michael Frayn did for the development of atomic weapons in his play, Copenhagen--you might choose the encounter described above as the opening scene. This was the point at which agents of the world's most powerful nation acted to keep the world's most famous man from traveling overseas to speak on equality for people of color, the rights of workers, world peace, the merits of Soviet Russia, and the ills of colonialism. (2) Eight years and numerous lawsuits later the U.S. Government issued Robeson a new passport, but the ordeal took its toll on him professionally, politically, and personally. The scene in the St. Nicholas Avenue apartment meets the classical requirement that a drama begin in medias res. Consider the situation beyond Harlem in 1950. Abroad, China had been lost to the communists; Russia had successfully tested its first atomic bomb; most pointedly, U.S. troops were newly engaged in a conflict, attempting to save South Korea from domination by communist North Korea. At home, Senator Joseph McCarthy was at the top of his form. Hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee mesmerized the public. And unknown to most citizens, the Office of Policy Coordination, an unpublicized arm of the National Security Council, had embarked on a program of psychological warfare, with activities ranging from covert operations abroad to control of information sources at home. (3) The Cold War had found its trajectory. What witchcraft had been to seventeenth-century Salem, communism was to the post-World War II U.S.--a source of fear and a weapon to enforce conformity. The cancellation of Paul Robeson's passport made headlines. Letters supporting him poured in from Sweden, Norway, England, Wales, Scotland, Australia, Czechoslovakia, and Colombia. The communist press objected loudly. (4) But the newspapers of the US., that had praised Robeson's successes and applauded his efforts on behalf of civil rights and organized labor, against lynching, fascism, and colonialism, handled the continuing story on the whole with silence and ambiguity--a response that raises questions. This article examines the Robeson passport case, and particularly the press coverage, as a manifestation of the Cold War and the accompanying mentality that gripped the nation at that time. To begin with, I will outline the series of actions by Robeson that drew attention to him as a possible threat to national security. Then I will examine in some detail the coverage by newspapers immediately after the cancellation. My premise is that newspapers both shape and reflect the ideas of their readers, and that this was particularly evident in the African American press during and just after World War II, when journalism enjoyed what historian Brenda Gayle Plummer calls its 'golden age.' She writes that black newspapers in that era [the late 1940s and 1950s] still had a limited advertising base and a somewhat captive market. Their relative independence from sanctions and reprisals from whites proved to be the most important factor in allowing them to unequivocally condemn the political victimiza tion of dissidents and urge immediate action on the racial front. …

Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949

Introduction - returning the gaze the souls of black folk in the age of mechanical reproduction - black newspaper criticism and the early cinema, 1909-1916 the Birth of a Nation and interventionist criticism - resisting race as spectacle cinephilia in the black renaissance - new negro film criticism, 1916-1930 black modernist dialectics and the New Deal - accommodationist and radical film criticism, 1930-1940 the recalcitrant gaze critiquing Hollywood in the 1940s.

Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health

Understanding the connections between culture, race, politics, and disease This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an invisible malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, where one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics was founded in the 1950s, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's discovery by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.

Black radicalism and political repression in Baltimore: the case of the Black Panther Party

Much has been written about the Black Panther Party. However, little is known about the organization outside of Oakland, New York and Chicago. This article focuses on the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. Using resources such as interviews with former Panthers, government documents, and a content analysis of four newspapers including the Black Panther newspaper, this essay discusses the history, inner-workings and systematically analyses the repression that ultimately rendered the Baltimore Black Panther chapter ineffective.

Black and White in Ink: Discourses of Resistance in South African Cartooning

ABSTRACT This author contends that cartooning in its various forms in South Africa played an important role in crystallising issues of allegiance and identity, introducing revolutionary concepts into public discourse, undermining the ideological hegemony of the apartheid state and legitimating the political struggle against apartheid. However, in spite of the fact that numerous black newspapers have subsisted to this day, there remains a dearth of black cartoonists in South Africa. The vexing question of why so few black cartoonists have emerged demands an answer. The villains of the piece appear to be the editors of the socalled 'liberal' newspapers who did nothing (and continue to do very little) to identify indigenous cartooning talent or promote the development of black South African cartooning, choosing rather to share the services of a few white cartoonists and to buy syndicated comic strips. Mason analyses this situation and offers a remedy for solving the problem.

Diamonds in Iowa: Blacks, Buxton, and Baseball

Between the years 1900 and 1926 in the unlikely state of Iowa, there was a coal mining town, Buxton, where a type of racial equality existed. Blacks and whites worked, played and studied side by side. During a time and in a region where racial diversity was a rarity and integration an uncommon practice, Buxton was unusual. Buxton was a relatively prosperous coal mining community. There was a quantum difference between the life--style and opportunities for Buxton Negroes and blacks who lived in other Iowa towns, in neighboring states, and the South. Because the Buxton Negroes had adequate earnings with some disposable income they participated in social and civic activities. Many of those activities, particularly sports and entertainment, were provided through the Buxton YMCA. Sports and other leisure activities were sometimes segregated but more often bridged cultural and racial differences. So it was that while the attainment of equality and provision of opportunity was often an illusive dream for people of c olor in the United States in the early 1900s, it was more nearly a reality for Negroes who lived in Buxton the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Consolidated Coal Company [CCC] and the town of Buxton were located in Monroe County, Residents in that county had been part of the underground transportation system wherein former slaves were transported north to start a new life in the 1860s. By 1892 the Iowa legislature had passed a law stating that all persons could vote and were entitled to the use of public amenities. That legislation brought a degree of equity to Negroes living in Although blacks in Iowa were few in number and were quite dispersed there was a network for communication. The oldest and major black newspaper in the state, The Bystander, published in Des Moines, had a wide circulation in 76 Iowa counties, 26 states, and two foreign countries. The Bystander carried news from all communities where blacks resided. It reported that Buxton has styled itself the Negro Athens of the Northwest. (1) Former residents agreed with a Buxton resident who wrote in 1940 after having moved to another Iowa community fifteen years earlier, that Buxton was the black man's utopia in Iowa. (2) The coal industry--euphemistically called black diamonds--provided full-time employment and resulted in the settlement of a black population never before or afterwards paralleled percentage-wise in Iowa history. While previous Buxton studies have been principally archeological and descriptive within the historical framework, none has examined the role of sport and recreation in that community. it is the intent of this study to describe the community, recreational opportunities, CCC's involvement, and to analyze the rationale for such extensive provision of sports and recreation. Buxton came into existence when the CCC located its mining camp on 30,000 acres of rich coal land in southern In 1900 Iowa was ranked fifteenth among the states in coal production and the CCC was the largest and most influential mining company in Coal production in Iowa, closely tied to the railroad industry, had been expanding since 1870 as railroad mileage increased. CCC, organized in 1873, was one of several companies that capitalized on this rapid growth and established coal mines in the most productive areas. As early as 1875, J. E. Buxton, the general superintendent of CCC, had recruited 3,000 men from Southern states to work in the several mines operated by the company in Mahaska County. While initially hired as strike breakers, the blacks among the recruits proved to be good miners. Hobe Armstrong, a Negro who had been raised by a white family, was the principal recruiter for CCC. He informed Negroes in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Missouri that work with the CCC was an opportunity for steady employment, above average wages, good housing and a minimum, if not a complete absence, of racial discrimination. …

Black newspapers and America's war for democracy, 1914-1920

How the black press enlisted public support for racial justice during World War I During World War I, the publishers of America's crusading black newspapers faced a difficult dilemma. Would it be better to advance the interests of African Americans by affirming their patriotism and offering support of President Wilson's war for democracy in Europe, or should they demand that the government take concrete steps to stop the lynching, segregation, and disfranchisement of blacks at home as a condition of their participation in the war? This study of their efforts to resolve that dilemma offers important insights into the nature of black protest, race relations, and the role of the press in a republican system. William Jordan shows that before, during, and after the war, the black press engaged in a delicate and dangerous dance with the federal government and white America - at times making demands or holding firm, sometimes pledging loyalty, occasionally giving in. But although others have argued that the black press compromised too much, Jordan demonstrates that, given the circumstances, its strategic combination of protest and accommodation was remarkably effective. While resisting persistent threats of censorship, the black press consistently worked at educating America about the need for racial justice.

Du Bois and Diasporic Identity: The Veil and the Unveiling Project

Positioning Du Bois's arguments in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) within social theory enhances our understanding of the phenomenological dimensions of racial oppression and of how oppressed groups build on members' differences, as well as on what they share, to construct a cosmopolitan and richly textured community. Du Bois wrote Souls just at the beginning of the Great Migration but indicated that geographical dispersion would deepen racial solidarity, enhance the meaningfulness of community, and emancipate individual group members through participation in mainstream society while maintaining their black identity. Du Bois's writings have powerful implications for understanding how to promote racial justice, and contemporary readers might consider that they have implications for social justice more generally. An analysis of black newspapers that were published during the period of 1900 to 1935 illustrates how Du Bois's conceptions were woven into discourse and everyday practices.

Black Newspaper Publisher Resigns in Protest against Profit Hardliners

Black Newspaper Publisher Resigns in Protest against Profit Hardliners

A Chance to Build for Our Selves

Black Press Boosterism in Oklahoma, 1891-1915 I 1891, the editor of the Langston City Herald, an Oklahoma-based black newspaper which circulated in the South, asked: How long, oh! how long will the thrifty people of our race put up with the treatment they receive in many, and in fact, most parts of the south. The article added: Why not come to Oklahoma where are [sic] peace, happiness and prosperity, coupled with that best of all blessings, absolute political liberty.You have ten chances of success here where you have one in the south.1 Editor William L. Eagleson was one of several black newspaper editors in Oklahoma who used their journals to promote migration to Oklahoma. Eagleson's call struck a chord with many African Americans, almost 100,000 of whom migrated to Oklahoma from 1889 to 1910.2 African American migration to the Plains was part of a broader, regular pattern of migration from the South toward the North and West following the Civil War. occurred within the South and across state lines as people searched for work and land and sought to escape from violence and restrictive laws.3 The westward movement attracted African Americans who saw the West as a promised land-largely unpopulated, free from the well-established racial norms and policies of the East, and thus, they believed, a land where they could live in peace and receive all the inherent rights and promises of a democratic society. Thousands of African Americans made the decision to move west on their own. Others were encouraged by ministers, town site promoters, and the black press. Many of the leading African American editorial voices, including the Washington, D.C. New National Era, the Indianapolis Freeman, the New York Freeman, and the Baltimore American Citizen, encouraged southern blacks to move to the Plains, first to Kansas in the 1870s and then to Oklahoma and the Dakotas a decade later.5 These publications' editors promoted migration as the only means by which African Americans could potentially gain equality, political franchise, and self-determination.6 Editors noted that only when large numbers of blacks left the South, thus draining the labor pool, would white attitudes and behaviors change.7 Although it is impossible to ascertain the full impact these newspapers had in encouraging western migration, historians note that the black press played a significant role in encouraging the Great Black March Westward8 The black press's ability to encourage migration can be attributed to the fact that the press and the church are the only two institutions blacks have historically controlled thus providing crucial pulpits, of sorts, for African American views.9 The black press that emerged in Oklahoma, particularly in the area's all-black towns, also encouraged the migration by boosting their town sites and the region as well as telling settlers what awaited them. Copies of these newspapers were distributed throughout the South by land salesmen.10 Readers who received the publications from these Oklahoma towns discovered communities run by African Americans who welcomed most blacks.11 his study examines the promotional rhetoric used by the editors of four newspapers to help settle, then expand, their communities.12 The research attempts to help fill voids in both black press history and black migration history, first by examining some largely understudied publications to determine how journalism and promotion intersected to encourage largescale social migration. Much of the scholarship on the postCivil War black press's role in encouraging migration has focused largely on one paper, the Chicago Defender, and the Great Migration that occurred when thousands of African Americans left the South largely for northern cities around the time of World War I.13 Less attention has been paid to the parallel role the western black press played in encouraging the earlier western migration. …

The Media and the Black Response

African American men have played a role in all aspects of the media in the United States, but their participation has not always been welcomed or come easily. The dominant media have either excluded African Americans or portrayed them in such a bad light that some black people may have preferred exclusion. But over the years African Americans have used adversity to motivate them to create opportunities for themselves. Racist editorial attacks on black people motivated Samuel Cornish and John Russworm to found the country's first black newspaper. Years later, Percy Sutton purchased his first station, WLIB radio (New York), as a means of marshaling political power for the city's black and Hispanic communities. As the twentieth century comes to a close, African American men work in all areas of the media in positions ranging from technicians to owners. The level of their authority and their images vary, but they have a definite presence.

"A Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension": Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois

African-Americans have reacted to Jews not only as neighbors in the American communal polity but as a fellow diaspora people. This has been true at least since the late nineteenth century, when Caribbean-born Edward Wilmot Blyden embraced Herzl's Zionism as a template for Africa's redemption, and black newspapers in the United States expressed measured sympathy for Jewish victims of Russian pogroms. 1 The focus here is on the career of W. E. B. Du Bois, the preeminent African-American intellectual of the first half of the twentieth century, as a prism [End Page 53] through which to view the global impact on African-American attitudes toward Jews during the period marked by the rise of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. 2 Born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1868 of a family lineage he described as "a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, but, thank God! No 'Anglo-Saxon,'" William Edward Burghardt Du Bois became not only African America's leading thinker but an American master whose talents as a scholar, journalist, novelist, poet, activist and visionary were mostly ignored by the white Americans of his time. The recipient in 1895 of the first doctorate awarded to an African-American by Harvard for his history The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896), he followed with The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the first serious study of the urban sociology of race relations, and The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the prophetic literary and political manifesto announcing that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." Du Bois was the moving force behind the creation of the interracial alliance which in 1909 formed the militantly integrationist National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) [End Page 54] whose journal, The Crisis, edited by him from 1910 to 1934, successfully challenged Booker T. Washington's philosophy of racial accommodationism. 3 Though Joel E. Spingarn, Arthur Spingarn, Henry Moskowitz, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, Lillian Wald, and other Jews were prominent in the formation of the NAACP, Du Bois began his career tinged with fin de siècle anti-Semitism. Studying at the University of Berlin in the 1890s, he returned to the United States imbued not only with the latest in German scholarly methods but with his own version of the volkisch nationalism associated with historian Heinrich von Treitschke. Described by Du Bois as "the fire-eating pan-German" and "by far the most interesting" of his professors, Treitschke modernized Luther's lament that "the Jews are our misfortune." 4 Du Bois rejected Treitschke's disparagement of Africans as a race without a history and mulattoes as an inferior breed but absorbed to some degree Treitschke's view of Jews as degenerate cosmopolitans incapable of assimilating into the organic nation state. 5 Though Du Bois recollected that he "followed the Dreyfus case" and was aware of "Jewish pogroms and segregation in Russia," his interest did not then translate into fellow feeling. When visiting Poland during a summer recess, he was light complexioned enough to have a question whispered in his ear by the driver of a rickety cab in a town north of Slovenia. The driver asked whether Du Bois wanted to rent a room in the part of town "unter die Juden?" He "stared and then said yes. I stayed at a little Jewish inn." Yet despite being mistaken for one, Du Bois found Jews to be "a half-veiled mystery" lacking a "strong middle class" and, as he complained about the Jewish passengers on the ship that carried him back to America, typified by "the low mean cheating Pobel [rabble]." 6 [End Page 55] The same sentiments pervaded the unsettling passages in The Souls of Black Folk disparaging as "heir[s] to the slave baron&quot...

Popular fronts: Chicago and African-American cultural politics, 1935-46

In a stunning revision of radical politics during the Front period, Bill Mullen redefines the cultural renaissance of the 1930s and early 1940s as the fruit of an extraordinary rapprochement between African-American and white members of the U.S. Left struggling to create a new 'American Negro' culture. A dynamic reappraisal of a critical moment in American cultural history, Popular Fronts includes a major reassessment of the politics of Richard Wright's critical reputation, a provocative reading of class struggle in Gwendolyn Brooks' Street in Bronzeville, and in-depth examinations of the institutions that comprised Chicago's black popular front: the Chicago Defender, the period's leading black newspaper; Negro Story, the first magazine devoted to publishing short stories by and about black Americans; and the WPA-sponsored South Side Community Art Center.

Ted Poston: pioneer American journalist

Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist is the life story of the first African American reporter to spend his career at a mainstream daily. Ted Poston (1906-1974) found his calling in Journalism, first as a columnist for the black weekly Pittsburgh Courier and later as city editor of Harlem's premier black newspaper, the Amsterdam News. In 1932 he traveled to Russia with Langston Hughes to make a film on American racism, and in 1935 he helped Heywood Broun create the American Newspaper Guild and was fired for unionizing the Amsterdam. The same year, wielding only words and a typewriter, he finally broke the color barrier in journalism by integrating the New York Post. During World War II Poston became a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's Black Cabinet when he headed the Negro News Desk of the Office of War Information in Washington. After the war, he returned to the Post, and in its heyday under editor James Wechsler and publisher Dorothy Schiff, he provided an insider's viewpoint on segregation and the civil rights movement. His incisive, usually upbeat, sometimes acerbic reports on everyday racism were eye-openers for the paper's mostly white readership, but often he leavened the bitterness of his stories with humor.

Poetry of the Black Panther Party

The Black Panther Party existed as Black America's contemporary revolutionary organization for over a decade. Founded in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby G. Seale, the Black Panther Party directly formed to challenge police brutality against American Blacks. As the antithesis of nonviolence, the original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense advocated weaponry use against police aggression. To bring attention to the organization and to expose injustices against Black people, they began publishing The Black Panther newspaper on April 25, 1967. Along with articles on the American and international political arenas, the newspaper included poetry by Panther members and sympathizers. In this article, I plan to analyze the poetry of the Panther, primarily from the early years. I will determine its relationship to the Black Arts and Black Aesthetics manifestoes and its relationship to the political philosophy of the party itself.

The African American press: a history of news coverage during national crises, with special reference to four black newspapers, 1827-1965

This work examines both predominately black newspapers in general and four in particular - the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City), and the Jackson (Mississippi) Advocate - and their coverage of national events. The beginnings of the black press are detailed, focusing on how they reported the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Their coverage of the migration of blacks to the industrial north in the early twentieth century and World War I are next examined, followed by the black press response to World War II and the civil rights movement. The survival techniques used by the editors, how some editors reacted when faced with threats of physical harm, and how the individual editorial policies affected the different newspapers are fully explored.