Introduction Lucy Caplan (bio) and Kristen M. Turner (bio) In Panel 34 of Jacob Lawrence’s iconic Migration Series (1940–41), a man stands with his back to the viewer and his head cast down, immersed completely in what is before him. He is reading the newspaper. A woman sits near him, motionless and attentive: is he reading aloud to her? Is she waiting for her own chance to rifle through the pages? With characteristic understatement, Lawrence captions the panel simply: “The Negro press was also influential in urging the people to leave the South.” This influence is a theme he returns to elsewhere in the series: Panel 20, for example, features groups of readers, each clustered together around a single copy of a newspaper, accompanied by the heading, “In many of the communities the Negro press was read continually because of its attitude and its encouragement of the movement.” In Lawrence’s visual imaginary, the newspaper is made into a material sign of its historical moment, a locus of communal activity, and a forum for creativity. In their emphasis on the role of the Black press in catalyzing the Great Migration, Lawrence’s images convey the centrality of the press to African American life during the first half of the twentieth century. His caption emphasizes that the press was itself a historical actor: not simply a record of what was happening in Black America, but also an institution that itself shaped historical change. Further, as works of art, Lawrence’s images also speak to—and embody—the multifaceted nexus and mutually constitutive relationship between the press and the world of the arts during this era. As such, they invite a number of questions that are fundamental to this special issue. How did artists and the Black press interact with one another during the age of Jim Crow? How did the press function [End Page 5] as an agent of social and cultural change? How did artistic content in the Black press relate to the Black public sphere more broadly? The authors whose work is featured in this issue of American Studies answer these questions alongside other, even more expansive ones: in what ways did arts coverage in the Black press figure into transnational networks of intellectual exchange? How did this content interact with other types of African American and American print culture? How did it function as a site of racial formation, especially in conjunction with questions of class, gender, and sexuality? Significantly, the page that Lawrence’s central figure ponders in Panel 34 appears blank; Lawrence lets the viewer imagine what words, images, and ideas it might include. Perhaps it was a straightforward call to southerners to migrate north. Or perhaps it was something else entirely—a review of a concert, an illustration of an eminent person, or a work of speculative fiction. To peruse the pages of a Black magazine or newspaper was—and is—to encounter an astonishing variety of content related to the arts. Usually considered to have originated with the 1827 founding of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned and -published newspaper, the Black press became a key site for political discourse in the post-emancipation era, from the landmark anti-lynching exposés of Ida Wells-Barnett to the mobilization of Black communities in opposition to racial segregation.1 Many of the earliest Black newspapers also featured fiction and poetry within their pages and facilitated vigorous debates about Black cultural production.2 As the press expanded, so did its coverage of and engagement with the arts. By the early twentieth century, specialty publications like the Negro Music Journal (est. 1902) and generalist literary magazines like the Colored American Magazine (est. 1900) offered extensive coverage of arts-related topics. For their part, newspapers featured cartoons, illustrations, fiction, poetry, arts criticism, and advertisements for upcoming cultural events. When the African American weekly newspaper emerged as a transformative cultural force around the turn of the twentieth century, Black journalists gained an unprecedented opportunity to reach a broad public. In 1890, there were between fifty and 150 Black newspapers in the country; most were small-scale, reaching fewer than 10,000 subscribers across limited...