White Newspapers Research Articles

“Old-Time Negroes”: Nostalgic Ex-Slave Narratives in New York Newspapers of the Gilded Age

In the field of social memory of slavery, a growing body of scholarship on the Jim Crow North has complicated the notion of white supremacy as a specifically Southern ideology, locating what historians view as a “missing link” in the history of race in America. This study examines a corollary gap in American journalism history—the role that white Northern newspapers played a generation after Emancipation in softening white memory of slavery and hardening discourse toward African Americans. This article applies narrative analysis to sample five large-circulation white New York City newspapers from 1889 to 1910, along with a contemporary Black city newspaper. The study concludes that white newspapers, by perpetuating racist tropes upstreamed from literature, cultivated Jim Crow ideology beyond the former Confederacy. The findings shed light on the timeline of Black Americans’ struggle for mass media representation and demonstrate journalism’s intertextual role in shaping social memory.

Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital By Candace O’Connor

Reviewed by: Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital By Candace O’Connor Linda T. Wynn Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital. By Candace O’Connor. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 314. $40.00, ISBN 978-0-8262-2247-3.) Candace O’Connor’s Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream: The History of Homer G. Phillips Hospital is one of several books written about African American hospitals that came into existence because of de facto or de jure practices that decreed the separation of African Americans and whites in spaces that delivered health care and social services. When St. Louis’s Homer G. Phillips Hospital opened in 1937, it joined the ranks of other hospitals for African Americans founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Chicago’s Provident Hospital and Training School, established in 1891; Philadelphia’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Training School, established in 1895; Baltimore’s Provident Hospital and Free Dispensary, established in 1894; and Nashville’s Millie E. Hale Hospital, established in 1916. The number of these institutions peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, during a period when ambitious stratagems were developed for creating segregated medical training and practice facilities. These hospitals delivered a higher standard of medical care to African American patients and provided education and training for African American physicians and nurses. Like many African American medical institutions, Homer G. Phillips held a special place within its community’s collective memory. O’Connor’s book was prompted by an association of retired nurses who trained at Homer G. Phillips Hospital over the course of its four-decade existence. Through interviews [End Page 380] excavating the memories of those who studied and worked at “Homer G.,” O’Connor brings the narrative of a successful hospital and its attendant auxiliaries to life (p. xiii). However, Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream is more than a history of Homer G. It also provides significant perspectives on numerous themes including the Great Migration, the causes of systemic racism, the aftereffects of racial desegregation, and the overall spectrum of race relations in America from the late 1930s to the late 1970s. O’Connor has drawn on her extensive previous research into St. Louis’s medical institutions to explore the history of Homer G. Phillips Hospital. To bring its story to the printed page, she combed through “more than 40 years of stories from Black and white newspapers,” researched “stacks of scholarly books and articles,” and held “dozens of interviews” with former staff members and others associated directly or indirectly with the institution (p. xiii). To cover Homer G.’s impact on the community and beyond, O’Connor has divided the tome into chapters that chronicle the hospital’s forty-two-year history, tracing its events and vicissitudes through decades of operation. Yet Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream is also thematic and broaches wide-ranging topics such as the “Ville,” the thriving African American community that was home to “more than a third of the city’s Black leadership” (p. 5). Like many African American communities, the population of the Ville included “school-teachers and janitors; doctors and meat packers; lawyers and railroad men; hospital staff and domestics” (p. 5). Other major themes include hospital units and nursing life. Consisting of thirteen chapters, Climbing the Ladder, Chasing the Dream begins with “The Mysterious Life and Death of Homer G. Phillips, 1878–1931” and ends with an account of the hospital’s closure on August 17, 1979. The chapter on the hospital’s namesake is one of the book’s more intriguing contributions. Homer G. Phillips was an influential Black attorney with a law degree from Howard University. During the 1920s, he passionately supported the establishment of a hospital for St. Louis’s African American community. But Phillips was murdered in 1931, six years before his dream came to fruition. O’Connor’s historical chronicle develops into a true-crime account as the author investigates Phillips’s mystifying murder in a tome already brimming with captivating local history and personal stories. For more than forty years, one of the country...

"For Women Only!": A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City

"For Women Only!"A Radical Message of the Black Middle Class in Kansas City Elyssa Ford (bio) The Kansas City [Missouri] Call, published from 1919 to the present, has been one of the largest and most successful Black newspapers in the country. This article examines the depiction of Black women in the Call in the 1950s, a decade of significant change in Kansas City. As a midwestern crossroads, Kansas City had seen its Black population grow substantially in the previous decade as rural African Americans arrived seeking new urban opportunities. Some of these new Kansas City residents came from the Missouri countryside or from surrounding midwestern states. Others were part of the Great Migration out of the South and either planned to make Kansas City their permanent home or saw it as simply a temporary stop before moving northward to Chicago or Detroit. Regardless of their origins, the increased Black population of 1950s Kansas City read the Call at a key time in the publication's history. The civil rights movement was ramping up, and the newspaper was changing editors for the first time. Under these circumstances, the paper's depiction of Black women relied significantly on the politics of respectability.1 While the Call sometimes presented women as activists, it more frequently paralleled White newspapers in its presentation of women in more traditional roles. Stories discussed women as college students, often as beauty contest winners; featured female musicians and actresses in the entertainment section; and included women in the society and wedding pages. While these articles did not differ significantly from those in White newspapers, to present Black women as models of success and beauty was inherently radical. The Call also included the weekly feature "For Women Only!," which focused on women as wives and mothers and included recipes and cleaning tips. This corresponded with the prescribed 1950s model of womanhood and mirrored the presentation [End Page 77] of ideal womanhood that also appeared in White newspapers. Yet to present Black women and Black families as middle class challenged popular conceptions of Blackness in the era. By depicting the typical Black woman as the counterpart to a White middle-class woman, the Kansas City Call aligned with an activist agenda of civil rights and social change based on racial uplift and made a gender- and socioeconomic-based argument that was revolutionary. In the 1950s, reformers' depictions of Black women as middle class, respectable wives, mothers, and daughters was nothing new. Booker T. Washington had promoted the idea of racial uplift in the late nineteenth century. For him, a focus by African Americans on thrift, industry, hard work, and education would raise up the race and eventually lead to an expansion of their civil rights.2 Though men were often the focus of these efforts, Black women soon became leaders of the racial uplift movement, and they formed their own organizations to support this race work. Black women founded the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, and the organization focused primarily on the uplift of the Black race. After seeing Black men fail to achieve racial equality and because the voices of Black men were more limited by Jim Crow-era violence, Black women believed that it was up to them to improve the stature of all African Americans. As historian Deborah Gray White has explained, "To build the black home was to build the black nation. At the center of it all was the woman." The association believed that Black women were responsible for uplifting the race through "intellectual development and cultural refinement." By the 1940s, club women began to adjust their focus from using the moral purity of Black women to uplift the race to helping uplift the race to improve their rights as women.3 Despite this evolution, the Missouri branch of the NACW still followed the earlier tenets of the national motto, "Lifting as We Climb," by continuing to emphasize intellectual development. In 1954 the Missouri group promoted three main goals: the integration of Missouri public schools, strengthening and improving family life, and building a student aid and scholarship fund.4 Founded in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin, the Kansas City Call had likewise...

“The Veneer of Civilization Washed Off”: Anti-Black Posse-Lynchings in the Twentieth Century Rural Midwest

This study seeks to identify anti-Black posse-lynchings in the Midwest between 1910 and 1930, and to examine the ways in which they were framed by the media for their readers. It posits that these lynchings emerged as the foremost type of anti-Black lynching by the second decade of the twentieth century, casting doubt thereby on the prevailing scholarly assumption that the number of lynchings declined precipitously in these years. Because most of these incidents received little attention at the time and few received significant attention outside of the locality in which they occurred, this essay uses as its primary documentation the local and regional white newspapers that did record them, however imperfectly, and the data drawn from federal decennial censuses. With its singular focus on white-on-Black incidents, this study targets posse-lynchings as just one of several types of racist violence used to enforce white supremacy over Blacks, and, as such, it does not consider any of the white-on-white posse-lynchings that may have occurred in these years, although these, if present, might merit their own study.

A Commemorative Bind: How the Birmingham News Redressed Past Journalistic Failure through Contemporary Civil Rights Memory

ABSTRACT Ideological clashes over race in American memory reveal an existential divide in journalism, between an ethos of activism and the normative rituals of objectivity. This study examines a crisis of memory that occurred upon a newspaper’s centennial in the 1980s alongside mainstream commemorations of the US civil rights movement amid an age of apology and backlash. The Birmingham News, a White newspaper that in the 1960s used proximity to a national story to conceal rather than bear witness, a generation later sought to reposition itself in a radically changed environment. This study, building on the scholarship of journalism as a site of collective memory, analyzes how a news organization arbitrated a reckoning with the past and its own professional failure. We analyze the strategies by which the News sought forgiveness and redress, and thereby sought to reclaim authority. The case illustrates how notions of journalistic legitimacy collide with the project of truth and reconciliation, and how journalists find a way forward by refashioning collective memory to navigate the present.

Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction

“Good Business in Missouri”: Minstrelsy, Violence, and the Case of Louis Wright

This article contextualizes the professional life and traumatizing lynching death of African American blackface minstrel Louis Wright in New Madrid, Missouri, in 1902. It unearths the physical dangers of “entertaining while Black” in early twentieth-century America. Wright’s life serves as a window into the racialized, gendered world of the American minstrel stage, which is gleaned from advertising information, entertainer biographies, and the early twentieth-century theatrical press. The essay highlights the mid-nineteenth-century origins of African American blackface minstrelsy, chronicles obstacles unique to Black traveling performers, and investigates contradictory reporting in African American and White newspaper media accounts of white supremacist violence. Ultimately, the Wright case and the persistence of racial violence were among the motivating factors in the pursuit of autonomous Black traveling theater in American entertainment during the nadir.

The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt

Reviewed by: The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875 by Gordon H. Shufelt Lauren N. Henley The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875. By Gordon H. Shufelt. True Crime History. ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 171. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-412-4.) In The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown: How a White Police Officer Was Convicted of Killing a Black Citizen, Baltimore, 1875, Gordon H. Shufelt examines the specific circumstances that led to Patrick McDonald, an Irish immigrant, being convicted of manslaughter in the death of Black Marylander Daniel Brown in post–Civil War Baltimore. In so doing, Shufelt offers a methodological framework "in which to examine the social, political, and cultural characteristics that [End Page 180] define the quality of justice in cases of police violence" (p. 6). This approach necessarily draws on what makes this case unique as opposed to representative, ultimately concluding that myriad factors at this particular place and time allowed Daniel Brown's death to be prosecuted in the manner Shufelt outlines. The Uncommon Case of Daniel Brown is organized around biographical sketches of the victim and perpetrator, with chapters on the role of the coroner's office, the politics of policing, and the trial itself. It ends with commentary on the post-trial proceedings and on the thread between this nineteenth-century case and the modern Black Lives Matter movement. The biographical chapters, "The Black Man in the Doorway" and "The Irish Policeman on the Doorstep," are solid examples of culling together individual people's lives from fragmentary evidence. Relying on census records, newspaper articles, city directories, published primary sources, and secondary literature, these chapters attempt to characterize Daniel Brown and Patrick McDonald. By the end of the first chapter, Brown is portrayed as a self-assured, literate homeowner who was "inclined to be outspoken about his rights" (p. 24). McDonald becomes an Irish immigrant who "was no stranger to street fighting" and "more willing than most men" to use "fists, clubs, and pistols" aggressively (p. 39). While these depictions are no doubt oversimplified, they provide texture and specificity to that fateful midsummer night in 1875. After convincingly arguing for the unique cultural setting of postwar Baltimore, where residential segregation was not as complete as in the Deep South and where Irish immigrants and Black freedpeople changed the city's demographics in a relatively short span of time, Shufelt turns toward another unique feature of nineteenth-century Maryland: discretionary coroner's juries. By reasoning that a lack of precedents and formalization in the state's coroner positions shaped how cases were adjudicated, Shufelt persuasively demonstrates the importance of coroner's juries in expressing a "community's social and political norms" (p. 54). This focus on the power of this particular component of pretrial proceedings—the coroners' inquests—contributes to the growing literature on race and crime in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shufelt successfully demonstrates how pretrial records can provide robust insights into how criminality was adjudicated in the Jim Crow era. At times, Shufelt's balance between the specifics of the Daniel Brown case with the broader Baltimorean context seems disproportionate. Chapters 4 and 5 are about perceptions of the police in terms of racial and political biases, respectively. The former chapter's reliance on white newspapers, without explicitly mentioning the Black press, reads like an incomplete account of how Black citizens responded to the city's police. Chapter 5's deep dive into the history of policing and corrupt politics throughout the mid-nineteenth century is a fascinating political history of Baltimore but does not make a strong case for such in-depth background information related to the Daniel Brown case specifically. Given contemporary protests of the killings of Black men and women at the hands of the police, Shufelt's study provides a useful historical lens to understand how the convergence of nuanced factors makes each case unique. [End Page 181] Lauren N. Henley University of Richmond Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Hollywood imagines revolutionary Haiti: the forgotten film Lydia Bailey (1952)

This article explores the history of Lydia Bailey, the only US studio-made film to depict the Haitian Revolutionary period. It asks why, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such an unlikely project might have seemed commercially promising enough to justify a significant production budget. The essay draws on private studio memorandums as well as public press discussions to shed light on the high stakes in debates over racial representation and colonialism/decolonization in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and to illuminate everyday assumptions of white supremacy as these shaped the making of the film and its promotion. Production files and a range of industry, daily and weekly mainstream white press and Black newspapers document the racial divide shaping the film’s production and reception. The story of the making and forgetting of Lydia Bailey reveals the process by which transnational Black history and Black struggle became more public and legible in the wake of WWII anti-fascism and internationalism, and then was driven back off stage by the political mobilization of Cold War anti-Communism.

Covering the Dawsons: Racial Variation in Newspaper Framing of Urban Crime

This article uses newspaper coverage of a case from Baltimore, Maryland, to explore racial variation in the rhetorical framing of urban crime. In October 2002, seven members of the Dawson family were murdered in a house fire. The murders became an expression of Baltimore’s character and the lives of its residents. After analyzing 206 newspaper articles about the case, we find stark differences in the way the case, its causes, and its consequences are presented to readers. Newspapers with primarily white audiences—both “mainstream” and “alternative” papers—present the case as a horrific, singular instance, placing responsibility on the perpetrator. In contrast, articles in African American newspapers offer a complex web of explanation, calling attention to the structural inequalities and disparate access to state resources. Whereas white newspaper portray the Dawson family as martyrs in the drug war, black newspapers position the family as part of a wider of community of African Americans who are victims of slack policing, racial discrimination, and negligent social policy. We argue that these rhetorical differences are more than cosmetic. Rather, they provide a framework for better understanding the relationship between the press and policy makers. Differences in coverage of the case also contribute to our understanding of why blacks and whites have fundamentally different understandings of race in the United States.

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart

Reviewed by: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart Jovonna Jones The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. By Jeffrey C. Stewart. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 944 pp. Illustrations, notes, select bibliography, index. $39.95.) "I am not a race problem," the first African American Rhodes scholar wrote to his mother back home in Philadelphia (105). The budding philosopher Alain Locke had just won the prestigious award during his final year at Harvard College in 1907. But he felt burdened by the task to represent the race. He resented black organizations across the East Coast who claimed his win as their own and the northern white newspapers who lauded him as an example of proper racial progress. "I am Alain LeRoy Locke," he declared in his letter, "and if these people don't stop I'll tell them something that will make them" (105). [End Page 226] Jeffrey C. Stewart has carefully mined Alain Locke's personal papers at Howard University to illustrate a complex portrait of the intellectual leader. The biography is organized in three major parts: "The Education of Alain Locke," "Enter the New Negro," and "Metamorphosis," each constructed through short episodic chapters. All episodes provide a detailed look into how Locke's philosophy of black aesthetics developed, from the domestic adornments of black Victorianism performed by his mother at the turn of the century, to the problem of the "primitive" and the "folk" in Western modernism, to the fight for more institutions and criticism to support black artists into the postwar period. One of the more refreshing contributions of this biography is Stewart's return to Locke's famed New Negro philosophy in the context of a more complicated psychic milieu. The New Negro philosophy—a charge to eclipse stereotypes and struggle with complexity and pleasure—was Locke's way of advocating for aesthetics in the world of black intellectualism and white patronage. The New Negro provided a framework for a spiritual and political engagement with black arts and letters so that a new generation of artists—like Locke's mentees and students Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston—could be received and supported in their full complexity with blackness as their inspiration, not as a problem to be solved. If W. E. B Du Bois wanted art to be used as propaganda for "gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy," Alain Locke, as Stewart writes, "wanted a drama that showed Black folk could already love and enjoy despite the terror of racism" (277, italics my own). Du Bois's approach was ultimately compromised by his condescension toward the black masses and toward artists deemed too risky for the racial cause. Locke's ideology held its own conflicts, too. His approach to art and life appeared exploitative and contradictory, informed by a colonial obsession with African artifacts and a cultural claim to tradition yet driven by a cosmopolitan desire for pure, ahistorical forms. But Locke's true impulse behind the New Negro often defied the political and intellectual discourse of the time, perhaps strategically so. Locke already knew what it felt like to balance respectability and transgression in his own life. As a black gay man long affirmed and cautioned by his doting mother, Locke was keenly aware of the constraints upon his freedom to experience intimacy and inspiration without the threat of being ostracized due to race and sexuality. Locke desired from black aesthetics the grammars and spaces to live the full breadth of his desires, fears, and experiences. This quality made him not only a leader of thought but a mentor who could see and affirm the black artists working the same vein. "I supposed some of us erotic lads," the budding poet Countee Cullen wrote in a letter to his new mentor Locke, "were placed here just to eat our hearts out with longing for unattainable things, especially for that friendship beyond understanding." Locke and Cullen both desired a freedom possible not through [End Page 227] political discourse or even through social acceptance but through a black art of living on new terms—sometimes unspeakable terms—that...

Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imaging the end of whiteness by Nicky Falkof

Reviewed by: Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imaging the end of whiteness by Nicky Falkof Melissa Hackman (bio) Nicky Falkof (2015) Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imaging the end of whiteness. London/NY: Palgrave MacMillan Hysterical white adolescent girls claiming to be possessed by Satan; Afrikaans men who violently killed their entire families with guns and axes. These are some of the white South Africans who populate the pages of Nicky Falkof’s Satanism and Family Murder in Late Apartheid South Africa: imagining the end of whiteness. In this book, Falkof writes about the fissures in whiteness during National Party rule in a culture that believed that questioning authority, challenging the status quo, and going against heteropatriarchal whiteness was heretical. Falkof wants the reader to see the cracks in white hegemony as the apartheid state crumbled and movements like the End Conscription Campaign, the fight for liberation, and international sanctions burst the bubble of whites claiming to be living idyllic lives. Falkof is clear, however, that she did not write the book to make the reader feel sorry for South African whites. Instead, it is about the ways that systems of domination are violent to the oppressor and the oppressed, albeit in radically different ways. Falkof explains to the reader that she chose both these moral panics in order to show how late apartheid led whites to claim that their social world was in crisis and under siege from within. The body politic, she explains, was in shock and reeling. To explore how repression and moral panic operated in the 1980s and 1990s, Falkof dives into an archive of national popular culture. In particular, she uses white newspapers and magazines, with a focus on ‘family magazines’, all which had ‘allegiances to the state’ (33) and were ‘moral entrepreneurs’ who both reported on and contributed [End Page 112] to moral panics. Falkof convincingly explains how this primary source data is key to understanding the ways that white society’s decades of repression, violence, and social control had psychic, cultural, and violent effects. Falkof’s text is divided in two. The first half of the book is on the Satanic scare (she is quick to remind the reader that there was no evidence of real Satanists in South Africa performing the acts they claimed, like murdering and eating babies) and the second half on family murders (gesinsmoorde), mostly carried out by Afrikaans men. Satanic scares were prevalent in both Afrikaans and English communities. A number of moral entrepreneurs, including the Dutch Reformed Church, Pentecostal ministers, so-called ‘cult cops’ (who worked in the South African Police force’s Occult-related crime unit), government officials, and the white media claimed to be actively battling against Satan and his influence. Unlike places like America and Britain, where Satanic scares were propagated by social workers and psychologists, in South Africa, Satanic scares were fought by Christians and ‘Christian government functionaries’ (36). Satanic rumours and accusations were part of a ‘generalized paranoia’ (61) from inside white society. Coloured and black South Africans were on the margins of white Satanic accusations and scares because whites were more concerned with the ways that their social worlds had been infiltrated from within by what they saw as evil. Satan abounded in late apartheid social worlds and Satanic accusations were one way to police those who questioned social, moral, and political authorities. The second half of Falkof’s text delves into the mostly Afrikaans men who murdered their entire families in the same time period as the Satanic scares. These murders had a number of stated causes in white newspapers and magazines, including the ways that so-called ‘traditional’ family values were being left behind, how Afrikaans marriages emotionally isolated men from being able to express their feelings and concerns, the changing economy, the influx of non-censored foreign media, and even the ways that mainstream churches were being flooded by liberation rhetoric and social movements. These all, claimed the media, had a detrimental effect on the power and social prestige of the Afrikaans patriarch (133–4). However, Falkof notes, while the white media may have been quick to critique Afrikaans masculinity...

Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag by Jeffery B. Howell

Reviewed by: Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag by Jeffery B. Howell Erin K. Devlin Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag. By Jeffery B. Howell. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017. Pp. viii, 245. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4968-1079-3.) Hazel Brannon Smith: The Female Crusading Scalawag is a biography of Hazel Brannon Smith, a white newspaper editor in Holmes County, Mississippi, who earned national acclaim as one of the first women to win a Pulitzer Prize as a result of her editorial positions during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jeffery B. Howell chronicles the entirety of Smith's career, tracing the evolution of her views on southern race relations and her consistent commitment to freedom of speech and law and order. Howell contends that Smith's early career laid the groundwork for her fight against the White Citizens' Council in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954). In the 1940s Smith consistently denounced lawlessness in her campaign against bootleg liquor. She viewed the actions of the Citizens' Council to maintain segregation through intimidation, violence, and economic retaliation as another expression of reckless disregard for the rule of law that threatened not only the civil rights of African Americans but also the civil liberties of white southern moderates like herself. Howell suggests that these concerns, rather than a liberal critique of Jim Crow, drove Smith to speak out against the Citizens' Council. During the first two decades of her career, "she ardently supported segregation" (p. 4). Although she decried overt violence and called for the equalization of public services, Smith believed that white and black southerners alike preferred racial separation. In her editorials in the late 1950s, Smith supported the state's legislative efforts to circumvent the implementation of the Brown decision and even applauded the establishment of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. [End Page 216] However, Smith alienated the white establishment when she spoke out against the Citizens' Council's tactics. The Citizens' Council sought to put Smith out of business by calling on advertisers to boycott her papers and by establishing a rival publication. The once popular editor became a social pariah, and she bridled at the Citizens' Council's efforts to quash her editorial voice. Rather than being intimidated, Smith took a more progressive stand in the early 1960s by calling for the repeal of Jim Crow segregation statutes and printing copies of NAACP publications like the Mississippi Free Press. Howell demonstrates how out of step Smith was with white public opinion by comparing her editorials and columns with those run by her competitors at the Lexington (Mississippi) Holmes County Herald, the Jackson Daily News, and the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. However, it would have been useful to analyze Smith's writing alongside the perspectives promoted by the black press. Smith maintained that abolishing formal segregation statutes would not overthrow "local customs and traditions" and opined that de facto segregation would continue to preserve most facets of the so-called southern way of life (p. 135). Howell describes Smith as an ally of the civil rights movement who helped facilitate racial change in Mississippi and was called an integrationist, yet he notes that Smith never described herself as such. Howell maintains that the label was less important than Smith's calls for "equal justice, fair treatment, freedom of expression and association, and racial harmony," and he suggests that she must have understood that "freedoms" could not exist "without some measure of societal integration," despite her own statements to the contrary (pp. 136, 160). Ultimately, Howell's portrait of Hazel Brannon Smith reveals both the editor's important contributions and the limitations of white southern moderation in the twentieth century. Erin K. Devlin University of Mary Washington Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Cultivating Narratives of Race, Faith, and Community: The Dawn of Tomorrow, 1923–1971

In 1923, an African Canadian newspaper entitled The Dawn of Tomorrow began publication in London, Ontario, billing itself as “Devoted to the Interests of the Darker Races.” The Dawn wrote about collective racial uplift, Canada’s black church, and about African Canadian “firsts,” whether in the fields of entertainment or nursing, in the Boy Scouts, or in the integration of segregated workplaces — triumphs that Canada’s white newspapers generally ignored. Challenging the notion that African Canadians did not have a black press comparable to the African American press in the United States, this article examines the editorial content, photographic journalism, and advertisements in The Dawn from its foundation to 1971, when it ceased publication. I argue that through its editorials, The Dawn played an instrumental role in cultivating a sense of community among blacks in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. This article also provides critiques of de facto Jim Crow laws in Canada, while highlighting the specific ways the black press combated pervasive racism with editorials about racial uplift, community advancement, civic engagement, and black entrepreneurship.

Cultivating Narratives of Race, Faith, and Community: The Dawn of Tomorrow, 1923–1971

In 1923, an African Canadian newspaper entitled The Dawn of Tomorrow began publication in London, Ontario, billing itself as “Devoted to the Interests of the Darker Races.” The Dawn wrote about collective racial uplift, Canada’s black church, and about African Canadian “firsts,” whether in the fields of entertainment or nursing, in the Boy Scouts, or in the integration of segregated workplaces — triumphs that Canada’s white newspapers generally ignored. Challenging the notion that African Canadians did not have a black press comparable to the African American press in the United States, this article examines the editorial content, photographic journalism, and advertisements in The Dawn from its foundation to 1971, when it ceased publication. I argue that through its editorials, The Dawn played an instrumental role in cultivating a sense of community among blacks in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes. This article also provides critiques of de facto Jim Crow laws in Canada, while highlighting the specific ways the black press combated pervasive racism with editorials about racial uplift, community advancement, civic engagement, and black entrepreneurship.

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

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

Mixing bodies and minds: race, class and ‘mixed schooling’ controversies in New Orleans and Atlanta, 1874–87

ABSTRACT Educational access was central in the racial inscription of class identities in the late nineteenth century. In Atlanta and New Orleans, white newspapers, politicians and ordinary citizens launched vigorous campaigns against integrated schools, which resulted in limited access to elite public schooling for upwardly mobile Blacks. Jewell's study analyses these cases to explore social reproduction as a link between race and class as social structures. Whites in both cities used the concept of miscegenation, or racial mixing, to define Blacks' access to elite cultural knowledge and social networks as a violation of the colour line. Jewell argues that analyses of racial formation should give attention to discursive links between race and class in struggles over social reproduction because maintaining racial hierarchies in periods of social change requires constructing new cultural narratives that reproduce economic dominance over racial minorities.

The Huntsville Gazette: The African American Perspective

The Huntsville Gazette: The African American Perspective By Mike Steele T he Reconstruction era of the United States, after the Civil War, was one of the most tumultuous and uncertain times in American history. This period could best be described as a perpetual roller coaster ride of hope, fear, triumph, failure, optimism and angst. For the first time in their collective history, African Americans would have no master beyond themselves. Adjusting to a life of emancipation however, was by no means a simple task. It can be argued that moving on from a life of servitude and hopelessness to a life of equality and advancement was akin to washing away a mountain, especially given that when the Reconstruction Era ended, any hope of creating a new and better world for the African American in the South was effectively extinguished. However, in the case of The Huntsville Gazette of Huntsville, Alabama an African America newspaper that was every bit as informative and engaging as any white newspaper of the day can be observed. This acts as a direct contradiction to the belief that African Americans were racially inferior and unable to advance themselves to the point that they could compete with whites. Still, there are still questions that warrant further investigation such as: what messages or attitudes did the paper try to express, if any? What matters did the paper consider important at the time? In addition, other topics of interest were encountered over the course of my research such as: the lack of condemnation for violence committed against African Americans in the city and how the paper was able to cater to a population that had a staggering illiteracy rate. A combination of the efforts of the stories told in this paper, the efforts of prominent names in the field of race and ethnicity and personal theories will attempt to address each of these issues while at the same time providing a unique window into the past. The Huntsville Gazette began its publication in 1881 and operated until 1894, covering a wide range of topics from domestic and international affairs to politics and advertisements. The year 1881 was an interesting one for the United States and the beginnings of several important chapters in American history such as the beginning of what would become Prohibition in Kansas, the creation of the Red Cross by Clara Barton, and the forming of the Oriental Telephone Company by Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. The Reconstruction Era in the post-Civil War South formally ended in 1877, and the white population wasted little time in engineering the near complete disenfranchisement of African Americans. Alabama during this time had experienced social and economic hardships that were similar to several southern states but in time, unfortunately, Alabama would emerge as a shining example of life under the Jim Crow laws, which established the segregation of blacks and whites on the social level. As outlined by Rob Dixon in the Encyclopedia of Alabama, “The period is also characterized by civil and social upheaval; farming hardships and exploitative labor practices led to the emergence of labor unions, and Jim Crow laws allowed racism to flourish under the guise of a policy known as ‘separate but equal’.” 1 Over the course of this research eight consecutive issues of the paper were consulted and the results consisted of stories that covered a wide range of topics that reached beyond domestic affairs in the South, such as the story about how “Belgium promises to become the great industrial teacher of Europe. She has fifty nine technical schools, thirty two industrial schools and a higher commercial school, all receiving funds annually from Rob Dixon, “New South Era” Encyclopedia of Alabama. Accessed November 20, 2013. http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-2128

Black Cyclist Framed Differently at 1910 Salt Lake City Competition

Taylor concluded his bicycle-racing career in 1910 in Salt Lake City, where he competed at the Salt Palace Saucer Track. This study uses framing to explore how this black cyclist was covered in articles, cartoons and advertisements published in the local white newspapers.