Race News

Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century

Fred Carroll

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780252050091
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Once distinct, the commercial and alternative black press began to crossover with one another in the 1920s. The porous press culture that emerged shifted the political and economic motivations shaping African American journalism. It also sparked disputes over radical politics that altered news coverage of some of the most momentous events in African American history. Starting in the 1920s, Fred Carroll traces how mainstream journalists incorporated coverage of the alternative press's supposedly marginal politics of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and black separatism into their publications. He follows the narrative into the 1950s, when an alternative press re-emerged as commercial publishers curbed progressive journalism in the face of Cold War repression. Yet, as Carroll shows, journalists achieved significant editorial independence, and continued to do so as national newspapers modernized into the 1960s. Alternative writers' politics seeped into commercial papers via journalists who wrote for both presses and through professional friendships that ignored political boundaries. Compelling and incisive, Race News reports the dramatic history of how black press culture evolved in the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 1

“Negro Subversion”

Solidifying a Militant Press

Week after week, postal censors and military intelligence officers read black newspapers from around the United States, riffling through pages for seditious statements as American soldiers fought and bled and died in boggy European trenches. They believed the editors and reporters who criticized the nation’s practices of racial oppression during World War I threatened to undermine the morale of African Americans called to support the war effort despite racism’s injustices. In private meetings and personal letters, censors attempted to intimidate editors, warning them of the fines and jail sentences they faced if their editorials and articles were deemed sufficiently unpatriotic. A San Antonio editor was convicted for attempting to cause mutiny among military forces after publishing a column that encouraged black soldiers to retaliate against civilian harassers. The military’s concerns mounted as the war continued.1

National officials called about thirty editors to Washington, D.C., in June 1918, hoping to improve what they characterized as “the bitter tone of the colored press.” Deadly race riots had already erupted in East St. Louis and elsewhere. A military court had already hanged black soldiers accused of murdering police officers during the so-called “Houston mutiny,” which had erupted amid extensive racial harassment and allegations of police brutality. Wherever African Americans organized for workers’ rights and adequate housing, their efforts were checked by indifference or violence. Military officers routinely mistreated and abused black enlistees. Regardless, federal officials—including Secretary of War Newton Baker, Committee on Public Information Chairman George Creel, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt—appealed to the publishers’ sense of loyalty and duty. They encouraged the editors to use their publications—the Chicago Defender, Crisis, New York Age, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, Richmond Planet, Washington Bee, and St. Louis Argus, among others—to fully mobilize black resources and increase America’s odds of winning the Great War. The publishers defended themselves and their race. They explained how lynching, segregation, and discrimination dampened enthusiasm for the war among their readers.2

While “heated argument was not infrequent,” both sides considered the conference a success and afterward frankly acknowledged their shared interests and unresolved differences. Col. Marlborough Churchill, the head of military intelligence, told the Army’s chief of staff that “the leaders of the race are intensely loyal, but feel keenly their inability to carry the great mass of their race with them in active support of the war unless certain grievances receive immediate attention.” The editors reaffirmed their loyalty and promised to aid the war effort. Carefully noting that their combined weekly circulations topped one million copies, they aimed to preempt their critics but also reassure their readers. “German propaganda among us is powerless,” their joint statement read, “but the apparent indifference of our own Government may be dangerous.”3

The nation-state’s intense wartime scrutiny of black publishers revealed the remarkable transformation that had occurred within black journalism since the beginning of the twentieth century. A skeletal national communications network of news by, about, and for African Americans solidified in the early 1900s as black men and women left sharecroppers’ shacks for industrial jobs in southern and then northern cities. As African Americans’ journeys acquainted them with modern urban living and greater daily freedoms, illiteracy plummeted and a mass consumer marketplace emerged for race news. Upstart editors competed for readers’ pennies and nickels by adopting modern journalism practices and emboldening their demands for racial justice. These editors condemned lynching, denounced segregation, and defended citizenship rights with an audacious militancy. They demanded integration, asserted African Americans’ humanity, and safeguarded an expansive conception of freedom claimed since Reconstruction. Circulations surged as new competitors intensified the pursuit for news. During World War I, military investigators and federal censors fixated upon the sensational headlines, critical editorials, and soaring popularity of a robust dissident press. The nation-state’s agents attempted to quiet editors by drawing connections between criticisms of American racism and potential acts of sedition, perhaps even treason. While editors often moderated their news coverage when confronted by state authorities, they refused to abandon their mission of protest. Abject editorial capitulation guaranteed bankruptcy.

Crusading Journalism in the Late Nineteenth Century

Aspiring editor-proprietors struggled to establish black journalism as a viable community institution between the Civil War’s smoldering aftermath and the dispiriting collapse of Reconstruction. Emancipation fulfilled abolitionists’ aims and eliminated most white financial support for publications devoted to African Americans’ concerns. Antislavery editors silenced their presses or joined other reform causes. Freedmen and women valued the written word after being forbidden by owners from learning to read and write. They viewed literacy as a means to personal empowerment. But illiteracy and poverty prevented them from subscribing to local black newspapers, which typically folded within two years of publishing their first issue. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment enabled black men to vote and inadvertently expanded African Americans’ access to the First Amendment’s freedom of the press. Partisan black newspapers often appeared several months before elections to tout the particular politician that bankrolled them. Such papers, though, typically ceased publishing soon after Election Day. Although the number of black newspapers nearly quadrupled in the 1870s, none published before 1880 existed three decades later.4

White supremacists intensified efforts to strip black men and women of their circumscribed political and economic independence after Reconstruction ended and federal troops decamped from the South. Unrepentant Confederates moved to consolidate their control over southern society through violence, social ostracism, and denial of civic rights. Vigilantes lynched thousands of African Americans. State prisons overflowed with black men convicted of petty property crimes. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld laws that mandated racial segregation in public places under the pretense that equal facilities would be provided for both races. State legislators drafted new constitutions across the South and disenfranchised most African Americans by tying voting rights to property and literacy requirements. White voters then swiftly replaced officeholders endorsed by black editors.5

White editors nationwide reinforced the South’s racial agenda by distorting, demeaning, and ignoring African Americans. They depicted black men and women in the abusive stereotypes assigned to them by white southerners. Using the same tropes as literary authors, reporters depicted black men as either rapacious brutes or lazy fools. Black women were loving mammies or flirty Jezebels. Black families were contented in slavery but wretched in freedom. Newswriting style guidelines subtly marked black men and women as outside American citizenry. Editors refused to follow the standard practice of using courtesy titles when writing about African Americans. Instead of referring to a black woman as “Mrs. Smith” or “Miss Jones,” a reporter might identify her as “the Smith woman” or “the Jones woman.” Reporters typically reserved such language for outing prostitutes. White newspapers seldom capitalized the word “Negro,” despite a relentless campaign of protest by black editors. But mostly, white journalists ignored African Americans, obfuscating the daily, interracial commitment required to build and grow communities. Daily newspapers did not announce black births or marriages or deaths. They did not post notices of black fraternal lodge meetings or women’s club fund-raisers or church dinners. They did not recognize black students’ academic achievements.6

White editors traded in stories that highlighted the supposedly inherent nature of black criminality, which implicitly justified extralegal racial violence. They featured race prominently in crime news, often flashing a black assailant’s color in the headline and then mentioning the suspect’s race again in a story’s first or second paragraph. While they seldom identified white assailants by race, they always identified by color the white victims who were allegedly attacked by black suspects. Editors frequently cast petty crimes involving black perpetuators as humorous reaffirmations of stereotypes. They wrote, for example, about thefts of watermelons or chickens with an exaggerated, knowing tone of condescension. Writers could demean entire neighborhoods to explain away unsolved crimes. A New York Times correspondent described in 1880 how white residents in Washington, D.C., blamed “horrible assaults upon young women” on “a large class of colored people here who live by burglary and begging, and who cannot be induced to go into the country and work, even for good wages.” Such news coverage validated and intensified white readers’ racial prejudices.7

White editors aimed to titillate and enrage their readers when they described allegations of interracial rape and murder. They slanted their stories with fanciful language that contrasted the white victim’s supposed good character with the black suspect’s alleged cruelty. In a story with the subheading, “Another Negro Fiend Finds Death at the End of a Rope,” the Macon (Georgia) Telegraph and Messenger reported that “a burly negro” stopped two children on the way to school and “laid violent hands upon the little girl and dragged her to the woods.” Outraged editors often encouraged extralegal retribution. The Wheeling (West Virginia) Register did not wait for a jury to decide the fate of a 20-year-old black man arrested for rape. Describing the suspect as someone with “a mean sneaking look” who “would commit any devilish crime,” the newspaper headlined its story, “Work for Judge Lynch.” While black perfidy was unforgivable, vigilante lawlessness was explained away by the victim’s pain. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch commended a lynch mob for remaining “orderly” as it hanged “a Negro brute.”8

Location and financial solvency often determined how aggressively black editors refuted white journalists’ lies, distortions, and innuendos. Most black newspapers operated in the South where 90 percent of African Americans lived. Southern editors either tempered their words or jeopardized their lives. A mob destroyed the Memphis Free Speech in 1892 after its 30-year-old editor, Ida B. Wells, suggested white women solicited interracial sexual relationships. Traveling on the East Coast when the attack occurred, Wells never returned to Memphis. Instead, she moved north and intensified her campaign against lynching. “Having lost my paper, had a price put on my life, and been made an exile from home for hinting at the truth,” she recalled, “I felt I owed it to myself and to my race to tell the whole truth now that I was where I could do so freely.” Similarly, Alexander L. Manly of the Wilmington (North Carolina) Record sparked a riot in 1898 after writing during a racially inflamed election season that, “Our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that the women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women.” Rampaging white citizens burned Manly’s offices, destroyed other black businesses, murdered an uncertain number of African Americans, and forced elected officeholders to resign. In the riot’s aftermath, a group of prominent black ministers, politicians, and educators blamed Manly for instigating the riot and apologized for his editorial. Rather than capitulate, hundreds of other black residents abandoned the city.9

Northern editors wrote more freely but still struggled to sell newspapers. By the mid-1880s, editor-proprietors published dozens of papers in northern and border-state cities with sizable black populations. They established publications that would enjoy several decades of success, including T. Thomas Fortune’s New York Age, W. Calvin Chase’s Washington Bee, Harry C. Smith’s Cleveland Gazette, John Mitchell Jr.’s Richmond Planet, Christopher Perry’s Philadelphia Tribune, and Edward E. Cooper’s Indianapolis Freeman. Northern editors wrote with greater militancy and urgency, but small circulations and limited advertising imperiled their papers’ existence. To appease patrons and advertisers, even the most pugnacious editors moderated their opinions when necessary. Even so, northern editors enjoyed larger circulations than editors in southern states because of their editorial forthrightness and readers’ higher rates of literacy. Successful newspapers sold just several thousand copies each week but circulated in all regions of the country and overseas. Editors extended the reach of their columns by exchanging copies with one another, reprinting excerpts from other newspapers, and engaging in long-distance political debates.10

Crusading black editors denounced white supremacists’ efforts to reassert a master’s control over black lives and advocated a fulsome definition of freedom. While some publishers retained childhood memories of slavery, most reached maturity amid heady expectations of full citizenship and political participation. They expected their talent, ambition, and connections to advance multifaceted careers. They often worked full-time as lawyers, printers, teachers, ministers, or political appointees. They created their newspapers to promote racial justice, supplement their incomes, and build their leadership credentials. They styled themselves as “race men” and “race women”—middle-class entrepreneurs who believed acceptance of the Victorian values of thrift and sobriety would lead to their race’s material and intellectual betterment and, ultimately, assimilation into American society. They saw their publications as community trusts, platforms for uplift and self-improvement, not mere commercial ventures. They seldom engaged in original reporting but printed local social news and announcements unavailable elsewhere. They condemned white oppression in scathing editorials that defined the era’s journalism and praised black achievement in flowery platitudes.11

Living in a supposed “age of accommodation,” these editors often trumpeted a bracing militancy and bombastic indignation. At the New York Age, Fortune emerged as his generation’s most influential journalist. Delicate-looking but hot-tempered, Fortune argued that the best way to avenge racial atrocities was to emulate the oppressors. He urged African Americans to “look at the white papers of the South and learn from them the necessary lesson, that the only way we can hope ever to win our fight is to arm ourselves as our opponents do, support those newspapers alone that support us, and support those men alone who support us.” Mitchell, an honor student born to enslaved house servants, took over the Richmond Planet in 1884. He advocated armed self-defense from the Confederacy’s onetime capital, and his early exploits earned him fame as the “Fighting Negro Editor.” Mitchell once holstered his Smith & Wesson revolvers and investigated a lynching, despite receiving an anonymous death threat warning him to stay away. He then wrote about the lynching and publicly ridiculed the threat. Readers applauded the stunt. Mitchell was just 22. Such editorial brazenness established a tradition of journalistic outspokenness that would expand in the twentieth century as the successors to these crusading editor-proprietors benefited from financial stability, greater personal safety, and improved pr...