Significance of Black Media Framing
This book1 uncovers and analyses print communications produced by people of African/Afro-Caribbean origin living in Britain, but influenced by thinkers and activists from the United States. The end of First World War witnessed an onset of unrest centring on the 1919 race riots2 and saw a profusion of communications on both sides. There appears to have been an increase in niche media transnationally. This surge in special interest newspapers and periodicals, combined with communication of racial issues, generated the growth of ‘self-reflexive media’ (Wilder 2005, p. 59), both by diaspora and by pro-establishment or right wing groups (Schor 1985, p. 175). Many mainstream newspapers appeared to blame black people for defending themselves against mob attacks. Even the Manchester Guardian commented that ‘[t]he quiet, apparently inoffensive, nigger (sic) becomes a demon when armed with revolver or razor’ (17 June, 1919, p. 12). Such comments acted as a contributory factor in prompting black people into a written response (Chapman 2018),3 which included support for their own publications. Social unrest was not limited to Britain: there were race riots in the United States, constitutional agitation in India, and economic and political unrest in several British African colonies, in South Africa and the Belgian Congo. This new race consciousness appears to have been a direct result of the First World War.
The narrative of oppression and racial awareness is evident during the aftermaths of war in what we now call the ‘diasporic’ press; it amounts to a significant contribution towards the bigger narrative of twentieth-century liberation. This in turn has implications for scholarship of black publishing and especially print ephemera: the re-discovery and recuperation of archival media representation with voices on race represents a new contribution to this field.
Furthermore, inter-textual comparisons of neglected archival extracts resonate with diaspora discourses (Fabre and Benesch 2004; Okpewho and Nzegwu 2009, inter alia), and engage with the idea of the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). Experiences during this period of history, with all their associated vicissitudes, such as pressures for repatriation, economic suffering, changing post-war attitudes, and consequential changing identity through challenges to citizenship—all represent a milestone on the road to further racial and political freedom from the constraints of empires.
Black people used print communications, including open letters to the press, as a means of self-defence, and to promote their diasporic and ethnic community cause. Their newspapers highlighted the centrality of economic factors, illustrated by human stories, in particular lack of employment, appallingly financial hardship, and desperate living conditions. Black publications also highlighted the fact that non-white soldiers, particularly those from the Caribbean and West African regions of the British Empire, experienced a profound change of attitude in Britain. In terms of the emphasis of the research presented, their reaction to it is central to their contribution not only to memory studies but also to media history as a voice rather than as numbers of readers or circulation statistics.
This study represents the first systematic attempt to analyse media and public communications by people of African and Afro-Caribbean origin during the aftermaths of war, a period of post-conflict readjustment. For media history, there is no in-depth study of print publications in Britain for the period 1919–1924, dealing specifically with racial framing of diaspora of African and Afro-Caribbean origin, although the period experienced a transnational surge in special interest newspapers and periodicals, including visual discourse.
Periodisation
Moreover, few media studies focus specifically on the aftermaths of the Great War as a discreet and significant period. Periodisation within specialised studies often moves from the Great War to the inter-war years more generally, either nationally or transnationally (see, inter alia, Mazón and Steingröver 2005; Wilder 2005; Makalani 2011; Adi 2013; Ezra 2000; Dewitte 2007; Chickering and Föster 2003; Matera and Kingsley Kent 2017). This study deals with traces of early black journalism transnationally in the widest sense of the word—as public articulations of influence, with implications for concepts of citizenship, race, ethnicity, class, and gender. As such it forms part of a continuing imperative to re-discover and recuperate black history. The findings here add to the body of research on the aftermaths of First World War , black studies, and the origins of diaspora. Articulations featured here have implications for concepts of cultural citizenship (Chapman 2013), and adding to transnational memory studies as an emerging field in which the aftermaths of First World War are under-explored (Chapman 2018).
This study argues for the aftermaths of war to be given more attention as a distinctly defined period of post-conflict adjustment in which individual voices need to be highlighted. African and Afro-Caribbean contributions towards the war effort were accepted (if not openly valued), their loyalty anticipated, and their contribution acknowledged—at least by present-day writers (Fryer 1984; Costello 2015; Olusoga 2014; Smith 2015). However, when the conflict ended, ex-soldiers and merchant seamen were expected to return to their native islands, usually without financial support or much help. So the newspapers of black communities act as a record of how physical and political oppression was specifically understood by members of the African Caribbean community, demonstrating opinions on either empowerment or disempowerment, visibility, self-esteem, and economic struggles for survival.
The narrow chronological time frame of this study follows a claim by Van Galen Last and Futselaar (2016, p. 207), that ‘[i]n the years 1919–1924 this culture of printed matter contributed to a transnational black consciousness’, claiming that the First World War and demobilisation contributed to ‘a new black political fervour in Africa, the New World and Europe’; but they make no direct connection between these two generalisations—that is, the relationship between print culture and black consciousness. That is the task of this study, but undertaken here by testing the claims as they relate to specific developments in the United Kingdom by writers and journalists of African and Afro-Caribbean origin and often influenced by texts published in the United States. Publications focusing on ordinary people’s experience during this period build on existing published content by key figures in media history, First World War, inter-war history, and black diaspora studies—such as works by Hall (1990, 1996), Gilroy (1993), Jenkinson (2009), and Killingray (1994).
The years immediately following the First World War are widely known by scholars and others to have been turbulent, even explosive, yet culture was also ‘jogged into a new age’,4 epitomised by the seminal work of a host of now famous names, such as Charlie Chaplin, T.S. Elliot, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, and Marcel Proust. At this time, discrimination was clearly a widespread experience for black people in most parts of the world, and made worse by the imperatives of post-conflict adjustment. With such superlatives, both positive and negative, it is somewhat surprising that media historians have not yet assiduously turned their interest to the diversity and range of public communications—more particularly, the fortunes of what are sometimes referred to as ‘minority’ or ‘alternative’ newspapers. In fact, the lack of original research on this topic is matched by a paucity of terminology to describe the public writings of African and Afro-Caribbean people transnationally.
At the beginning of the twentieth century and up until the outbreak of the First World War, the numbers of black people living in metropolitan Britain was tiny (Chapman 2018), yet their collective communications became important after the First World War. On the macro scale, contextual significance is underline...
