Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century. By Fred Carroll
2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/jsh/shy029
ISSN1527-1897
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoVeteran journalist turned academic Fred Carroll examines the symbiotic yet contentious relationship between the commercial and alternative black press in his insightful Race News. Drawing extensively on the archives of these publications, Carroll traces each institution’s relationship to progressive politics. The ability of the alternative black press to pull the commercial black press to the left, or the commercial press’ expulsion of progressive writers from their staff, functions as a narrative through line that unifies seven chapters covering as many decades. Chapter 1 traces the explosion of commercial black newspapers in the early years of the twentieth century. Although black newspapers date back to the 1820s, the Great Migration brought the industrialization, urbanization, technological advancement and geographic reorganization of black communities required to establish a nationwide black newspaper readership. Robert Abbott’s Chicago Defender and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis, founded in 1905 and 1910, respectively, quickly became two of the most prominent and widely-circulated commercial black newspapers. Editors like Abbott and Du Bois, and others at papers like the Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, New York Amsterdam News, and the St. Louis Argus, created commercial black newspapers to promote racial justice and uplift. In doing so they “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” (15).
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