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This chapter examines Black visibility in public culture and how picturing freedom works as a means of conceptualizing nationhood. It considers the treatment of Black freedom in the Black press and explains how the powerful combination of words and images in caricatures became the unchecked representation of Blackness in the larger cultural imaginary. It shows how seemingly disconnected materials like racist caricatures, Black newspapers, and abolitionist material cultures aligned through an inability to elide slavery's visual culture. It also explores how Black women's domesticity undermines Black national identity and connects ideas about visibility in African American public culture to the propaganda of the U.S. antislavery movement.

The black press had a tremendous impact on shaping and solidifying attitudes in the African American community. This chapter identifies the impact of black journalists who shaped minority public opinion and generated government anxiety during World Wars I and II. It explores the themes that dominated news stories as well as the federal response to the black press.

This chapter connects newspaper history and Woodson's partnership with the black press, including his merger of the Black History Movement with interests of the black newspapers. They were suitable allies during the period of this study, 1915 to 1950, because of their support for education, civil rights and other issues and the impact of the Great Migration of blacks to urban areas. The migration, especially in northern cities, increased the size of black newspaper markets and made them a mass medium.

This chapter documents how Bennett specifically, and Ebony more broadly, began to use black history as a lens through which to critique the gains and trajectory of the civil rights movement and the emergence of Black Power on the national stage. It focuses on the publication of Bennett’s “Black Power” series, which both preceded and overlapped with the popularisation of the Black Power slogan by activists such as Stokely Carmichael, and which aimed to analyse new patterns of black radical activist through a historical framework.

Newspaper coverage of Woodson, from his graduation from high school as an unknown through his rise as one of the most significant newsmakers in the black press during his era, is retraced from Appalachia to Washington and beyond. Black newspapers defined Woodson as news. Black newspapers made Woodson a national hero and celebrity, assets he used in support of his cause.

This chapter charts Ebony’s initial response to the ‘mainstreaming’ of black history in American popular and political culture during the 1970s, focused around the magazine’s discussion of, and engagement with, the American Bicentennial in 1976. As a whole, Ebony’s coverage of the Bicentennial reflected a shift away from a more activist-oriented depiction of black history and an embrace of less political and more commemorative editorial perspective. Yet even as this shift occurred, Bennett pushed for a rejection of the Bicentennial as an ‘affront to truth and freedom.’

This chapter examines the beginnings of college football at HBCUs from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. Black college football started as a separate institution distinct, yet similar, to the game played at predominately white institutions. This chapter uses Gaither’s early biography to examine how the pieces of the sporting congregation came together to support Black college football.

This chapter situates the early development of Ebony within a longer history of black press engagement with black history and the evolution of the black history movement in the United States. It demonstrates that black history education was an important, if often overlooked feature of Ebony from its creation in 1945 and demonstrates how coalescing civil rights activism pushed the magazine towards a more substantive engagement with both black history and black activism.

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

This chapter examines the mass movement of southern African Americans to Northern cities in the first half of the twentieth century and shows how it dramatically altered the Black Press. After 1920, black newspaper editors covered more news that they believed would appeal to working-class African Americans. In charting the development of the early-twentieth-century Black Press, chapter 1 presents a comparative analysis of five different newspapers: The Amsterdam News, The Baltimore Afro-American, The Chicago Defender, The Philadelphia Tribune, and the Pittsburgh Courier. These five newspapers demonstrate how the Black Press fostered and imagined an African American readership’s interest in sexuality through its sensational coverage of the variegations of black life throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

This chapter considers the role of the Black press and, to a more limited extent, the Latino press in Obama's campaign. Given his desire to transcend race and ethnicity yet his need to mobilize Black and Latino voters, this specialized press played a key role in the campaign. Before Obama became the forty-fourth President of the United States, his campaign was viewed in three major ways by the media: There were those who cheered him along; those uncertain what to make of him but who retained a tame, mainstream, “wait and see” perspective; and those whose views ranged from “critically supportive” to firmly opposed. Since his election, there has been little change in these assessments, though at this time there is a clearer delineation between those for and against Obama in the mainstream media as they gather a better understanding of his pragmatic tendencies on policy and issues.

Chapter 1 sets the stage for the lynching by illuminating the legacies of racism, Jim Crow, lynching, regionalism, World War II racism, Cold War race relations, and Brown v. Board of Education. Placing Emmett Till's family within the long history of the Great Black Migration, this chapter underscores the dissonance between Chicago race relations and Mississippi race relations as well as the growing racial tensions in the wake of the Brown decisions. Throughout, this chapter points up how black press outlets underlined the growing racial tensions and the white backlash against integration efforts. This chapter makes clear the fact that the Till lynching was part of a longer legacy of racial conflict in this country, a conflict that the black press covered in great detail.

This chapter explores how internal and external tensions influencing Ebony’s depiction of black history fed into the struggle to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. during the 1970s and 1980s. Against this backdrop, Bennett and other Ebony contributors struggled to negotiate the continued importance of the magazine’s black history content in a changing cultural and political climate. For some, the King Holiday represented an opportunity to reflect on the activist’s legacy as a ‘hero to be remembered.’ For others, it was a chance to reiterate the political application of the black past and its role in the ongoing struggle for black liberation.

Between 1950 and 1952, during a period known as the “golden age of tourism” to Haiti, the Chicago Defender fostered black internationalism in Haiti that revolved around African American women. This form of black internationalism appeared in the Defender as a prizewinning trip to Haiti for winners of a popularity contest. This essay examines how the Defender used the popularity contests to simultaneously increase circulation and further African American economic development and investment goals in Haiti. The Defender used the winners’ trips to create a counter discourse to the challenges that everyday Haitians faced on a daily basis and the political issues that plagued the Haitian government. This narrative helped to facilitate a flow of business and political alliances between African Americans and Haitians.

This chapter traces the influence of travelers like William and Lucy Gantt Sheppard on more conventionally fictionalized literary work by authors like Hopkins who never traveled to Africa themselves. Her novel Of One Blood, which was first serialized in the influential Colored American Magazine, where she was an editor, is indicative of the way that broadly internationalist culture circulating around the Congo, and other geopolitical spaces, was grounded in the black press. This chapter argues that connections between Of One Blood and the missionary careers of the Sheppards illuminate the transatlantic routes that have contributed to the development of African American literature and culture, further challenging common generalizations that, in the early twentieth century, modern Africa was unknown to African Americans. Early twentieth century American representations of Africa, such as Of One Blood, were informed by intellectual networks of writers and activists that were nurtured through the black press as well as literary societies, civic organizations, HBCUs, and religious institutions.

This chapter details the demise of a black newspaper, the Lighthouse and Informer, and the role of white newspapers in the rise of massive resistance to civil rights in South Carolina. John McCray’s newspaper had always depended financially on help from fellow activist Modjeska Simkins and her family, but a growing feud between the two civil rights activists eventually doomed the black newspaper. The rising pressure exerted by the white massive resistance movement contributed to the collapse of the newspaper and the decline in black activism in the late 1950s. Charleston News and Courier editor Thomas R. Waring Jr. and his chief political reporter, William D. Workman Jr., played central roles in establishing the white citizens’ council movement and using anti-communist rhetoric to undermine the civil rights effort.