Jonathan Fenderson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042430
- eISBN:
- 9780252051272
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042430.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the ...
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This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the resurgence of a popularly rooted Black nationalism and the associated emergence of new modes of thinking and organizing as it related to African American art, intellectual work, and social activism. By chronicling the strained professional relationship between the magazine owner, John H. Johnson, and Fuller, the magazine’s editor, the chapter illuminates the intraracial struggle between an emergent group of Black nationalists and a more established elite class of African American liberals. This struggle was perfectly encapsulated in Fuller’s efforts to undermine what he deemed as the bourgeois Negro politics of JPC. By advancing “Black” as a counter to JPC’s dominant discourse, Fuller used Negro Digest as an influential print mechanism in the production and amplification of an alternative politics for African Americans.Less
This chapter explores Hoyt Fuller’s work as the lead editor of Negro Digest, one of several magazines produced by Johnson Publishing Company (JPC). It recounts the magazine’s centrality to both the resurgence of a popularly rooted Black nationalism and the associated emergence of new modes of thinking and organizing as it related to African American art, intellectual work, and social activism. By chronicling the strained professional relationship between the magazine owner, John H. Johnson, and Fuller, the magazine’s editor, the chapter illuminates the intraracial struggle between an emergent group of Black nationalists and a more established elite class of African American liberals. This struggle was perfectly encapsulated in Fuller’s efforts to undermine what he deemed as the bourgeois Negro politics of JPC. By advancing “Black” as a counter to JPC’s dominant discourse, Fuller used Negro Digest as an influential print mechanism in the production and amplification of an alternative politics for African Americans.
Jonathan Fenderson
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780252042430
- eISBN:
- 9780252051272
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252042430.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Social Movements and Social Change
This chapter recounts the circumstances surrounding John Johnson’s decision to discontinue Black World and terminate Hoyt Fuller. It recalls the broad national outcry and subsequent efforts by the ...
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This chapter recounts the circumstances surrounding John Johnson’s decision to discontinue Black World and terminate Hoyt Fuller. It recalls the broad national outcry and subsequent efforts by the Black intellectual community to replace the magazine with the short-lived journal First World. More than just an attempt to chronicle the life and death of a seminal Black periodical and its short-lived replacement, the chapter elucidates how these magazines’ respective trajectories embodied larger shifts and rifts among Black intellectuals and within the Black Arts movement. In recalling this history, the chapter explores the very meanings of Black intellectual community in the 1970s while paying close attention to intraracial class politics. In essence, it argues that the slow demise of Jim Crow exacerbated preexisting class (and ideological) divisions within the Black intellectual community, and these divisions, once inflamed, had a tremendous impact on Black institutions and the shape of Black intellectual praxis.Less
This chapter recounts the circumstances surrounding John Johnson’s decision to discontinue Black World and terminate Hoyt Fuller. It recalls the broad national outcry and subsequent efforts by the Black intellectual community to replace the magazine with the short-lived journal First World. More than just an attempt to chronicle the life and death of a seminal Black periodical and its short-lived replacement, the chapter elucidates how these magazines’ respective trajectories embodied larger shifts and rifts among Black intellectuals and within the Black Arts movement. In recalling this history, the chapter explores the very meanings of Black intellectual community in the 1970s while paying close attention to intraracial class politics. In essence, it argues that the slow demise of Jim Crow exacerbated preexisting class (and ideological) divisions within the Black intellectual community, and these divisions, once inflamed, had a tremendous impact on Black institutions and the shape of Black intellectual praxis.
E. James West
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252043116
- eISBN:
- 9780252051999
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043116.003.0002
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
E. James West
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- September 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780252043116
- eISBN:
- 9780252051999
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5622/illinois/9780252043116.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, African-American History
This study reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century, stretching from its ...
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This study reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century, stretching from its formation in 1945 to its role in the movement to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1980s. Benefitting from unprecedented access to new archival materials at Chicago State and Emory University, it focuses on the impact of Lerone Bennett, Jr., the magazine’s in-house historian and senior editor. More broadly, West highlights the value placed upon Ebony’s role as a “history book” by its contributors and readers. Using Ebony as a window into the trajectory of the post-war “modern black history revival”, this study offers a bold reinterpretation of the magazine’s place within modern American cultural and intellectual history and highlights its role as a critical tool for black history empowerment and education on a local, national and international scale.Less
This study reveals the previously hidden impact of Ebony magazine as a major producer and disseminator of popular black history during the second half of the twentieth century, stretching from its formation in 1945 to its role in the movement to establish a national holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1980s. Benefitting from unprecedented access to new archival materials at Chicago State and Emory University, it focuses on the impact of Lerone Bennett, Jr., the magazine’s in-house historian and senior editor. More broadly, West highlights the value placed upon Ebony’s role as a “history book” by its contributors and readers. Using Ebony as a window into the trajectory of the post-war “modern black history revival”, this study offers a bold reinterpretation of the magazine’s place within modern American cultural and intellectual history and highlights its role as a critical tool for black history empowerment and education on a local, national and international scale.