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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 describes Ida B. Wells's journalistic career, highlighting her affiliation with the Free Speech and Headlight. By 1889, Wells was widely known as Iola, the “Princess of the Press.” Black newspapers around the nation printed and reprinted her columns which reflected her experiences in Memphis. Several of her writings eulogized the ideal woman as depicted in the cult of true womanhood. Like many African Americans of that era, Wells felt the need to combat the racist rantings that had become so common in both white popular culture and academic literature.

This chapter views the black press as a primary context of Flood advocacy fundamentally shaped by Robinson in the 1940s. Black newspapers had become accustomed to fighting the inclusionist fight in baseball, and the sport represented the social arena in which black newspapers possessed greatest influence. Through a rhetoric of self-abstraction, black newspapers simply denied the importance of Flood’s blackness in advocating careful labor reforms in pro baseball. By considering the proposition that the black press constituted a “counterpublic,” the chapter concludes with an examination of the disincorporated rhetoric through which speakers in the black press advocated Flood’s case.

This chapter examines how black girls were represented in the earliest extant examples of the black press by focusing on Freedom's Journal, published from 1827 to 1829, and the Colored American (1837–1841). Articles about black girlhood in the early black press offer insights into the everyday struggles of African Americans in the early republic. In a sense, early black newspapers served as conduct manuals as they emphasized the model family, encouraging readers to be temperate, industrious, and pursue intellectual development through literacy and education. Although the ideal black family figured prominently in both Freedom's Journal and the Colored American, this chapter argues that the stories and columns they published reveal stress and struggle in black households in the early decades of the nation. It cites the striking absence of black mothers in these articles in the heyday of the ideal of republican motherhood, an indication that many black mothers were working for wages outside the home.

This chapter focuses on the eve of Cuba's first constitutional elections since Gerardo Machado took office in 1925, when the editors of Atomo, a new youth-run black newspaper, threw down the gauntlet. The editors called out the political machine that had dominated Cuban politics since the republic's inception and which had betrayed blacks: “There are those corrupted by experience . . . and their thirst for sinecures . . . who seek to . . . exploit the collective anguish of a Race.” Speaking to politicians of all colors generally and to black politicians in particular, Atomo's editors blasted Cuban leaders who placed their own individual interests above those of the racial collective. In leveling their accusation against black leaders, they also asserted their right to a more actualized relationship to kith and country.

This chapter examines the metamorphosis of the black Huntingtonians varied responses to rising Jim Crowism during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Benefiting from increasing affluence, kin and augmented family networks, strong religious convictions, and education, Huntington’s black working class, in conjunction with working class blacks throughout the Ohio River Valley, engaged in a variety of tactics and strategies to progress. It contends that in building institutions, entering into the public space, and agitating for political inclusion black Huntingtonians formed the “building blocks” for self-improvement, community formation, and racial uplift. In the process, they transformed Huntington into a regional black socio-cultural hub, produced an embryonic black professional class, and further strengthened black Huntingtonians’ cultural, social, and political linkages with the region’s African American population.

This chapter examines the ways in which Flood’s case might have resonated within a social and political imagination that was deeply racialized and unapologetically committed to a world-making project informed by black experience. First, it analyzes the rhetoric of revolt. Second, it shows how Flood’s “argument from blackness,” as opposed to being confined to his consciousness or spread thinly over the amorphous “mood” of the 1960s, consisted in discernible rhetorical consonances to the radicalism of Harry Edwards’ Revolt of the Black Athlete. Third, it explains how black newspapers appropriated Flood and domesticated the threat he posed by fitting him into the political rationality of liberalism.

This chapter describes Andy Cooper’s weekly paper, called the City Sun, which promised an editorial environment that was compatible with advertisers’ interests without allowing them to dictate tone or content. The City Sun’s first issue was published on June 6, 1984. By the time the sixth edition was released in July, the paper received its first of many letters from Mayor Koch. Cooper’s City Sun also broke a taboo of other black newspapers—it criticized black politicians whenever it became convinced their behavior was venal, lazy, or self-serving.

Show Boat's black chorus played an important role in the success of the 1927 production. The black press followed Show Boat closely and this chapter recovers how African Americans understood the show in the Twenties. The process by which the black chorus accumulated several featured numbers is detailed, as is the importance of Tess Gardella as Aunt Jemima in the key role of Queenie. Numbers discussed include the cut spiritual “Mis'ry's Comin' Aroun'” (inspired by the hit play Porgy), “Queenie's Ballyhoo,” and “In Dahomey” (a stylized tribal dance for which Hammerstein wrote an ironic lyric that drew attention to the artificial nature of black performance). The prominence of Show Boat's black cast within the black community is also discussed.

This chapter describes the entry of jazz into Europe in 1919 after World War I. It demonstrates how the jazz craze presented French men and women of color with opportunities for recognition but also threatened them with widespread misrepresentation. French Antilleans and Africans responded to the jazz craze by offering their own interpretations of Black music and Black identity in political meetings, journalism, and literary reactions. By 1924, police were monitoring these activities carefully. The chapter argues that musical developments contributed powerfully to an interwar context within which racial representation in France was both widespread and contested. It shows how the French state responded by surveilling Black francophone populations closely even in their “leisure” activities such as music making. The chapter emphasizes throughout how the tumulte noir catalyzed Black French to articulate their differences from Black Americans in print and in performance.

This chapter shows how news of federal segregation spread quickly through a well-developed network of black newspapers in the spring and summer of 1913. The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender sounded alarms all over the country. They joined Calvin Chase's Washington Bee, which had been publishing news of segregation in federal offices since Wilson's inauguration. In the fall, some liberal white editors, especially Rolfe Cobleigh of the Congregationalist and Christian World, picked up the story. The obfuscation that became a hallmark of Wilsonian praxis accomplished its goal of making protests more complicated, but the reports began leaking out almost immediately. Ralph Tyler, a black Republican still serving as auditor for the Navy Department, was one of the first to take the reports seriously and voice his objection to racial segregation in May letters to the Bee and to the president directly.

Through collective biography, the careers of the African-American performers in On the Town are explored to gain a sense of educational, artistic, and employment opportunities under Jim Crow segregation. The performers profiled here include the conductor Everett Lee, and the dancers Royce Wallace, Frank Neal, Flash Riley, and Billie Allen. At the time, African-American critics such as Joe Bostic, Dan Burley, Nora Holt, and Theophilus Lewis were reviewing contemporary theater and concerts in black newspapers such as the New York Amsterdam News, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, and The People’s Voice. They perceived a different America from the one covered by their white colleagues at the New York Times or Chicago Tribune. They relentlessly reported to their readership—that is, the black community—about racial advances and injustices on stage, and they wrote revealingly about black artists.

This chapter focuses on Freedom's Journal, America's first black newspaper, with Samuel Cornish (1795–1859) and Russwurm as senior and junior editors, respectively. They sought to make Freedom's Journal a “medium of intercourse” between African Americans in different states as well as have it serve as a forum for its constituency of readers on various issues that concern them. Cornish and Russwurm saw Freedom's Journal as an organizer; they sought to meld the scattered black population in the United States into one people, with the Journal as its advocate and articulate voice. Freedom's Journal also saw itself as an educator, in both the narrow and the wider sense of the term, and emphasizing this role, it promised to “urge upon our brethren the necessity and expediency of training their children, while young, to habits of industry, and thus forming them for becoming useful members of society.”

This chapter presents writings from Freedom's Journal, the first black-run and black-owned newspaper in the United States that commenced publication on Friday, March 16, 1827. These include articles where editors Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm outlined their rationale and hopes for the paper; an editorial by Russwurm that reprises the key arguments put forward in his commencement address; Russwurm's letters to Cornish written during his trip through Connecticut and Massachusetts in the summer of 1827; Russwurm's article on the growing trend of black people betraying other black people to slave catchers; exchanges that highlight the offense caused by the anticolonization editorial position of Freedom's Journal; and Russwurm's account of his a trip from New York to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1828.