Notes from the film:The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords
One of the strongest voices of the Black community and Black politics has always been the newspaper. Beginning with the Freedom's Journal, the first newspaper in the United States published by African Americans, founded in 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm. Black journalists quickly learned the power of the pen was mightier than the sword. As Vernon Jarrett, a journalist, noted in the documentary film The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, "Public expression was one of the few weapons Blacks had." At least 24 other Black newspapers were published before the Civil War including the Frederick Douglass' North Star, which he began in 1847.
Following the Civil War, Black newspapers flourished. Journalist Phyl Garland argues that following the war, Black newspapers sprung up in small towns and large cities all over the nation and including the South because, "it was there first opportunity to use the written word without fear of reprisal." Historian Christopher Reed notes that Black newspapers performed a miracle of sorts in reestablishing a sense of Black community after the Civil War. Over 500 Black newspapers were published between the Civil War and the turn of the century. Even though most lasted only lasted a short time, their growing popularity was a tribute to the desire of an entire people to have a voice and to establish a community following the devastating social, personal, and economic realities of slavery and war.
But the hope for the freedom of expression, community stability, political advancement, and economic opportunity that Reconstruction seemed to offer after the Civil War quickly waned. Reconstruction ended and Blacks throughout the South (where most of the Black population still was) found themselves the victims of mob violence and brutality in the name of "White redemption."Mainstream newspaper outlets condoned these actions and encouraged White Southerners to do what they could to keep Blacks in line. Black journalists in the South could do little to respond for fear of retribution. While Black press outlets in the North did what they could to expose the racial injustices occurring in the New South, Black perspectives from the South were needed to bring the issues of lynching and mob violence to national attention (for powerful images of lynching, see the Without Sanctuary exhibit). Ida B. Wells, editor of the Free Speech, went through the South to sort out the facts of lynching and boldly discussed relationships between Black men and White women. But her outspoken journalism was punished when in
She really set the stage for a very radical, very activist kind of Black journalism. And as a Black woman, she was also an inspiration because there were so few African American women who would have worked in journalism before her. And when they did it tended to be sort of a social, service-oriented journalism not this sort of powerful, radical, vociferous journalism that said--we won't stand for this, we must do something about the kinds of violence affecting African-Americans.
Wells fusion of journalism with bold, radical politics would become the hallmark of Black journalism at the start of the twentieth-century, carried on by Robert S. Abbott in the Chicago Defender.
For and extended bibliography on the subject, go here.
(Stay tuned for Pt. 2 & 3)
Blogging Black History Month
2 comments:
Thanks for the continuing history lessons. It is our history. We should all know it.
Loving the BHM posts all over, but especially enjoyed this one.
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