The Black Press and a Mass Black Readership

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-44
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Mass Movement ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Black Life

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.

Regionalism, Social Class, and Elite Perceptions of Working-Class Foodways during the Era of the Great Migration

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-122
Author(s):  
Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Food Culture ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Class Project ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
The Great Migration

This chapter explores the class tensions inherent in the middle-class project of reforming black food habits, demonstrating that working-class African Americans frequently did not share the certainty that foodways could be used as an avenue for citizenship and doubted many of the assumptions embedded in the project of cultural elevation subscribed to by black food reformers. One of the issues at the heart of the culinary tensions among members of the black community was the emerging question about whether there was a distinctive African American way of eating that was separate from mainstream American food culture. In the context of the Great Migration, “southern” food often became labeled “black” food in the northern cities that served as the terminus for black migrants. This transformation took place much to the consternation of black food reformers who, on the whole, resisted the idea of essential black cultural practices.

scholarly journals La rinascita della tragedia dallo spirito del blues nel teatro di August Wilson

Le Simplegadi ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (20) ◽  
pp. 147-161
Author(s):  
Valentina Rapetti
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Friedrich Nietzsche ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
August Wilson ◽  
Blues Music

Born in 1945 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August Wilson was the most prolific and represented African American playwright of the twentieth century. His Century Cycle, a series of ten plays that chronicle the lives of African Americans from the early 1900s to the late 1990s, is an expression of Wilson’s spiritual realism, a form of drama that, while adhering to some conventions of the Western realist tradition, also introduces elements of innovation inspired by blues music and Yoruba cosmology. This essay analyses the double cultural genealogy of Wilson’s work to show how, despite respecting the Aristotelian principle of mìmesis, his playwriting draws on a quintessentially black aesthetic. In conceiving of theatre as a ritualistic performative context where music and words intertwine, Wilson restored what Friedrich Nietzsche regarded as the authentic spirit of Greek tragedy – the harmony between Dionysian and Apollonian – while at the same time injecting an African American ethos into the Western theatrical canon.

Contested Terrain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. Weems
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black Business ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Bank ◽  
Contested Terrain ◽  
Business Person

This chapter examines the “contested terrain” associated with the founding of Chicago’s Douglass National Bank in 1921. Anthony Overton, one of history’s most prominent African American entrepreneurs, is widely regarded as the founder of the second national bank organized by African Americans. Yet, the evidence indicates that this distinction should go to Pearl W. Chavers, a relatively obscure early twentieth-century black business person. The story of Anthony Overton’s ascent and P.W. Chavers’ descent in the Douglass National Bank’s administrative hierarchy reveals the power of money and influence. It also illuminates the nuances of both group and individual entrepreneur-based strategies for African American economic development.

Divorce Trials and Sex Scandals

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-73
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Sex Scandals ◽  
The Status ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
Black Elite ◽  
Public Forums

This chapter covers the coverage of sex scandals and divorce trials, which dominated black papers’ front pages in the mid-1920s. Many of these stories involved the black elite and the middle class. Black papers believed that the status of individuals involved in the scandals generated interest among a new and expanding reading audience. Newspapers, however, depicted different images of elite and middle-class black heterosexual relationships from the ones they carefully constructed. This chapter also argues that the Black Press revealed and spoke about what readers could not discuss in other public forums as it related to African American sexuality. Overall, the second chapter reveals how the coverage of divorce trials and sex scandals exposed class tensions among African Americans and, perhaps most importantly, made private sexual matters public.

Spirituality among African Americans

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-176
Author(s):  
Jason E. Shelton
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
National Survey ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Black And White ◽  
Spiritual But Not Religious ◽  
Blacks And Whites

This chapter assesses the importance of spirituality among African Americans. More specifically, it examines the extent to which respondents in a large, multiyear national survey view themselves as a “spiritual person.” Four sets of comparative analysis are offered: (1) racial differences among black and white members of various evangelical Protestant traditions, (2) racial differences among black and white members of various mainline Protestant and Catholic traditions, (3) denominational differences specifically among African Americans, and (4) racial differences among blacks and whites who view themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” The findings reveal significant interracial and intraracial differences in how spirituality shapes one’s personal identity. Because organized religion has historically been so central to African American community life, the implications for the growth in noninstitutional spirituality are considered.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Kim T. Gallon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Black Press ◽  
The Public ◽  
Introductory Section ◽  
African American Sexuality ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Public Sphere

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.

Advising the Race

2021 ◽  
pp. 86-114
Author(s):  
Julie Golia
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Racial Uplift ◽  
Black Newspapers ◽  
The Many

This chapter examines the advice column “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise,” which ran in the Chicago Defender, one of the most successful black newspapers in the United States. In the early twentieth century, black publishers recognized the many ways that mainstream newspapers reinforced the racial status quo in America and failed to address the needs of African American readers. They also sought to offer more feature content to women readers. “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” was one of the country’s most widely read black advice columns. Columnist Princess Mysteria, a vaudeville mentalist, embraced the Defender’s mission of racial “uplift” and advocacy. But her counsel also reflected a unique sensitivity to the dual prejudices that her female readers faced as African Americans and as women. The columnist offered a worldview very different from that of white columnists, one that doled out assertive, even feminist advice.

“To Build a New World”: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 52-68
Author(s):  
Russell Rickford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Middle East ◽  
New World ◽  
Black American ◽  
The Political ◽  
Freedom Struggle ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Political Imaginary

This essay traces the arc of Black American solidarity with Palestine, placing the phenomenon in the context of twentieth-century African American internationalism. It sketches the evolution of the political imaginary that enabled Black activists to depict African Americans and Palestinians as compatriots within global communities of dissent. For more than half a century, Black internationalists identified with Zionism, believing that the Jewish bid for a national homeland paralleled the African American freedom struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, colonial aggression in the Middle East led many African American progressives to rethink the analogy. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American dissidents operating within the nexus of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism constructed powerful theories of Afro-Palestinian kinship. In so doing, they reimagined or transcended bonds of color, positing anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.

Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism in Cleveland, 1915–45. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999. xv + 334 pp. $59.95 cloth.

2001 ◽  
Vol 60 ◽  
pp. 246-248
Author(s):  
Peter Gottlieb
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Working Class ◽  
North African ◽  
University Of Illinois ◽  
Black Migration ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
And Gender ◽  
North And South ◽  
Landmark Study

Kimberley Phillips adds a fine study of African-Americans' northward migration, community development, and working-class formation to a series of similar works published in the 1980s and 1990s. Alabama North opens new reaches of African-Americans' early twentieth century experience in both North and South, but especially in Cleveland, a major industrial city and significant destination for Southern black migrants. We have known most about the city's African-American community at this time from the landmark study of ghetto development by Ken Kusmer, published in 1976. Like the more recent field of research which has examined black migration and migrants in Northern industrial cities, Phillips focuses her study not on the spatial and social aspects of African-Americans' increasingly segregated community but on the racial, class, and gender dynamics that produced a particular form of community in Cleveland.

The Making of the Modern Death Penalty in Jim Crow North Carolina

2019 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
Seth Kotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Convictions ◽  
The Impact

focuses on the transition from local public hangings to state-controlled electrocutions in North Carolina in the early twentieth century. The chapter addresses the impact of this shift on African American communities. Although the death penalty had long served as an instrument of racial control, the ritual of a local hanging nevertheless had allowed the condemned and black witnesses a public space to express religious convictions and honor the condemned’s suffering. Once the state seized control of this ritual, African Americans were largely excluded as witnesses. The modern death penalty thus came to represent the racial subjugation of Jim Crow, indeed having more in common with lynchings than legal hangings had.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document