A educação do negro na imprensa paulista do fim do século XIX (1880-1900)

A educação do negro na imprensa paulista do fim do século XIX (1880 - 1900) Resumo: O presente artigo é parte de uma pesquisa que contempla os projetos para a educação dos ingênuos veiculados na imprensa paulista entre a promulgação da Lei do Vente Livre (1871) e os anos subsequentes à abolição da escravidão. Tomando como pressuposto que as ideias são produtos culturais gestados em redes de sociabilidade, analisamos de que maneira as noções acerca de raça e modernização relacionavam-se às propostas educativas para os filhos de escravas na imprensa, suporte material privilegiado para tal circulação de ideias. Trabalhando com três periódicos que julgamos representativos dos segmentos identificados como “imprensa branca”, “imprensa negra” e “imprensa abolicionista”, tidos como fonte e objeto, notamos diferenças substanciais na abordagem relativa ao tema, mesmo identificando o trânsito de colaboradores entre espaços de sociabilidade comuns.Palavras-chave: História da Educação. Raízes da educação brasileira. Cultura afro-brasileira. Education of black people in the press of São Paulo during 19th century Abstract: This article is a part of a research that intends to present the educational projects for slave’s children published in the São Paulo press between the promulgation of free womb law (1871) and the first years after the liberty (emancipation) of slaves, as a part of our master thesis. Thus, we analised how the relations between ideas of race and modernity and the education proposals for slave’s children were presented in the press, having the premise that ideas are cultural products from sociability networks and the journals the material pillar for the ideas’ circulation. Contemplated as historical source and research object, tree journals we consider representative of kinds of press named as “white press”, “black press” and “abolitionist press” were analyzed, in which we notice distinctive differences, although it is noteworthy that collaborators sometimes were in the same sociability places. Keywords: History of education. Roots of Brazilian education. Afro-Brazilian culture La educación del negro en la prensa paulista de finales del siglo XIX (1880 - 1900) Resumen: El presente artículo, como parte de una investigación académica más amplia, abarca los proyectos para la educación de los ingenuos vehiculados en la prensa paulista entre la promulgación de la Ley del Vientre Libre (1871) y los años subsiguientes a la abolición de la esclavitud. Tenido como presupuesto que las ideas son productos culturales criados en redes de sociabilidad, analizamos de qué manera las ideas acerca de la raza y de la modernización se referían a las propuestas educativas para los hijos de las esclavas en tres vehículos de la prensa, suporte material privilegiado para tal circulación de ideas. Tomando para análisis tres jornales que consideramos representativo de lo que identificamos como “prensa branca”, “prensa negra” y “prensa abolicionista”, entendido como fuente y objeto histórico, notamos diferencias substanciales en la abordaje relativa al tema, aunque tenido identificado el tránsito de colaboradores entre los espacios de sociabilidad comunes.Palabras clave: Historia de la Educación. Raíces de la educación brasileña. Cultura afro-brasileña Data de registro: 24/02/2019 Data de aceite: 29/10/2020 Apoio: CAPES.

Conflict in Private Land: The Role of “Yellow Journalism” in the Turmoil of Batu Ceper, Tangerang 1934

This article discusses the conflict and social unrest in the Batu Ceper private lands. The events in Batu Ceper was an example of anti-extortion movement erupted due to the Cuke and Kompenian problems against the background of the socio-economic issuessince the late 19th century. This study identifies “yellow journalism” concept which succeeded in uplifting the Batu Ceper event with a bombastic and sensational headline in the form of an exciting debate between the newspapers of the landlord’s defender (the white press) and the peasant advocates (press Indonesier). The victory of the white press in the court did not mean the end of potential chaos, because the anxiety which became the factor of chaos never faded away due to a mere court ruling. This article reflects the field of social history, in which the study uses mass media as its primary focus. It shows the characteristic of disruption in a historical perspective.

“Tears of Joy”

This chapter centers the jazz vocalist Ella Fitzgerald’s career as a racial crossover artist, whose early career was critical to securing jazz as a profession for race representation. After emerging as a popular vocalist for Chick Webb’s swing band, she became a symbol of a respectable African American woman to counter the negative characterizations of the jazz world as corrupting of youth. Her career in the late 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s became an effective vehicle for the desegregation of performance venues and the creation of integrated clubs, due to her popularity with black and white audiences. Fitzgerald’s race representation included her status as a wealthy African American woman who provided for her extended family and who made charitable investments in civil rights organizations, particularly the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Fitzgerald’s highly visible race representation entailed constant black and white press coverage and critical assessments that produced two major and recurring debates: whether Fitzgerald constituted a legitimate jazz singer, and whether her perceived lack of emotion in performance disqualified her as an authentic black jazz woman vocalist. Importantly, Fitzgerald showcased the jazz profession in several aspects as a non-religious vehicle for accomplishing the progressive, integrationist pursuits of religious race representatives.

‘Lower types of cranks, crooks and racial bigots’? The Universal Negro Improvement Association and black political violence in the United States, 1918–1930

This article examines the involvement of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in black political violence in the early-interwar period in the United States. Evidence suggests that the UNIA was the organisation most often involved in black political confrontations, and the article discusses how the state, the black and white press and other black activist organisations may have both benefitted from and perpetuated the UNIA’s reputation for political violence. The essay argues that the UNIA’s involvement in violence against other black organisations and groups can be explained partly by the intensity of the ‘war of words’ among prominent black leaders in the United States, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Furthermore, the article suggests that ethnic and gender differences within the American UNIA itself could exacerbate pre-existing tensions between different groups of Garveyites. Contextualising black political violence in these ways allows us to move beyond a reductionist view of grassroots Garveyites as prone to violence. Instead, this approach allows us to better understand the relationship between the famous ‘war of words’ and the kinds of tensions, confrontations and violence that sometimes occurred at grassroots level between supporters of different black organisations and groups. The article contributes not only to the growing historiography about the UNIA at grassroots level, but also to discussions about the militarisation of black protest during World War I and in the 1920s, including the use of self-defence and paramilitary-style tactics by people of African descent in the United States.

The Great War and Siberian Memory: Georgy Vyatkin in an American Poetry Anthology of 1916

The essay is dedicated to a rather extraordinary episode in the literary biography of the Siberian poet Georgy Vyatkin (1885–1938), when one of his poems was translated by the American social worker Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950) and published in 1916 in the magazine “The Russian Review.” The authors carefully reconstruct political and ideological contexts of this publication, directly linked to the United States’ entry into the Great War. They pay special attention to the literary and social activities of Alice Stone Blackwell. They discuss what place Vyatkin’s poem “To the Descendants’ took in Vyatkin’s literary biography in the time of the Great War. In 1914 he became a front-line correspondent for the Kharkov newspaper “Utro.” By 1915 he was drafted as a “ratnik” (soldier) by the army, and further served as an assistant within the medical and nutritional detachment under the command of another poet, Sasha Chernyi (Alexander Glikberg; 1880‒1932). Throughout the Great War, Vyatkin created an œuvre of literary works in verse and prose, which also includes his poem “To Descendants,” that was published in the magazine “Europe’s Messenger” and translated into English. Vyatkin revised some of his war poems after the Revolution, and adapted them to the circum- stances of the Civil War, from the perspective of the “White” press. At the same time, he became the Secretary of the War Archives Commission, which was created in 1918 under the leadership of the folklorist Ivan Ulyanov (1876–1937), who collected evidence of the modern memory of the Great War.

Selective Public Outrage

This chapter deals with the selective public outcry over the use of torture in the case of Quintar South. The abuse of Quintar South was one of the few cases in which the torture practices of law enforcement officials captured the attention of the white population in the South. A reporter to the white press of Atlanta, C.E. Harrison supported directing a number of readers to speak up against police misconduct and brutality. Breaking conventional representational practices of the American Press, Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Daily published brutal images, which showed blacks as passive victims of racial violence.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Media

The media has played a fundamental role in American race relations since the days of slavery. The black press has been a source of protest against racial inequality and a disseminator of news and information for and about the black community from the time of its emergence in the early 19th century. However, for much of this history, black America remained largely invisible in mainstream journalism with only criminal activity ever reported on in the white press. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the media spotlight began to shine on America’s black citizens, illuminating the inequities they faced to a national and worldwide audience. The way in which the white press covered the struggle for black freedom defined its nature, chronology, and achievements in popular understanding and memory. For decades, this first draft of history influenced how scholars interpreted the civil rights movement. Despite a long history of individual and organized resistance to oppression, the movement is often conceived of beginning when the Montgomery Bus Boycott prompted reporters to make household names of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the male ministers who led the principal civil rights organizations in the following years. Yet in Montgomery and throughout the next decade, the community organizing of mostly women workers remained unseen. Imagery of police dogs and firehoses being used against peaceful demonstrators sparked outrage at the same time as ensuring that racism became associated with Southern bigotry rather than socioeconomic inequality. In recent years, new scholarship has sought to correct this distorted narrative and shed light on the media’s part in its creation. Scholars have also shown how an appreciation of the value of publicity in gaining support for the struggle for black freedom shaped the organizing of the civil rights movement. At the same time, coverage of the race issue determined the evolution of modern journalism, nowhere more so than in the development of its newest electronic iteration: television news. Furthermore, reporters played a large part in painting the Black Power era as a tragic coda to the civil rights story, where Martin Luther King’s integrationist dream was lost to militancy, madness, and mayhem. Twenty-first-century scholarship has highlighted the continuities and shared roots between the two movements, refuting the line in the sand drawn by the media between two mutually exclusive strategies of resistance. While Black Power activists decried their negative portrayals in the press, at the same time press coverage was fundamental to the creation of their image and the dissemination of their message. As such, any study of the struggle for black freedom and the media would be incomplete without considering how this relationship changed in the Black Power era. Moreover, entertainment is an important facet of any discussion of the media and civil rights. The black image in popular culture, one that was often portrayed by negative stereotypes with long histories, defined African Americans in the minds of many white Americans, intensifying racial disharmony. African Americans had little input toward or control over this imagery, as segregation within the entertainment industry barred them from writing or production roles. Representation in Hollywood and entertainment television, both onscreen and within the industry, formed a core plank of civil rights campaigning. This article’s review of scholarship will consider both entertainment and the news media in its discussion of civil rights and the media.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

Equal Power

Charles Harrison Mason was the founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which from its Memphis roots grew into the largest black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with profound theological and political ramifications for poor and working-class black Memphians. This essay traces the origins of COGIC in Memphis; it reveals how Mason’s early black Pentecostal denomination grew, gained social and political power, and earned a permanent place in Memphis’s black religious pantheon. While analyzing how the local black and white press viewed Mason, it uncovers the significance of Mason’s religious teachings, especially his thoughts about freedom of religious expression, racial inequality, integration, gender discrimination, and appreciation of black working-class culture. The essay argues that COGIC congregants regarded Mason’s unusual religious demonstrations as embodying political protests—these rituals of resistance transformed black lives, helping to strengthen and sustain blacks fighting for freedom in segregated Memphis.

The “New Crowd” Goes Global

The United States' entry into World War II led the federal government to renew its surveillance and censorship of black journalists who struck at segregation in wartime. Simultaneously, the white press dismissed black reporters for failing to uphold the doctrine of objectivity. National black newspapers reconciled black protest and white scrutiny by forsaking explicit textual radicalism for a more coded militancy, as illustrated by the “Double V” campaign. Black war correspondents – including Edgar Rouzeau, Deton "Jack" Brooks, Roi Ottley, and George Padmore – praised black troops for their patriotism and sacrifice but also explained how white supremacy structured the lives of people of color elsewhere in the world. By the war's end, black journalists had achieved an uneasy détente with federal officials and white journalists.