Garvey Must Go

This chapter reinterprets the New Negro era as an intense moment of jockeying for racial leadership among certain black male leaders and black male publishers in Harlem. This chapter argues that when Marcus Garvey arrived in Harlem to build his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), he stepped into a crucible of New Negro thought, organizing, and publications with competing visions for racial advancement. The UNIA’s businesses and paper, the Negro World, helped make Garvey the premier black leader of his day. But debates about his ideas among many black leaders quickly led to a public war of words between Garvey and critics in which they strove to use their papers to destroy the leadership of the other. Garvey used the Negro World to perform a rhetorical emasculation of critics. Garvey’s critics retaliated with the “Garvey Must Go” campaign. It not only laid bare a contentious battle in print among rival black male leaders, but also the influence the black press now had to elevate and/or destroy black male leadership.

Go to It, My Southern Brothers

This chapter reinterprets the Great Migration as a call to manhood for black men led by the Crisis and, in particular, the Chicago Defender. Their promotion of the migration along these lines gave rise to the modern black press, as well as the personal quests of W. E. B. DuBois, founder of the Crisis, and Robert Abbott, founder of the Defender, to achieve their own manhood through newspaper publishing. Yet, unlike DuBois, Abbott deployed sensationalism in order to amplify his paper’s particular call to manhood, politicizing and en-gendering the migration through riveting rhetoric that asserted that urbanity was the new maker and marker of manhood over the emasculating south’s older models of manhood connected to land ownership and self-produced commodities. The Defender’s construction of an urban-based black manhood helped set the tone for emerging New Negro sensibilities. Additionally, the Defender’s use of a gendered sensationalism helped establish black newspapers’ role in framing racial advancement within masculine terms throughout the twentieth century black freedom struggle.

Introduction

This chapter delineates the major arguments, questions, and historiographic interventions of the book, discussing the discourse theories that the book engages, centering especially on public spheres, black publics, and counterpublics. It also provides a reconsideration of the critical dialogical and commercial relationship between black readers and black publishers, as well as between the publishers and their own papers.

Conclusion

This chapter closes the book, revisiting the book’s major arguments and themes by observing John Sengstacke at the height of his journalistic career as he looked out on the future of a weathered black press and new generation of black male publishers.

A Challenge to Our Manhood

This chapter reinterprets Robert F. Williams as a new kind of black male publisher, who challenged the civil rights establishment and the mainstream black press. Northern black papers had often challenged southern black papers to be as militant as they were, but Williams, a publisher based in the South, accepted this challenge, prompted by escalating racial violence in the South following the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision. Lacking the commercial resources of the mainstream black press, Williams used a mimeograph machine to publish The Crusader to address these issues and promote a vision of black manhood rooted in black self-defense against the non-violent strategy promoted by Martin Luther King, Jr. Williams came to believe in “print and practice,” and issued a challenge to mainstream black newspapers to do the same, which helped expose the black press for not being as militant as it had long claimed to be. Many black newspapers now sided with nonviolent activists, elevating Martin Luther King especially, a move that helped usher in the decline of mainstream black newspapers and the rise of radical ones.

Walk the Way of Free Men

This chapter reinterprets the rise of black radicalism as a moment of competing “voices” across competing mass medias amid rapid changes in the black freedom struggle and media landscape of the 1960s. It also reinterprets Malcolm X as a newspaper publisher, a rather underanalyzed side of Malcolm. Black publishers had long considered their papers the “voice” of the race, and Malcolm’s founding of Muhammad Speaks in 1960 to amplify the voice of Elijah Muhammad signified this. Yet, the paper’s founding also marked the beginning of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) robust media campaign to use various medias—radio, books, and albums of Muhammad’s speeches—to promote Muhammad’s vision for racial advancement over others. His vision promised to redeem black manhood by renewing their lives, a vision displayed through salesmen for Muhammad Speaks. Thus, readers could read both the paper and their bodies. Malcolm, however, made his display through television. But when he began to gain a voice through television that rivaled that of Muhammad’s in print, the NOI’s media campaign turned from promising to renew the lives of black men to promising to take it away. Malcolm became a newspaperman cut short of his full publishing potential.

The Fraternity

This chapter reinterprets the production of black newspapers as a “production” of Race men. It examines Robert S. Abbott’s efforts to groom his nephew, John Sengstacke, to succeed him during a crisis for the nation and for the paper. This crisis was the Great Depression, which presented the Defender with a number of financial challenges. Yet, focusing especially on private letters Abbott and Sengstacke exchanged between 1931 and 1934, Abbott worked to train Sengstacke to confront these challenges by teaching him to be a self-made man. Sengstacke embraced parts of Abbott’s conceptions of manhood, while also embracing conceptions coming from labor activists and Depression era racial and political organizing. Sengstacke eventually married the two and founded the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), which he marketed to other members of the black press as a fraternity. With the black press organized within this masculine framework, many black newspapers worked to unite nationally to fight segregation in the armed forces and major league baseball by the 1940s.