Percy Greene, publisher and editor of the Jackson Advocate from 1939 to 1977, lost the backing of the African American community in the 1950s for his harsh criticisms of the civil rights movement. He also accepted money from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a state agency created to destroy the movement in the South. Nonetheless, he continued to publish the most important black newspaper in Mississippi, telling the news from the perspective of a radical black conservative.
In the summer of 1928, William Alexander Scott began a small four-page weekly with the help of his brother Cornelius. In 1930 his Atlanta World became a semiweekly, and the following year W. A. began to implement his vision for a massive newspaper chain based out of Atlanta: the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, later dubbed the Scott Newspaper Syndicate. In April 1931 the World had become a triweekly, and its reach began drifting beyond the South. With The Grapevine of the Black South, Thomas Aiello offers the first critical history of this influential newspaper syndicate, from its roots in the 1930s through its end in the 1950s. At its heyday, more than 240 papers were associated with the Syndicate, making it one of the biggest organs of the black press during the period leading up to the classic civil rights era (1955–68). In the generation that followed, the Syndicate helped formalize knowledge among the African American population in the South. As the civil rights movement exploded throughout the region, black southerners found a collective identity in that struggle built on the commonality of the news and the subsequent interpretation of that news. Or as Gunnar Myrdal explained, the press was “the chief agency of group control. It [told] the individual how he should think and feel as an American Negro and create[d] a tremendous power of suggestion by implying that all other Negroes think and feel in this manner.” It didn’t create a complete homogeneity in black southern thinking, but it gave thinkers a similar set of tools from which to draw.
This is a book that exposes the practice of racial betrayal among African Americans and how J. Edgar Hoover used that slavery-imposed mindset on certain individuals within the Black community to undercut and stagnate Black struggle and progress in the Twentieth century.
This work examines both predominately black newspapers in general and four in particular--the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City), and the Jackson (Mississippi) Advocate--and their coverage of national events. The beginnings of the black press are detailed, focusing on how they reported the anti-slavery movement, the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Their coverage of the migration of blacks to the industrial north in the early twentieth century and World War I are next examined, followed by the black press response to World War II and the civil rights movement. The survival techniques used by the editors, how some editors reacted when faced with threats of physical harm, and how the individual editorial policies affected the different newspapers are fully explored. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
For southern newspapers and southern readers, the social upheaval in the years following Brown v. Board of Education (1954) was, as Time put it in 1956, “the region's biggest running story since slavery.” The southern press struggled with the region's accommodation of the school desegregation ruling and with Black America's demand for civil rights. The nine essays in The Press and Race illuminate the broad array of print journalists' responses to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, a state that was one of the nation's major civil rights battlegrounds. Three of the journalists covered won Pulitzer Prizes for their work and one was the first female editorial writer to earn that coveted prize. The journalists and editors covered are Hodding Carter, Jr. (Greenville Delta Democrat-Times), J. Oliver Emmerich (McComb Enterprise-Journal), Percy Greene (Jackson Advocate), Ira B. Harkey, Jr. (Pascagoula Chronicle), George A. McLean (Tupelo Journal), Bill Minor (New Orleans Times-Picayune), Hazel Brannon Smith (Lexington Adviser), and Jimmy Ward (Jackson Daily News). Their editorial stances run the gamut from moderates such as Minor, Smith, and Carter, Jr., to openly segregationist editors such as Ward and Greene. The Press and Race follows the press from the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision to 1965, when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act. Those years saw some of the most notable events of the civil rights movement—the South's resistance to school desegregation throughout the 1950s and 1960s; the Freedom Rides of 1961; James Meredith's admission into the University of Mississippi in 1962; the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963; and the events of Freedom Summer in 1964. These essays present an in-depth analysis of the editorials, articles, journalistic standards, and work of Mississippi newspaper reporters and editors as they covered this tumultuous era in American history. While a handful of Mississippi journalists openly defended Black people and challenged the state's racial policies, others responded by redoubling their support of Mississippi's segregated society. Still others responded with a moderate defense of Black Americans' legal rights, while at the same time defending the status quo of segregation. The Press and Race reveals the outrage, emotion, and deliberation of the people who would soon be carrying out the nation's command to end segregation. The journalists discussed here were southerners and insiders in a crisis. Their writing made journalism history.
Details the ferment in civil rights that took place across the South before the momentous Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954 This collection refutes the notion that the movement began with the Supreme Court decision, and suggests, rather, that the movement originated in the 1930s and earlier, spurred by the Great Depression and, later, World War II—events that would radically shape the course of politics in the South and the nation into the next century. This work explores the growth of the movement through its various manifestations—the activities of politicians, civil rights leaders, religious figures, labor unionists, and grass-roots activists—throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It discusses the critical leadership roles played by women and offers a new perspective on the relationship between the NAACP and the Communist Party. Before Brown shows clearly that, as the drive toward racial equality advanced and national political attitudes shifted, the validity of white supremacy came increasingly into question. Institutionalized racism in the South had always offered white citizens material advantages by preserving their economic superiority and making them feel part of a privileged class. When these rewards were threatened by the civil rights movement, a white backlash occurred.
The plight of the Black male in American society has been well-documented by scholars and practitioners. Although Black males represent only 6 percent of the American population, they represent about 40 percent of the prison population; the number of Black males in prison and jail exceeds the number of Black males in higher education. The homicide rates for Black males were 72.5 percent per 100,000, nearly eight times higher than for White males. This bibliographic volume explores the extent to which American academia has addressed these problems. It will be an invaluable resource for researchers as well as practitioners in social service programs. In addition to more than 400 annotated publications, the book includes a selected list of works on the African American male and a compilation of doctoral dissertations. This publication will serve as a reference in public as well as academic libraries, human service agencies, government policymaking agencies, and in academic courses in gender and ethnic studies, criminal justice, and social psychology.
