Academic literature on the topic 'African American press'

Using African American newspapers, this study examines the consensual opinion of articles and editorials regarding two events associated with the space race. One event is the Soviet launch of Sputnik on October 4, 1957. The second is the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969. Space Race investigates how two scientific accomplishments achieved during the Cold War and the civil rights movement stimulated debate within the newspapers, and that ultimately centered around two questions: why the Soviets were successful in launching a satellite before the US, and what benefits could come from landing on the moon. Anti-intellectualism, inferior public schools, and a lack of commitment on the part of the US government are arguments offered for analysis by black writers in the two years studied. This topic involves the social conditions of African Americans living within the United States during an era when major civil rights objectives were achieved. Also included are considerations of how living in a "space age" contributed to thoughts about civil rights, as African Americans were now living during a period in which science fiction was becoming reality. In addition, this thesis examines how two scientific accomplishments achieved during this time affected ideas about education, science, and living conditions in the U.S. that were debated by black writers and editors, and subsequently circulated for readers to ponder and debate. This paper argues that black newspapers viewed Sputnik as constituting evidence for an inferior US public school system, contrasted with the Soviet system. Due to segregation between the races and anti-intellectual antecedents in America, black newspapers believed that African Americans were an "untapped resource" that could aid in the Cold War if their brains were utilized. The Apollo moon landing was greeted with enthusiasm because of the universal wonder at landing on the moon itself and the prowess demonstrated by the collective commitment and organization necessary to achieve such an objective by decades end. However, consistently accompanying this adulation is disappointment that domestic problems were not given the same type of funding or national commitment.

Media & Communication<br>Ph.D.<br>Through the development of entertainment culture, African American actors, athletes and musicians increasingly were publicly recognized. In the mainstream press, Black celebrities were often faced with the same snubs and prejudices as ordinary Black citizens, who suffered persecution under Jim Crow legislation that denied African Americans their basic civil rights. In the Black press, however, these celebrities received great attention, and as visible and popular members of the Black community they played a decisive yet often unwitting and tenuous role in representing African American identity collectively. Charles M. Payne and Adam Green use the term "critical citizenship" to describe the way in which African Americans during this period conceptualized their identities as American citizens. Though Payne and Green discussed critical citizenship in terms of activism, this project broadens the term to include considerations of community-building and race pride as well. Conceptualizing critical citizenship for the black community was an important part of the overall mission of the Black press. Black press entertainment journalism, which used celebrities as both "constellations" and companions in the fight for civil rights, emerged against the battle against Jim Crowism and came to embody the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance. The purpose of this project is to trace how celebrity reporting in the black press developed over time, distinct from yet contemporaneous with the development of yellow journalism in the mainstream press, and to understand how black journalists and editors conceptualized the idea of "celebrity" as it related to their overall construction of critical citizenship. The evidence in support of this project was collected from an inductive reading of the entertainment-related content of the following black press newspapers over the time period 1895-1935: Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender, New York Age, New York Amsterdam News, Philadelphia Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Cleveland Gazette, Kansas City/Topeka Plaindealer, Savannah Tribune, and Atlanta Daily World. In addition, the entertainment content of Black press magazines The Crisis, The Messenger, The Opportunity and The Negro World was included.<br>Temple University--Theses

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University<br>Between 1859 and 1909, the African-American press in Boston, Cleveland, New York, and Philadelphia nurtured a radical black political consciousness that challenged white supremacy on a national and local level. Specifically, black newspapers provided the ideological foundation for the New Negro movement of the 1910s and 1920s by cultivating this consciousness in readers. This dissertation examines black newspapers as political texts through what I have called figurative black nationalism in the ante-bellum Anglo-African, Douglass' Monthly, and Christian Recorder; through the political independence advocated in the post-Reconstruction New York Age, Cleveland Gazette, and Boston Advocate; and through the tum of the century Woman's Era, Colored American, and Boston Guardian. This study challenges fundamental assumptions about race, politics, and African-American activism between the Civil War and the Progressive Era. First, analyzing how ante-bellum African-Americans used the press to define radical abolition on their own terms shows that they adopted what I call figurative black nationalism through the Anglo-African's serialization of Martin R. Delany's 1859 novel Blake, or The Huts ofAmerica. Second, even as this press moved to the post-bellum south, northern African-Americans became increasingly alienated from the conservative rhetoric of racial spokesmen, particularly as the fall of Reconstruction led to repeal of the 1875 Civil Rights Act and failure of the 1890 Federal Elections Bill. Frances E.W. Harper's serialized novel Minnie's Sacrifice perpetuated the idea that free and freed people shared a post-bellum political outlook in the Christian Recorder, but such unity was elusive in reality. Consequently, northern African-Americans adopted a form of "mugwumpism" that questioned notions of blind African-American loyalty to the Republican Party. Finally, black northerners at the turn of the century reclaimed the radical abolition and political independence of the past in a successful assault on Tuskegee-style accommodation through a radical version of racial uplift. This radical racial uplift was shaped through northern black women's appropriation of Anna Julia Cooper's feminism, through Pauline Hopkins' serial novel Hagar's Daughter, and through William Monroe Trotter's participation in the Niagara Movement. Northern black politics, rather than white Progressivism or southern black conservatism, nurtured twentieth century civil rights activism.

This thesis examines the representations of Haiti in the black and white American press throughout the United States Occupation, 1915-1934, and in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. It analyses how Haiti's revolutionary and colonial history has been variously celebrated and ignored, and as well as the context in which such representations took place.

African American Studies<br>Ph.D.<br>The writings and the experience of independent African American editors in the first half of the twentieth century from 1901 to 1955 played an invaluable role in laying the ideological groundwork for the Black Freedom movement beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The anti-imperialist writings of Pauline Hopkins who was literary editor of the Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904 celebrated revolutionary leaders, and adopted an independent course that refused partisan lines, which prompted her replacement as editor according to a letter she writes to William Monroe Trotter. The anti-imperialist writing of A. Philip Randolph as editor of The Messenger from 1917 to 1928, raised the role of labor organizing in the advancement of racial justice and helped to provide future organizers. These individuals founded the Southern Negro Youth Congress an analytical framework that would help organize thousands of Southern workers against the Jim Crow system into labor unions. Based on the letters he wrote to the American Fund For Public Service, Randolph raised funds by appealing to the values that he believed Fund chair Roger Baldwin also valued while protecting individual supporters of The Messenger from government surveillance. The anti-imperialist writing of Paul Robeson as chair of the editorial board of Freedom from 1950 to 1955 could not escape McCarthyist government surveillance which eventually caused its demise. However not before including an anti-fascist editorial ideology endorsing full equality for African Americans that inspired plays by Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry that imagined a world that defies the increasingly fascist rule of the American state. This thesis will argue that the Black Freedom Struggle that developed after the fifties owed a great deal to Hopkins, Randolph, and Robeson. The work that these three did as editors and writers laid a solid intellectual, ideological, and political foundation for the later and better known moment when African American would mobilize en masse to demand meaningful equality in the United States.<br>Temple University--Theses

BLACK PRESS COVERAGE OF THE EMMETT TILL LYNCHING AS A CATALYST TO THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT by MICHAEL OBY Under the Direction of Leonard Teel ABSTRACT The movement for civil rights in America gathered momentum throughout the 1950s. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. The Board of Education ruling, declaring unconstitutional permissive or mandatory school segregation, the white South responded with both passive and active resistance. In the midst of this ferment, an African-American boy from Chicago was lynched in Mississippi. Subsequent stories in the black press reported not only Emmett Till’s murder and the trial, but also a widening mobilization within the race, notably the creation of associations in defense of civil rights. The coverage of news and views in the black press provide substantial evidence that this mobilization ignited the civil rights movement of the mid-1950s, just months before the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr. This research supports the view that the black community’s mobilization during the months after Till’s murder served as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.