Journalism

Faced with the challenge of seeking just treatment in a society that systematically restricted the lives of freepeople as well as slaves, African Americans began publishing their own periodicals long before the Civil War, using their words as weapons in a protracted struggle for equality. The crusading editors of early black newspapers comprised an intellectual vanguard with a five-pronged mission: (1) to define the identity of a people who had been stripped of their own culture in a hostile environment; (2) to create a sense of unity by establishing a network of communication among literate blacks and their white supporters throughout the country; (3) to examine issues from a black perspective; (4) to chronicle black achievements that were ignored by the American mainstream; and (5) to further the cause of black liberation.

These objectives, set forth by the founders of one of the oldest black institutions in the United States, underscored the activities of African-American journalists for nearly 150 years. When blacks began to move into the mainstream during the latter part of the twentieth century, assuming positions on general-circulation newspapers and in the broadcast media, many retained a sense of being linked to a larger racial cause. Often they were torn by conflicting loyalties. Were they blacks first or journalists first? Should they strive for respect in the mainstream by

avoiding stories dealing with black topics, or fill in the gaps of coverage that might be left by white reporters? Should they follow the journalistic rule that calls for objectivity and report even events that might be damaging to blacks, or be mindful of the effects their stories might have on attitudes toward African Americans? It was a measure of social change that no such questions would have entered the minds of their predecessors.

Origins

The first African-American newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was founded in New York City on March 16, 1827, in response to the persistent attacks on blacks by a proslavery white paper, the New York Enquirer. The purpose of this pioneering publication was to encourage enlightenment and to enable blacks in the various states to exchange ideas. Thus it provided a forum for debate on issues that swirled around the institution of slavery. Among these was the question of whether blacks should strive for full citizenship and assimilation in America—a view favored by most blacks at that time—or whether they should follow a course of separation and opt for resettlement in Africa, a position then held mostly by whites who saw this as a way to rid the country of troublesome free blacks.

The two founding editors of Freedom's Journal were educated and accomplished freemen who stood on opposite sides of the colonization question. Samuel E. Cornish, an ordained minister who had organized the first African Presbyterian church in the United States, thought blacks should fight for integration in America, while the Jamaican-born John B. Russwurm, who was the nation's second black college graduate (from Bowdoin College) supported repatriation in a part of West Africa that became Liberia. But they were united in their opposition to slavery and appetite for discussion. They clearly set forth their mission in the first issue of Freedom's Journal, stating: "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us…. From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented."

Six months later, when their differences over the colonization issue proved insurmountable, Cornish left. Russwurm continued publishing the paper until March 28, 1829. He then settled in Liberia where he remained until his death in 1851, at one time editing a newspaper called The Liberia Herald

Two months after Russwurm's departure, Cornish resurrected Freedom's Journal on May 29, 1829, changing its name to The Rights of All and infusing it with a more militant tone; publication was suspended on October 9 of the same year. Though Cornish was active in the antislavery and black convention movements, he was driven toward journalism. In 1837 he became editor of Philip A. Bell's newspaper, the Weekly Advocate. Two months after its debut, the paper was renamed the Colored American and was published until 1842. Although the paper was based in New York, there is evidence that a Philadelphia edition also was produced, making it possibly the first African-American publication to serve more than one city with different editions. Scholars of the early black press have noted the quality and originality of the Colored American, which was uncompromising in its call for black unity and full citizenship rights for all.

After these first steps had been taken, others began using journalism to establish communication links in a largely illiterate nation and to generate support in the struggle against slavery. While most of these papers were based in New York, the Alienated American was launched in Cleveland on April 9, 1853. Martin R. Delany, the first black graduate of Harvard, published his own newspaper, the Mystery, in Pittsburgh before he became assistant editor of Frederick Douglass's North Star. Other outstanding early publications were Stephen Myer's Elevator (Albany, New York, 1842), Thomas Hamilton's Anglo-American (New York, 1843), and William Wells Brown's Rising Sun (New York, 1847).

The first black newspaper to be published in the South before the Civil War was the Daily Creole, which surfaced in New Orleans in 1856 but bowed to white pressure in assuming an anti-abolitionist stance. It was followed near the end of the Civil War by the New Orleans Tribune, which appeared in July 1864 and is considered the first daily black newspaper. Published three times a week in both English and French, it was an official organ of Louisiana's Republican Party, then the nation's progressive political wing. The Tribune called for bold measures to redress the grievances of bondage, including universal suffrage and payment of weekly wages to ex-slaves.

Most of these newspapers depended on the personal resources of their publishers along with contributions from white sympathizers to supplement the meager income from subscriptions, but prosperous blacks also lent their support. A notable "angel" of the period was James Forten, a Philadelphia veteran of the American Revolution who had amassed a fortune as a sail manufacturer. Forten was a major backer of William Lloyd Garrison, a white journalist who became one of the leading voices in the abolitionist movement through his newspaper the Liberator, first published on January 1, 1831.

Of the forty or so black newspapers published before the Civil War, the most influential was the North Star, founded and edited by Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, on November 1, 1847. The name was that of the most brilliant star in the night sky, Polaris, a reference point for escaping slaves as they picked their way northward to freedom. Douglass is an important historical figure, often not regarded primarily as a journalist, but he, like the black leaders who would follow him, knew how to use the press as a weapon. In the prospectus announcing his new publication, he wrote: "The object of the North Star will be to attack slavery in all its forms and aspects; advocate Universal Emancipation; exact the standard of public morality; promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the colored people; and to hasten the day of freedom to our three million enslaved fellow countrymen." Thus he defined the thrust of the early black press.

A Period of Transition

The number of black newspapers increased dramatically after the end of the Civil War in 1965, as the newly emancipated struggled to survive with no resources and few guaranteed rights. Publications sprang up in states where none had previously existed. Armistead S. Pride, the leading scholar on the black press, determined in the mid-twentieth century that African Americans had published 575 newspapers or periodicals by 1890, the end of the Reconstruction period. Although most were short-lived and many were religious or political publications rather than regular newspapers, some survived—notably the Philadelphia Tribune, which was founded in 1884 and continues to be published. It is considered the oldest continuously published black newspaper in the United States. This period also marks the beginning of the Afro-American, which originated as a four-page Baptist Church publication in Baltimore on August 13, 1892. After several metamorphoses, it became the highly respected anchor of a nationally distributed newspaper chain.

This heightened journalistic activity was the result of many factors, among them an increase in literacy and greater mobility on the part of blacks, though their position in society as a whole was hardly satisfactory. When federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877 as a matter of political expediency, African Americans were left to the mercy of bitter whites who had fought to deny them freedom. Slavery was replaced by the economic bondage of sharecropping. White dominance was sustained through a system of rigidly enforced segregation and terrorism, including lynching, the random torture and hanging of blacks. When southern blacks fled to northern cities in the first wave of the Great Migration, they found themselves trapped in squalid ghettos with few opportunities for work except in the most menial jobs. For these reasons, the black press was still fueled by the spirit of protest, though that spark often had to be veiled.

The pattern for race relations in America had been set in 1895 when Booker T. Washington, a former slave who had founded Tuskegee Institute, a school providing vocational education for blacks, went before the Cotton States' Exposition in Atlanta and proclaimed that it was folly for blacks to seek equal rights: They should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and make the best of things as they were, getting along with whites by being patient, hardworking, subservient, and unresentful. In one of the most famous metaphors of American history, Washington raised his hand and declared: "In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." Such rhetoric, calling for a separate but not necessarily equal society, condoned the conservative mood of the era. Ordained by whites to speak for blacks, because of his "Atlanta compromise" Washington came to wield extraordinary power. It extended to the press, as black publishers struggled to keep their papers alive. Most had a small subscription base and

advertising was hard to come by. Therefore, they were inordinately dependent on contributions. Washington's critics said that he exercised undue influence over the black press by controlling loans, advertisements, and political subsidies, making certain that his doctrine prevailed.

The journalist most commonly associated with Washington is T. Thomas Fortune, who was editor of he New York Age during a period when Washington controlled it financially and used the paper as a conduit for presentation of his views, though Fortune did not share them. Respected as an accomplished writer with a sharp satiric style, Fortune was one of the first of his race to hold an editorial position on a white daily, writing for the New York Sun and the Evening Sun, leading turn-of-the-century newspapers. Before assuming control of the Age, Fortune had published two newspapers of his own, the Globe and the Freeman, which were considered the best of their type. The Age had grown out of a tabloid called the Rumor, established in 1890.

Fortune was an activist who thoroughly opposed Washington's willing acquiescence to racism and used the Age to promulgate his own ideas. He extolled black pride before the arrival of the twentieth century, urging that the term Afro-American be used instead of "negro," then usually spelled with a lowercase n. Disdaining political patronage and declaring himself as independent, he had to get along without the political advertising that was the main source of income for black newspapers. As a result, Fortune had to rely increasingly on contributions from Booker T. Washington, who eventually purchased the Age. Obliged to write editorials espousing Washington's views, Fortune responded by presenting his own opinions in opposing editorials in the same edition. Researchers credit Fortune with having written or edited all of Washington's books and many of his speeches, but Washington never acknowledged him. Torn by the compromises he was forced to make, Fortune succumbed to mental illness and poverty during the latter part of his career, but he has been called the dean of black journalism.

A few intrepid journalists refused to accept a state of such uneasy compromise. Ida B. Wells-Barnett transcended gender by risking her life to expose racially motivated crimes. She was a teacher in the rural schools of Mississippi and later Tennessee, when she began writing exposés about injustices in the education system. Turning to journalism on a full-time basis, she became part owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech. In May 1892, when three black Memphis businessmen were lynched after a white mob attacked their grocery store, Wells-Barnett charged in her paper that the murders had been instigated by the white business community and called for a boycott of those white businesses. She also wrote that she had purchased a pistol and would use it to protect herself. While Wells-Barnett was out of town to attend a convention, her newspaper office and the building that housed it were burned down. She relocated to New York, where she continued her crusade in Fortune's New York Age, of which she became a part owner. She later published extensive documentation of lynchings in Redbook magazine, a leading mainstream publication.

Washington's accommodationist views still prevailed at the arrival of the twentieth century, but a more militant tone was set when William Monroe Trotter founded the Boston Guardian in 1901 with George Forbes. Both had graduated from college in 1895, Trotter from Harvard and Forbes from Amherst. Trotter quickly became the main force on the paper. The product of an interracial marriage, he had grown up comfortably in a Boston suburb. At Harvard, he had become the first African American inducted into the honor society Phi Beta Kappa and went on to earn his M.A. degree there in 1896. Unwilling to accept any sort of compromise, he demanded absolute equality for blacks and used his paper to consolidate the first organized opposition to Washington and his ideas. Trotter joined with another son of Massachusetts, W. E. B. Du Bois—who is considered by many to be the greatest intellectual produced by black America—in laying groundwork for the Niagara Movement, the forerunner of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Trotter then disdained the NAACP for being too little, too late, and too white. He carried the fight for black rights to the international arena, going be fore the League of Nations and the World Peace Conference in Paris, to no avail. Disillusioned and ill, Trotter either jumped or fell to his death from the roof of his Boston home in 1934, when he was sixty-two years old. But he had sounded a defiant note that set the tone for further development of the black press throughout the twentieth century.

Early black newspapers bore little resemblance to their modern counterparts. From the beginning, they had not been intended as instruments of mass communication. They were aimed at a small, educated elite and emphasized commentary over news coverage. Editors exchanged copies of their publications by mail and engaged in debates over issues, with the responses appearing in their next editions. It was assumed that subscribers also read white publications and thus were informed on national events. Yet these papers filled a void by interpreting the news from a black perspective and noting developments of particular interest to African Americans, providing information that was not available elsewhere. This included local coverage of religious and social events, still a mainstay of black newspapers.

Growth and Power

The modern black press did not come into being until 1905, when Robert S. Abbott founded the Chicago Defender, the first African-American newspaper designed to appeal to the masses and, consequently, the first commercially successful black journalistic enterprise. Although Abbott's sole objective was to improve the plight of blacks in America, he realized that he would have to communicate with the common people if he were to help them. In this respect Abbott followed the imperatives that have shaped daily newspapers since the beginning of the twentieth century. It has been assumed, for the most part, that a publication first must capture the attention of the largest number of potential readers by playing up stories that generate immediate interest. Abbott took particular note of the practices of William Randolph Hearst, who had built the largest journalistic empire of the early twentieth century by engaging in sensationalism to boost sales. But in spite of the screaming red headlines and excited tone that came to mark the Defender's style, the paper, at its core, held to the same precepts that have informed black journalism since its inception.

A small, very black man who suffered the indignities imposed on those of his color during a period when dark skin was considered a major social liability even among African Americans, Abbott was a Georgian who settled in Chicago where he decided to publish his own newspaper, although three other black newspapers already were being distributed there. According to Roi Ottley, Abbott's biographer, the publisher started out in a rented room with nothing but a card table, a borrowed chair, and twenty-five cents in capital, intent on producing his newspaper. Abbott, who had a law degree, called it the Defender because he intended to fight for the rights of black people. At that time the black population of Chicago was concentrated in so few blocks on the South Side that Abbott could gather the news, sell advertising, and distribute his newspaper on foot by himself. That was a situation he was to change with his paper.

At first Abbott avoided politics and other contentious topics, featuring neighborhood news and personals, but he hit his stride when he began to concentrate on muckraking, publishing exposés of prostitution and other criminal activities in the black community. Adopting the scarlet headlines favored by his white counterparts, Abbott developed a publication so popular that copies were posted in churches and barbershops where blacks congregated, so that the latest stories could be read aloud.

One of the factors that contributed to Abbott's early success was increasing literacy among blacks. By 1910 seven out of ten blacks over the age of ten could read and Chicago's black population had grown to 44,103, though still concentrated in a small area. In 1910, when the Defender was in its fifth year, Abbott hired his first paid employee, J. Hockley Smiley, an editor who moved the paper more decidedly toward sensationalism and encouraged the publisher to press for national circulation. White distributors refused to carry black newspapers, but Chicago was a major railroad center, so Smiley suggested that railroad porters and waiters be used to carry bundles of papers to their destinations, smuggling them into the South, where they could be turned over to local black agents. In turn, the railroad workers brought back news, enabling the Defender to become the first black publication with a truly national scope. To shore up this thrust, Abbott employed Roscoe Conkling Simmons, a leading narrator, to tour the country, promoting the paper. Since the stance of the Defender was militant, with detailed accounts of injustices committed against blacks, participants in this underground distribution system courted danger. Two agents were killed and others were driven from their homes because of their involvement with the Defender. Yet Abbott did not back down, engaging the redoubtable Ida B. WellsBarnett to report on riots, lynchings, and other racial wrongs.

Abbott found his place in history in 1917, during World War I, when he began to publish front-page stories with blazing headlines urging southern blacks to migrate to the North, where they could escape from the indignities of Dixie and acquire higher-paying jobs in industry. The paper offered group railroad rates to migrants and encouraged them to seek personal advice on how to adjust to the big city by following the Defender's regular features. Scholars credit the Defender with being a major force in stimulating the tide of northern migration after the war, when blacks realized that the rights U.S. soldiers had fought for abroad were not being extended to them at home. More than 300,000 African Americans migrated to the great industrial cities of the North between 1916 and 1918, with 110,000 moving to Chicago alone, tripling the city's black population.

By 1920, the Defender claimed its peak circulation of 283,571, with an additional high pass-along rate. Unlike those struggling earlier black publishers, Abbott became a millionaire, moving into his own fully paid-for half-million-dollar plant on Chicago's South Side. With a broad-based national circulation, the Defender offered hope and inspiration to poor southern blacks like the young Johnny Johnson, who read the paper as a youth in his native Arkansas during the early 1930s and son moved north with his family to Chicago, where he would build his own publishing empire. Though the paper eventually declined in popularity, due to its failure to keep up with the growing sophistication of blacks, it is still being published. When Abbott died in 1940, one of his nephews, John H. Sengstacke, assumed leadership. In 1956 he converted the Defender into a daily; it appeared four times a week with an additional weekend edition.

While Abbott carved out his empire from Chicago, some resourceful publishers in other parts of the country also built journalistic enterprises that cumulatively developed into one of the most powerful institutions in black America.

At least a dozen black newspapers had come and gone in Pittsburgh by 1910, when the lawyer Robert L. Vann drew up incorporation papers for the Pittsburgh Courier, a fledgling publication he edited and eventually came to own. Born impoverished in 1879 in Ahoskie, North Carolina, Vann struggled for years to get an education, finally earning both baccalaureate and law degrees from the Western University of Pennsylvania, later renamed the University of Pittsburgh. A relatively small man, like Abbott, he was encouraged by friends to pass for an East Indian because he had straight hair and keen features, but Vann remained staunchly black. Though the Courier managed to survive, it did not gain much momentum until 1914, when Ira F. Lewis joined the staff as a sportswriter. He turned out to be a gifted salesman who built advertising and circulation, going on to become business manager of the paper and transforming it into a national institution.

In its editorial tone, the Pittsburgh Courier tended to be somewhat less sensational than the Defender, commanding attention with its distinctive peach-colored cover page. In front-page editorials, Vann led his crusades, demanding that the huge industrial firms hire African Americans and criticizing unions for denying blacks membership, while the European immigrants who were surging into the labor market were accepted in both cases. He called for better education and housing for blacks and urged them to boycott movie houses and stores that overcharged them or treated them disrespectfully.

A local publication during its early years, the Courier began to make national inroads during the 1920s, when Vann improved its quality by retaining some of the most talented black journalists of the period. George S. Schuyler, a figure of the Harlem Renaissance who was called the black H. L. Mencken because of his bitingly satiric prose, began contributing a weekly column and became the chief editorial writer, a position he held for several decades. Schuyler also toured the nation to produce extensive series on the socioeconomic status of black America.

Vann sent Joel A. Rogers, a self-taught historian, to Europe and Africa, where he documented black contributions to Western civilization. Rogers later produced a column called "Your History" and collaborated with an artist on a weekly illustrated feature that stimulated pride among blacks, who had been denied evidence of prior achievements by their race. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, Rogers became one of the first black war correspondents by covering the conflict from the front. His colorful dispatches captured the attention of African Americans throughout the United States and thus boosted circulation.

Sparkling entertainment and social news were staples, but the Courier's forte was its sports coverage. Excellent reportage was provided by W. Rollo Wilson, William G. Nunn Sr., Wendell Smith, and Chester "Ches" Washington, a championship speed typist who went on in the 1970s to become the successful publisher of a chain of newspapers in California. The Courier secured its national stature during the 1930s by recognizing the potential of a young pugilist named Joe Louis and maintaining a virtual monopoly on coverage of his activities until long after Louis had become the most popular heavyweight champion in history. As a result, circulation reached 250,000 by 1937, according to figures of the Audit Bureau of Circulation, making the Courier competitive with the Defender as the nation's leading black weekly.

It was a role of the nation's top black newspapers to bridge the gap separating artists and intellectuals from the masses. The Defender published the early poems of the young Chicagoan Gwendolyn Brooks, who would become the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, and employed Willard Motley as a youth editor long before he became a best-selling novelist. The poet and humorist Langston Hughes introduced his character Jesse B. Semple (Simple) in its pages. Similarly, the Courier featured commentary and reviews by James Weldon Johnson, while W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a column for the paper after he stepped down as editor of the Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP.

Unlike Abbott, who relished his ties to the man in the street and especially fellow migrants from the South, Vann was an aloof, politically driven man who used his paper to promote his own career as a lawyer and to seek control of black patronage. He is perhaps best known for his defection from the Republican Party, which had claimed the loyalties of black voters since the time of Abraham Lincoln. Democrats were strongly identified with their party's southern segregationist faction. By 1932 the country was in the throes of an economic depression and the yet untried Franklin D. Roosevelt was the Democratic presidential candidate. Vann, who thought that the Republicans had taken the black vote for granted without responding to the needs of that constituency, delivered a speech that projected him to national prominence. Calling for the black vote to remain "liquid" rather than allied to a single party, he said, "I see millions of Negroes turning the picture of Lincoln to the wall." The line became a catchphrase in the successful Democratic campaign to get black votes and win the election.

Vann died in 1940, seven months after Robert S. Abbott. Yet he established so firm a foundation for the Courier that it retained its popularity for several more years under the management of Ira Lewis, with the publisher's widow, Jesse L. Vann, at the helm. Under editors P. L. Prattis and William G. Nunn, Sr., the crusades continued, with calls for integration of the armed forces during World War II and a "double V" campaign for victory abroad and against discrimination at home. In 1946 the Courier published fourteen editions, including local and national editions with branch offices in twelve cities, and was the most popular black publication even in several cities with their own black newspapers. It attained a circulation of 357,212 in May 1947, a record for audited black newspapers.

Some of the paper's crusades had tangible results. Courier sportswriter Wendell Smith, who had been using his column to press for integration of major league baseball since the 1920s, served as the liaison between Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, resulting in Robinson's joining that team in 1947.

After the death of Ira Lewis in 1948, the Courier lapsed into a general decline because of mismanagement and numerous other factors that affected the black press in the 1950s and 1960s. On the brink of financial collapse in 1965, it was purchased by John Sengstacke, owner of the Defender chain. Thus the similar but separate missions of Robert S. Abbott and Robert L. Vann converged in a final irony. Continuing publication as the New Pittsburgh Courier, it earned some awards for excellence under its new editor-in-chief, Hazel Garland, whose tenure there dated back to the Golden Age of the 1940s, but the Courier had become but a shadow of its old self. Sengstacke Publications, which included the Courier and other acquisitions, became the largest African-American newspaper chain in the country.

The third member of what could be called a triumvirate of great black national newspapers was the Afro-American, which evolved from its beginnings as a Baltimore church publication to become one of the most widely circulated black newspaper in the South and East, with branch offices in Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond, and Newark, New Jersey. Its founder was John H. Murphy, Sr., a former slave and a whitewasher by trade, who created it by merging his own Sunday school sheet with two similar church publications and going on to expand its coverage to include issues and events of interest to the general black public.

When Murphy died in 1922, his five sons took over the operation, with one of them, Carl Murphy, assuming control. Under his leadership, the Afro-American grew into a national publication with multiple editions that emphasized solid reportage and took moderate editorial positions. It became the dominant black publication in the Washington-Baltimore-Richmond triangle, focusing on political matters in a part of the country with a heavy concentration of African Americans. Though firmly patriotic in most of its views, the Afro, as it was known, demonstrated courage by standing up for the singer/actor Paul Robeson and the scholar/editor W. E. B. Du Bois when both were accused of being Communists during the McCarthy era. The publisher also ignored official pressure and sent the journalist William Worthy to Communist China on assignment after the U.S. State Department had denied him a visa. From 1961 through the 1980s the founder's grandson, John Murphy III, played a major role in the paper's fortunes, especially after the death of Carl Murphy in 1967. Over the years, successive generations of Murphys have stepped forward to assume leadership.

While these were the titans in the era of the popular black press, other newspapers distinguished themselves by serving the needs of their own urban communities. The Amsterdam News was established in 1909 in New York City when James H. Anderson began publishing a local sheet with $10 and a dream, giving it the name of the street on which he lived. The paper gained prominence and commercial success after 1936, when it was purchased by two Harlem physicians. One of them, C. B. Powell, assumed control and developed the paper to the point where it had a circulation of more than 100,000 after World War II. The Norfolk Journal and Guide achieved a high level of respectability after 1910, when P. B. Young, a twenty-six-year-old North Carolinian, purchased its original entity, a fraternal organ, and transformed it into a general circulation black newspaper. Avoiding sensationalism and maintaining a relatively conservative stance, the Journal and Guide was singled out for praise by mainstream scholars, who considered it the most objective of black newspapers. Yet it responded readily to the needs of its readers, launching campaigns that resulted in better housing for black residents and pay scales for black teachers that equaled those of whites. W. O. Walker built the Cleveland Call and Post into a "bread-and-butter" paper that focused firmly on local news, while the Scott family, beginning in 1932, built the Atlanta Daily World into the nation's oldest black daily, one of only three that survived beyond the 1990s. Across the nation, from the early to mid-twentieth century, it was difficult to find a major city that was not served by a black newspaper.

The reasons for their existence were obvious. Until the late 1950s African Americans were almost totally ignored by mainstream publications, and when they did appear, it was as suspected perpetrators of crime. If news of interest to the black population was included at all, it was in tiny, segregated columns dubbed "Negro" or "Afro-American," or some similar name, placed inconspicuously in back pages. Even reportage on African-American sports or entertainment figures was designed to reinforce prevailing stereotypes. Thus the black press served the palpable needs of a neglected and maligned people. Editors of black newspaper said that they hoped to change society to such an extent that they would put themselves out of business. But when this change began to take place, they were not prepared to cope with the consequences.

The Tides of Change

When the struggle for racial equality blossomed into the civil rights movement, beginning with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott in 1955, mainstream publications took steps toward covering events in which African Americans were the major players. As the movement spread from Montgomery to Birmingham to Little Rock and beyond, white newspaper editors began to realize that they were witnessing one of the biggest stories of the century. Furthermore, they were being challenged for the first time by television, a new medium that could provide more immediate coverage, enhanced by dramatic visual images that captured the action as it happened. This was most forcefully demonstrated on August 28, 1963, when television provided extended live coverage of the historic March on Washington and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Since each day brought new developments, most black newspapers, limited to weekly publication, were unable to compete. Furthermore, few of them possessed or were willing to commit the resources that would have enabled them to deploy correspondents to the various hot spots throughout the country. Reporters who worked for the black press during that time recalled their frustration at having to cover the movement by telephone or by rewriting accounts that appeared in the leading white-owned papers.

Although the coverage provided by mainstream print and broadcast media was from a white perspective, inroads were made into a territory that had been the exclusive property of the black press. Yet black journalists rarely were employed by the white media. Even in New York City, the nation's media capital, no African Americans held full-time jobs on white newspapers until Lester A. Walton was hired by the World in the 1920s. No further advances were made until 1936 when Ted Poston became a staff reporter for the New York Post. He risked his life to cover stories in the South, including the trial in Florida of three young black men who were beaten, with a fourth being killed, for the alleged rape of a white woman, a crime that was never proven. Poston won a George Polk award for his stories on this subject and became a legend in the field, but black journalists were still shunned by daily newspapers. In 1955, a year after the Supreme Court school-desegregation decision, Ebony magazine found only thirty-one blacks working on white newspapers throughout the country. Black journalists were so rare in the developing medium of television that they were not even counted before 1962, when Mal Goode, a radio newscaster and former advertising salesman for the Pittsburgh Courier, was hired by ABC to become the first network correspondent of his race.

No major changes were to occur until the late 1960s, when the nation's black communities went up in flames, from Watts in Los Angeles to Harlem in New York. The 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission Report, analyzed the causes of these upheavals. In a section implicating the media, the report said:

They have not communicated to the majority of their audience—which is white—a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of living in the ghetto. They have not communicated to whites a feeling for the difficulties and frustrations of being a Negro in the United States. They have not shown understanding or appreciation of—and thus have not communicated—a sense of Negro culture, thought or history.

Equally important, most newspaper articles and most television programming ignored the fact that an appreciable part of their audience was black. The world that television and newspapers offered to their black audience was almost totally white, in both appearance and attitude. As we have said, our evidence shows that the so-called "white press" is at best mistrusted and at worst held in contempt by many black Americans. Far too often, the press acts and talks about Negroes as if Negroes do not read the newspapers or watch television, give birth, marry, die and go to PTA meetings.

The riots, as they were transpiring, had driven home a message to white news managers, who realized that their reporters were ill-equipped to enter the alien world of black neighborhoods and to gain confidence of residents to the point where they might discover what was really going on. As the flames of rage spread from the ghettos to central commercial areas, some realized that the destiny of white America was irrevocably linked to that of black America. As a result, some black reporters were hired literally in the heat of the moment. With the strong indictment of the Kerner Commission finding its mark, black reporters were recruited by the mainstream for the first time, most commonly from the black press. By the mid-1970s nearly a hundred African-American journalists were employed by mainstream publications.

Another response to the report was the development of training programs to increase the limited supply of black journalists. The largest of these was a concentrated summer program established at Columbia University in 1968 through a $250,000 grant from the Ford Foundation. Directed by Fred Friendly, former head of CBS News and a professor at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, the program trained members of various minority groups, then placed from twenty to forty of them each year in both print and broadcast jobs. When one of its black graduates, Michele Clark, died in an airplane crash after working her way up to become co-anchor of the CBS Morning News, the minority-training program was renamed in her honor. In 1974, after substantial increases in the number of African Americans earning degrees from journalism schools, including Columbia's, this program was discontinued. The following year it was revived through the efforts of Earl Caldwell, a leading African-American journalist. Relocated to the University of California at Berkeley and operated by the Institute for Journalism Education (IJE), the program to train and place members of minorities on mainstream newspapers continued into the early 1990s. Under the guidance of nationally known African-American journalists, among them Nancy Hicks, Robert Maynard and Dorothy Gilliam, the IJE broadened its scope to focus on programs in editing and management training, facilitating movement of black journalists into the upper echelons of the print media.

All of these changes had a devastating effect on black newspapers. Their circulations plummeted as television and mainstream newspapers encroached on their readership by providing more immediate, though often superficial and insensitive, coverage of major events affecting the African-American community. By 1977 the audited circulation of the Chicago Defender had shrunk to 34,000 daily and 38,000 for the weekend edition. The New Pittsburgh Courier dipped to 30,000 weekly; the Baltimore Afro-American averaged 34,000 for two weekday editions and 18,500 for a weekend national edition. A few publications fared somewhat better, but others teetered on the brink of bankruptcy or had disappeared altogether. While more than 300 black newspapers were being published in the early 1960s, only 170 remained by the late 1980s. Their overall quality also declined as most of the top talent defected to the mainstream, where the rewards included salaries that were several times larger, far better benefits, and greater prestige. Television offered not only large salaries but also high visibility and glamour, a heady kind of stardom. After 1970, few aspiring journalists entered the field with the intention of working for the black press.

Exceptions to this grim pattern were two radical newspapers that surfaced during the 1960s in the furor of the Black Revolution. Muhammad Speaks, the official organ of the Nation of Islam, otherwise known as the Black Muslins, stemmed from a column called "Mr. Muhammad Speaks" that the sect's leader, Elijah Muhammad, had written for the Pittsburgh Courier during the 1950s. When Christian ministers, valuable links in the black press circulation chain, objected to Muhammad's anti-Christian rhetoric, the column was discontinued. Since Muslim followers had employed aggressive tactics to sell the paper on the streets, they took with them a huge chunk of the Courier's circulation. The column resurfaced in the Amsterdam News during the 1960s, when Malcolm X was galvanizing the black masses not only in Harlem but also throughout the nation. By the early 1970s the Black Muslims were publishing a popular weekly newspaper of their own called Muhammad Speaks. It was produced in Chicago, where Elijah Muhammad lived, by a staff of experienced journalists (who were not necessarily Muslims) working out of a well-equipped plant. Featuring African-American news with a militant slant, along with dogma, and distributed through the same pressurized street-selling techniques, Muhammad Speaks achieved an unaudited weekly circulation of 400,000 to 600,000, an all-time record for a black newspaper. (Unaudited means that the Audit Bureau of Circulations has not verified these figures.) Circulation dropped sharply after the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, the death of Elijah Muhammad, which brought on power struggles within the Muslim sect, and a general shift away from overt militancy in the African-American population. However, the paper continued publication under other names, including the Bilalian News and later the Final Call, into the early twenty-first century. These later publications never approached the success of earlier efforts.

A short-lived but significant polemical newspaper was the Black Panther, which achieved an unaudited circulation of 100,000 during the early 1970s, when it was edited by Eldridge Cleaver, author of the autobiographical militant manifesto Soul on Ice. Radical in tone, this newspaper attracted an audience in the turbulent antiwar climate of that time by condemning police brutality at home and America's foreign policy abroad, but it ceased publication after the credibility of Panther leaders was broadly questioned.

The sheer volume of news being generated by the movement toward integration and mainstream efforts to recruit African Americans who could cover these events all but obliterated the power previously held by black newspapers. But one genre of black publications flourished. These were the black magazines that had been conceived as commercial enterprises rather than instruments of protest. Thus they were better able to adjust to the demands of an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Black Magazines

Early black newspapers so resembled magazines in tone and content that differentiation between the two often was based on frequency of publication. The first black magazines seem to have been subsidized organs that originated in the black church during the early 1840s. The first general-circulation magazine owned independently by African Americans and directed to them was the Mirror of Liberty, published by David Ruggles, a New Yorker who was a key figure in the Underground Railroad. Forwarding the cause of abolition, it was published from 1847 to 1849. Other magazines followed. Frederick Douglass, after publishing a series of newspapers, lent his name to an abolitionist magazine, Douglass' Monthly. Aimed primarily at British readers, it was issued from 1860 to 1862. A forerunner of popular modern periodicals was Alexander's Magazine, a national publication produced in Boston from 1905 to 1909. It emphasized the positive aspects of African-American life, featuring stories about outstanding individuals with commentary on cultural, educational, and political events.

The first African-American magazine to have a lasting impact was the Crisis, which was the brainchild of W. E. B. Du Bois. It first appeared in 1910, a year that resonates with significance because of the number of African-American organizations, institutions, and publications spawned at that time. Du Bois, who was one of the original incorporators of the NAACP, assumed the position of director of publications and research for that organization after several previous excursions into journalism. He used the Crisis —which remains the official organ of the NAACP—to criticize national policies that impeded the progress of blacks and to educate African Americans in the techniques of protest. After Du Bois resigned his post in 1934 following squabbles with the NAACP leadership, he launched other magazines, the most notable being Phylon, a scholarly journal published by Atlanta University, where he spent portions of his career as a professor and head of the sociology department.

Following Du Bois's inspired lead, the National Urban League published Opportunity, a journal that documented the literary and artistic accomplishments of the Harlem Renaissance and lasted until 1949. Another important periodical of the post–World War I period was The Messenger, a militantly socialist journal edited by Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph, the latter of whom was to become the voice of black labor as head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. All of these publications depended on subsidies.

Commercial black magazines—meaning those that were fully self-sustaining through advertising as well as subscriptions—did not surface until the 1940s, a period when general-circulation magazines were one of the main forms of home entertainment. The engaging combination of pictures and words had made Life a popular chronicler of the American Dream, while Time provided snappily written coverage of weekly events and The Saturday Evening Post reinforced mainstream values in fiction and nonfiction. The Reader's Digest offered extracts from the era's leading publications, such as the Ladies' Home Journal, which catered to the traditional interests of women. Yet African Americans remained invisible in the pages of these magazines, as they had been in mainstream newspapers.

A veritable revolution in black magazines began in 1942 when John H. Johnson began publishing Negro Digest, a monthly periodical roughly the size of the Reader's Digest, featuring stories about black accomplishments, news items of interest to African Americans, and provocative original articles by prominent whites addressing black issues. He used it as a cornerstone for the development of the most successful black publishing firm in history. Although other quality mass-circulation black magazines originated in the post–World War II period, Johnson outmaneuvered his competition and thus eliminated it by developing brilliant marketing strategies.

Johnson's climb from poverty to riches was a real Horatio Alger story. He was born poor in 1918 in a tiny Arkansas town on the banks of the Mississippi River. His father was killed in a sawmill accident when he was eight and his mother remarried a year later. Since the town offered no opportunities for a black child to be educated beyond the eighth grade, his mother, Gertrude Johnson Williams, moved her family north in 1933 and worked s a domestic to educate her son. When he graduated from Chicago's DuSable High School as the most outstanding student in the class of 1936, he was offered a scholarship to the University of Chicago but opted to attend part-time while working at Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, one of the nation's leading black businesses. One of his tasks was to produce the company's monthly newspaper. Another was to provide digests of news about blacks for the company's president, Harry Pace, who was Johnson's mentor.

When friends relished the nuggets of black-oriented news Johnson shared with them, he conceived the idea of publishing a monthly magazine based on this kind of material. Having no money, he used his mother's new furniture, with her permission, as collateral to borrow $500. With this sum, he paid for the mailing of an introductory subscription letter sent to Supreme's twenty thousand customers in 1942. The resultant magazine, Negro Digest, was so popular that Johnson was able to launch another magazine, Ebony, in 1945. Stressing the positive aspects of African-American life and using ample pictures to help tell stories, Ebony immediately attracted a large, enthusiastic audience.

Along the way, Johnson outstripped his most promising competitor, Our World, which was published by John P. Davis, a Harvard Law School graduate. It was launched in 1946, just after Ebony, and also was a quality picture magazine printed on slick paper. Our World amassed an impressive circulation of 251,599 by 1952, but went bankrupt in 1955 because it could not attract major advertising accounts, the lifeblood of commercial publications. Meanwhile, Johnson used every ounce of ingenuity he could muster to break down the barriers that led white manufacturers to dismiss black magazines as advertising venues. It was essential to his survival and eventually he devised a winning strategy. By Johnson's own admission, he triumphed not so much because he had a better magazine but because he was a more inventive businessman.

Johnson also was adept at changing his tactics as the times demanded. He discontinued Negro Digest in 1951 when Ebony had usurped its audience, replacing his first publication with Jet, a pocket-size weekly newsmagazine that has remained popular over the years. In 1965, when militancy was in vogue, he revived Negro Digest, changing its name to Black World. Under the editor Hoyt Fuller, it became a prestigious outlet for African-American literature and thought, documenting the developments of what some have called the second black Renaissance. By 1970, when the movement subsided and subscriptions began to fall off, Johnson again discontinued the magazine.

Responding to what he considered to be public taste, Johnson conceived and published an assortment of magazines over the years, among them Tan Confessions during the 1950s, which was transformed into Black Stars in the 1960s, but more significantly Ebony Jr., an educational magazine for children produced during the late 1960s, Ebony Africa, which reflected the African independence movement but was discontinued after a few issues in 1965 when it foundered on differing national, linguistic, and political realities. But over six decades, Johnson has prevailed as the nation's—and world's—leading black publisher, his empire anchored by two stalwarts: Ebony, with an audited monthly circulation of 1,707,489 at the end of 2004, and Jet, with a weekly circulation of 967,909.

Some criticized Johnson's publications for relying too heavily on entertainment and light features while paying too little attention to major issues. But Ebony also had a serious side and provided a nurturing environment for talented black writers. Foremost among these was Lerone Bennett, who joined the staff in 1953. A scholar as well as a journalist, Bennett produced several series of articles that interpreted and dramatized black history in a literary style accessible to the general reader. Most of these articles evolved into popular books, published by Johnson, becoming a mainstay of black studies programs instituted by American colleges and universities during the 1970s.

The legislative gains of the 1960s led to improvements in the overall educational and economic status of African Americans, providing fertile ground for the cultivation of magazines aimed at newly affluent black consumers. A dozen new magazines surfaced in 1970 alone. Two of them became major publications: Essence and Black Enterprise.

Courting Black Women

Essence: The Magazine for Today's Black Woman was conceived in New York City in the fall of 1968. Russell Goings, an assistant vice president for Shearson, Hamill & Company and one of the few black executives with a Wall Street investment banking and brokerage firm at that time, put together a list of up-and-coming young African-Americans in the corporate world. He then invited them to a series of meetings where they could put forth ideas for new businesses they might want to start. It was Jonathan Blount, age twenty-two, a salesman for New Jersey Bell Yellow Pages, who came up with the idea for a black women's magazine. The idea had come from his godmother. Goings introduced Blount to other young men who liked the idea and formed a team. (Few women attended those meetings.) As a result, Blount, joined by Ed Lewis, age twenty-eight, a star in the executive training program at First City Bank; Clarence Smith, thirty-five, a top salesman at Prudential Insurance; and Cecil Hollingsworth, twenty-eight, who had started a small printing brokerage firm, developed a proposal for a black women's magazine. They became known as the Hollingsworth group, with Ed Lewis serving as chief executive.

They assumed it would take $1.5 million to start the magazine, but being black and having no experience in publishing made it all but impossible for them to get backing. All four had to quit their jobs to concentrate full-time on the project, but presentations on Wall Street and elsewhere, attracted no backers. Somehow they got by on moderate loans that had to be paid back, leaving them little to work with. Finally, in May 1970, or nearly two years later, Essence made its debut on newsstands in 145 cities with a press run of 175,000 copies. The new magazine was chock-full of thoughtful articles on important issues by respected authorities along with a cornucopia of fiction, nonfiction, and essays by leading black writers. It was highlighted throughout by beautiful illustrations under the supervision of photographer Gordon Parks. This approach resonated immediately with the targeted Essence audience. However, theirs were not the only opinions that would determine whether the new magazine could survive. White media critics found Essence too militant, somehow intimidating. A white writer for Time magazine went so far as to state that "After a while, the young, urban, inquisitive and acquisitive Black woman for whom the magazine is intended is going to get tired of being reminded of the longstanding, dehumanizing rape of the Black woman in America." An advertising newsletter menacingly predicted: "Black women's magazines have a shaky future." These comments could drive away advertisers.

Sensing potential problems, the founders dismissed their editor in chief, Ruth N. Ross, a former assistant editor at Newsweek who had left her job—a rare one for women of any color in those days—to join their tiny staff. Ross also had come up with the name of Essence for the magazine. Originally, the founders had intended to call it Sapphire, long a pejorative term for a loud-mouthed black woman. Focus groups of women had voiced their displeasure, but the four young men had found it difficult to come up with a better name. Ross had done so, but her approach was deemed "too black for prime time" after the first issue. Furthermore, her old job at Newsweek had closed up after her. But Essence thrived. By 1992 Essence had an audited circulation of 900,000, and by the end of 2004, it had climbed to 1,063,645, surpassed only by Ebony.

Black Enterprise

For more than thirty years, Black Enterprise magazine, which was founded in 1970 by Earl G. Graves, a former administrative assistant to Robert F. Kennedy, has informed the public—and particularly African Americans—of improved financial opportunities available to them, thus encouraging greater black participation in the economic mainstream. It celebrates the achievements of black entrepreneurs by presenting documented lists of those who have been most successful. Its annual listing of the one hundred biggest black businesses provides a ready reference for determining the progress of African-American entrepreneurs. This magazine has a clear-cut mission and was nearly two years in the planning, with input from a board of advisors that included Whitney Young, Jr., executive director of the Urban League. It is to get African Americans to learn more about money, how to get more of it and how to use it to their own advantage.

Unlike many magazines specializing in financial affairs, Black Enterprise takes an upbeat but down-to-earth approach, examining a full range of money matters, from the issues of corporate America to how families handle their finances. Black Enterprise's annual listing of the nation's largest black businesses is a ready reference to the financial health and wealth of black capitalists. Much emphasis is placed on self-improvement and ample coverage is provided of regular people who have developed their own start-ups, even on a small scale. Complex matters are explained in understandable terms highlighted by photos of smiling African Americans who have managed to make money work for them. The formula has worked, for the magazine had attained an audited circulation of 508,489 by 2005.

With the expansion of the black middle class, a variety of new magazines were developed to address specific tastes. By 1990 at least twenty-five black-oriented magazines were being published in the United States. Most of the newcomers did not survive. Some deserved a better chance, most notably Emerge, a black newsmagazine launched in 1991 by Wilmer Ames, an African-American editor on the Newsweek staff. Uncertain in its thrust early on, Emerge acquired firmer footing when most of its stock was purchased by Black Entertainment Television (BET), which Bob Johnson had launched in 1980 in Washington, D.C., as the first black-owned national cable network. This was a mismatch of sorts, for BET featured dance videos and catered to tastes of those favoring urban hip-hop culture, while Emerge was a newsmagazine. Emerge reached its peak in the mid- to late 1990s when George Curry served as editor, offering fearlessly satiric assessments of politics and public affairs with articles by top black writers working in the mainstream. By 1999 it had a monthly circulation of 160,000, but BET wanted a bigger return for its investment and discontinued publication.

Mainstreaming

The last decades of the twentieth century brought a dramatic shift toward the mainstreaming of African-American journalists. Beginning in the 1970s, general-circulation daily newspapers and television stations recruited black journalists as they never had before. By 1990 nearly four thousand blacks were employed by daily newspapers, with a few establishing national reputations. Foremost among them was Carl T. Rowan, a senior statesman of journalism who had always worked in the mainstream, starting out in 1948 at the Minneapolis Tribune. He held high government posts in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, then became a syndicated columnist and television panelist. Rowan conducted a historic televised interview with Justice Thurgood Marshall on his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court in 1991. William Raspberry of the Washington Post also gained broad recognition through his syndicated column. Other columnists who became widely known were Earl Caldwell of the New York Daily News; Bob Herbert, who became the first African-American columnist for the New York Times; Les Payne of Newsday; Dorothy Gilliam of the Washington Post; Chuck Stone of the Philadelphia Daily News; and Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune.

The Gannett Corporation, which was the nation's largest newspaper chain, publishing eighty-seven dailies throughout the country as well as the national USA Today, outstripped others by instituting a strong affirmative action program. Under chairman Allen Neuharth, Gannett enforced strict rules ensuring that minorities were included in coverage and that they were consulted as sources for stories that did not necessarily pertain to race. Through the Gannett chain, Robert Maynard, who had spent ten years at the Washington Post as a national correspondent, ombudsman, and editorial writer, became the first publisher of a general-market daily, the Oakland Tribune, in 1979. Maynard went on to purchase the paper in 1983, another first. Also under the Gannett system, Pam Johnson, who held a Ph.D. in communications, was named publisher of the Ithaca Journal in upstate NewYork in 1981, becoming the first African-American woman to control the affairs of a mainstream daily newspaper.

Television

Similar changes took place in television, though they did not extend to the higher levels of management. The first black journalist on television was Louis Lomax, a newspaperman and college teacher who entered the relatively new medium in 1958 at WNTA-TV in New York. The author of five books, Lomax produced television documentaries before his death in an automobile accident in 1970. Because of the visual nature of television, it often appeared that blacks were making more progress there than in print journalism. Some shifted easily from one medium to the other. In 1963, a year after Mal Goode became the first African-American commentator on network television news, Bill Matney moved from the Detroit News, a daily newspaper, to NBC, where he covered the White House for the network from 1970 to 1972. Yet no African American held a major position in television until 1978, when Max Robinson was the first of his race to become a regular coanchor for a prime-time network television newscast, heading the national desk in Chicago for the ABC Nightly News. Robinson left the network five years later after being demoted and died of AIDS in 1988, but he served as a role model for young blacks aspiring to careers in television news. One of the most durable of network TV newscasters was Ed Bradley, who joined CBS as a stringer in the Paris bureau in 1971, then became a White House correspondent in 1976. He later anchored the CBS Sunday Night News and later went on to attract a loyal following in his long-term position as one of the chief correspondents for the top-rated 60 Minutes, a position he still held in 2005. In terms of all-around popularity, the leader was Bryant Gumbel, who shuttled between news and entertainment as host of NBC's Today show. Although he had been with the show for fifteen years by 1992, it took him five more years to convince NBC brass to let him take the show to Africa, the only continent other then Antarctica that they had not visited. He was able to do so by compiling a mountain of meticulous research and planning on how it could be done. The weeklong series cost more than $2 million to produce but won an award for Gumbel. His struggle to pull it off highlighted Americans' lack of interest in Africa and its people. An informal survey of network coverage found that Africa got less coverage than California whales trapped in Arctic ice or a virus among North Sea seals.

Progress in television was more uneven for women. Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a former New Yorker staffer and New York Times reporter, became one of the most visible women journalists on TV in 1978 when she became New York correspondent for the McNeil-Lehrer Report, on the Public Broadcast System's nightly news program. During her tenure there, she also became the first African-American woman to anchor a national news program. When Hunter-Gault left PBS to take up residence in South Africa, the public network acquired another heavy hitter. Gwen Ifill, a lawyer and journalist, had been White House correspondent for the New York Times before she left in 1994 to join NBC News. After five years at NBC, she was hired by PBS as moderator and managing editor of Washington Week in Review and correspondent for Jim Lehrer's Nightly NewsHour, making her the most prominent woman in public television.

Change moved at a slower pace in commercial TV, but by the late 1980s it had become common for local stations to feature black women as anchors, for they were "two-fers," qualifying as diversity hires because of both race and gender. As the twenty-first century settled in, the formula was modified to include Asian and Latino women, sometimes paired with an African-American woman or man as a featured reporter or weather commentator, especially in urban areas. But it was difficult for these women to break into the networks as correspondents. The most successful black woman journalist on television was Carole Simpson, who took a major step in 1989 at ABC, when she became the first African-American woman to anchor an evening newscast on commercial television, appearing on Sunday nights. But these gains were limited. As in print journalism, the real power in broadcasting is held by executive producers and other top managers, who work behind a white curtain where they determine who or what will make it onto the air. In a 1982 survey of the nation's three networks, Michael Massing found that no blacks held high-level management positions. The highest job held by an African American at ABC was an assignment editor on a nightly news show, while at CBS and NBC the top posts were held by bureau chiefs. At all the networks, about 5 percent of the producers and associated producers were black, many in lower-level jobs. The efforts of black reporters were often overshadowed by general policies that resulted in a predominance of negative portrayals of African Americans in the media. While only 15 percent of the poor people in the United States in 1990 were black, newspaper and television coverage, in particular, perpetuated the impression that most criminals, prostitutes, drug addicts, welfare mother, illiterates, and homeless persons were black. On the other hand, hardworking African Americans and those who constituted a large and growing middle class were glossed over. In newspapers, as on television, the problem could be traced to monochromatic leadership. A survey conducted by the American Society of Newspapers in 1985 revealed that almost 95 percent of the journalists on daily newspapers were white and the 92 percent of the nation's newspapers did not have a single minority person in a news executive position. Fifty-four percent of the newspapers had no minority employees at all.

Yet progress was made. A study released in 1999 showed that the percentage of minority television reporters had doubled within that decade. In 1998 they represented 20 percent of those broadcasting as compared to 10 percent in 1991. But there was a disturbing consequence. The increase in black, brown, and tan faces on television has caused many white Americans to believe that all inequities had been corrected. Some even contended that talented whites—and particularly white men—were being denied opportunities they deserved to meet demands for diversity. This led to strained relations in many of the nation's newsrooms.

Leaving the Fold

During the many years when African-American journalists worked almost entirely within the black press, their salaries had not been particularly handsome and the white world had not paid much attention to them, but they commonly had gone about their tasks with a communal spirit, a shared sense of knowing that they were doing something that might make life better for their people. Besides, they could have fun while doing it, for their coworkers as well as the people they usually covered shared a common culture. Of course, there were rivalries at work and some of the same irritations that might be found on any job, but if they got undesirable assignments, were paid less, or passed over for promotions, they could be certain that it was not because of their race. That one factor was a major concern for many African-American journalists who moved into the mainstream. By the early twenty-first century, most black journalists were to be found there.

On a Difficult Course

Life could be uncomfortable at times in the mainstream. Cut off from the fold, fragmented, and dogged by a sense of isolation, these journalists were concerned about their overall ability to effect better and more balanced coverage of African Americans in newsrooms where this might not be a priority. Many were troubled by what they perceived to be an overall assumption of black inferiority and an expectation that their work should emphasize black pathology. Some black journalists were challenged to prove their objectivity, or ability to assume a "white" perspective in their work by digging up dirt about black politicians and leaders, although white reporters were not asked to prove their objectivity. It was assumed. Often black reporters found themselves in a bind, trapped in an uncomfortable place where they would be more likely to achieve success on the job if they wrote negative stories about their own people. This led black people to turn against these journalists, at times venting their rage in public meetings. But one ambitious young journalist rode the matter of black pathology to fame—or infamy.

Janet Cooke, a talented, twenty-five-year-old writer at The Washington Post won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for her feature story about an eight-year-old boy named Jimmy whose mother's boyfriend regularly injected him with heroin, thus feeding the child's addiction, which the live-in lover had instigated. Cooke said she had witnessed the scene. The story appeared on the front page of the Post and was picked up by hundreds of other papers, making Cooke an instant journalistic star. When it was discovered that Cooke had fabricated both Jimmy and the story, she was condemned by the public and had to return the Pulitzer, which was the first won by an individual African-American woman journalist. Cooke's caper led many in the journalistic establishment to question the credibility of African-American journalists as a whole, although white journalists were not regarded similarly when those of their color were revealed to be fabricators.

When a similar incident occurred several years later, some feared that black journalists, as a whole, again would have to bear the burden for the misdeeds of an individual. Jayson Blair, a promising twenty-seven-year-old New York Times reporter, had been on the fast track, working as a roving national correspondent, after courting the favor of some of the paper's top figures. But in May 2003, it was revealed that Blair had fabricated much of the material in high-profile stories he had written, some related to moving events taking place on the homefront, in other parts of the nation, during the Iraqi war. He had produced them without leaving his apartment, borrowing material from other publications and creating his own details. His feat, which was examined and analyzed extensively, especially by the Times, was a major embarrassment to that institution. Blair would be remembered as a miscreant who not only destroyed his own career, but who also took down the Times' editor, Howell Raines, who resigned, and the first African-American managing editor at the Times, Gerald Boyd, who also resigned. Though some conservatives dubbed Blair the "poster child for affirmative action," most pundits of the press linked his misdeeds to a culture in some high-pressure journalistic institutions that places such a premium on fame that people will do almost anything to get it.

NABJ

As African-American journalists moved into the mainstream, they took major steps to address their problems. They realized that there could be power in numbers, so they organized. Forty-four African-American newsmen and newswomen founded the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) on December 12, 1975, at the Sheraton Park Hotel in Washington, D.C. They came from both black and mainstream firms, from print media (newspapers and magazine) and broadcast (radio and television). Unlike some journalism organizations, NABJ limited membership to professionals involved in gathering and disseminating the news, excluding professors and those in public relations. Chuck Stone, a flamboyant journalistic figure who had been an editor of several black newspapers, was the guiding force behind creation of the NABJ and served as its first president. At the time, he was a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News. After two years the organization had a membership of more than a thousand. Its leaders went on to develop a scholarship program for journalism students, to present annual awards to outstanding journalists of the year, and to hold lavish annual conventions in various cities where there were member chapters. These affairs included job fairs, panel discussions, speeches by luminaries, screen debuts, and live performances by musical stars. One of the major accomplishments of NABJ has been to have members of its board meet with leaders of the three other major organizations of ethnic journalists: the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association, and the Native American Journalists Association. The objective is to work in consort and thus to prevent negative forces in the mainstream from pitting them against each other. These sessions resulted in joint conventions called UNITY, held in 1994 at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. Six years in the making and budgeted at $1,000,000, the event brought together 6,000 members of all four organizations to share their cultures and concerns. UNITY continued to meet at five-year intervals, with conferences in 1999 and 2004.

Clouds on the Horizon

Wayne Dawkins, who documents NABJ's history, noticed something unexpected when he checked their financial records at the end of 1999. Membership in the organization had reached an all-time high of 3,321 in August 1997 but had dropped to 2,456, down 26 percent in only a year and a half. Perhaps it was just a glitch resulting from the high cost of members having to travel to conventions in western cities for two consecutive years, far from the East and Midwest, where most members live. But this drop-off more likely was a manifestation of a trend others have noticed. Numbers of African Americans and other minorities have been leaving journalism almost as fast as other members of their groups have been entering the field. A 1978 survey by the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund concluded that only one in five minorities who earned journalism degrees got jobs. Some get them, but their unemployment rate is three times that of their white peers. A 1985 study by the IJE, a leader in educating and placing minorities in journalism jobs, tracked a group of graduates over ten years and found that 40 percent of them were planning on leaving the field because of a perceived glass ceiling that did not allow them opportunities to grow, to move up. These comments might be considered in the context of a rancorous and heavily-covered trial in 1987 which grew out of a federal discrimination suit filed by four African-American journalists—three men and one woman—against their employer, the New York Daily News, at that time, the nation's most widely circulated newspaper. Some in the industry considered it a suit against the whole industry. The issue was not mere employment or even salary, though it was revealed during the investigation related to the suit that blacks and Hispanics were generally paid less than whites in comparable positions, regardless of performance. But the complaint by the Daily News employees had more to do with promotion, recognition, and opportunities to distinguish themselves. They prevailed and were given a total of $3.1 million in damages and a promise that the Daily News would implement an affirmative action program to increase the number of black reporters. Though some considered this a victory, the plaintiffs were permanently scarred by the experience. Joan Shepard, a forty-five-year-old cultural editor who was the lone woman in the case, was found alone in her home in 1998, dead for an unknown length of time, after struggling to establish her own restaurant newsletter.

A Final Note

Progress toward more integrated media seemed to slow after the end of the twentieth century. A study conducted by the Knight Foundation in 2005 found that 73 percent of the larger American newspapers employed fewer nonwhites in that year than they had in some earlier year dating back to 1990. They included some of the most highly respected, among them The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and USA Today. This finding also coincides with the defection of younger journalists from the field, due to frustration at lack of advancement. But Herbert Lowe, a courts reporter for Newsday and president of NABJ confirms this finding, saying that much of it has to do with lack of advancement. But other experienced journalists stress a need for those who are dissatisfied to understand that it's not enough just to do a job and to do it well. They have to learn how to play the game, to politick on their own behalf.

Those who are dissatisfied also might try the Black Press. More than two hundred black community newspapers and two dailies are being published, with some, like the Sacramento Observer being robust and respected. Someone concerned about preservation might help to restore a historic institution, The Chicago Defender, which celebrated its centennial on May 5, 2005. It has been struggling to survive, with circulation down to 15,000 for four weekday editions and 19,000 for a weekend edition. But Tom Picou, long the key executive of the Defender and chair of the corporate concern that now owns the newspaper has announced plans to move into electronic media by presenting podcasts of news and interviews.

However, Black media itself might be forced to undergo some changes. In June 2005 the New York Times Company announced that it intended to publish a newspaper for African Americans in Gainesville, Florida, called the Gainesville Guardian. The new paper would result from the conversion of a newspaper the Times Company already owns in that area, The Gainsville Sun. A black editor already had been chosen and was participating in the planning. The question raised by African-American publishers was whether a newspaper could be considered "black" if it was not owned by blacks. Their response was a resounding "no" One publisher called such publications "white papers in blackface," conveying memories of the insults of minstrelsy. Nonetheless a precedent already had been set. On January 4, 2005, Time Inc. had announced that it had agreed to buy the 51 percent of Essence Communications Partners, the publisher of the magazines Essence and Suede, that it did not already own. A story in the New York Times business section noted that in 2000 Time Inc., which is owned by Time Warner, had purchased 49 percent of Essence Communications. Ed Lewis, founder and chief executive of Essence Communications, was quoted as saying that in the four years of partnership with Time Inc. he had come to trust the company and that he believed that its strategic might would help Essence and Suede reach more readers. Black Enterprise immediately shot back with an article potting: "Are Black Women Losing Their Voice?" The debate is likely to ensue.

See also Abbott, Robert Sengstacke; Anglo-African, The ; Baltimore Afro-American ; Black Press in Brazil; Black World/Negro Digest ; Chicago Defender ; Christian Recorder ; Cornish, Samuel E.; Crisis, The ; Delany, Martin R.; Ebony ; Forten, James; Fortune, T. Thomas; Douglass, Frederick; Freedom's Journal ; Guardian, The ; Jet ; Liberator, The ; Messenger, The ; Negro World ; North Star ; Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life ; Phylon ; Pittsburgh Courier ; Schuyler, George S.; Trotter, William Monroe; Washington, Booker T.; Wells-Barnett, Ida B.; Woman's Era

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phyl garland (1996)
Updated by author 2005