For the past few days, I’ve been working on the epilogue to the book I’m co-editing with Sid Bedingfield: Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South. The final manuscript has been with the publisher for months now, but we waited to write the epilogue as close to publication as possible. So we’ve been writing the epilogue to our book as we consider the final days of 2020. Turns out, many of the ideas, events, and issues we and our colleagues write about in Journalism & Jim Crow have their counterparts in 2020.
That’s disturbing.
It’s perhaps no great revelation to say that journalism plays a central role in American political and social life. Most of us have been profoundly grateful to the dogged reporting of our local, regional, and national news outlets as we’ve tracked the chaos of the Trump administration, the upending of democratic norms, the pandemic and resulting economic crisis, and the realities of our local communities. So much of what we know about our shared political and social world we learn from the news.
But too few political scientists and sociologists and historians have considered journalists and news organizations to be critical political actors who often play outsized roles in moments of political conflict and change. It’s a curious lacuna. But who could doubt it after witnessing the symbiotic relationship between Fox News and President Trump and the malign influence on American democracy?
Fox News helped the Trump administration spread misinformation about the election, the coronavirus, the Ukraine affair (remember that?), and the Russia investigation and create an alternate reality for the Trump base where the coronavirus is a hoax and voter fraud stole the 2020 election.
Fox News largely operated as the propaganda organ for the Trump administration and the GOP these past five years. And that’s not a new phenomenon in the history of American politics and journalism.
Here’s just one example. In the 1880s, Henry Grady used the Atlanta Constitution to rally the white people of Georgia and the South around his effort to promote the reconciliation of the South and North after the Civil War. Seems like a noble effort for a journalist and a newspaper, right? But that’s just one tiny sliver of the story, although it’s been forwarded for years as THE story, a story that justifies naming the Grady College of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Georgia after the famous New South editor. But a more complete and honest story would account for the way Grady used the Atlanta Constitution to build a white supremacist political economy and social order in Georgia with the help of the Atlanta Ring of Democratic Party politicians and leaders of which he was ringmaster. Grady used his newspaper and speeches to promote the idea of “equal but separate” that became the cornerstone of Plessy v. Ferguson and Jim Crow; to advocate for the disfranchisement of Black Southerners; to threaten his Black neighbors as they strove to exercise their political and civil rights; to make light of brutal lynchings of Black men and to normalize incendiary lynching coverage that eventually embraced the actual fomenting of lynching; and to defend and protect the brutal convict leasing system that stole the lives and labor of so many Black men, women, and children in Georgia. Meanwhile, the men of Grady’s Atlanta Ring—who traded the governor’s office and U.S. Senate seats among themselves throughout the 1880s and after, with Grady's and the Atlanta Constitution’s help—grew rich from convict labor they exploited and abused in their railroad, mining, and plantation businesses.
As Grady carried on his work, Black journalists fought back, including Ida B. Wells, T. Thomas Fortune, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who called out Grady’s lies and anti-democratic ideas and actions. Wells drew a straight line from Grady’s New South rhetoric to lynching. Fortune called Georgia’s convict system a “cesspool of degradation and crime . . . under the very nostrils of the prophet Grady.” W. E. B. Du Bois called Grady’s New South “an armed camp for intimidating black folk” and “a phantasmagoria” of “five thousand lynchings, jails bursting with black prisoners incarcerated on trivial and trumped-up charges, and caste staring from every train and street car.”
We know who won the battle. After all, whose name appears on UGA’s school of journalism?
Some of my colleagues have suggested that I’m using values and standards of the present in my revision of the received history about Grady, the Atlanta Constitution, and the New South. But many Americans of Grady’s own day, including Black journalists and activists and white Southern journalists like George Washington Cable and Walter Hines Page, thoroughly rejected the white supremacy Grady helped build and sustain. The story I tell about Grady is basically the story I learned from paying attention to these marginalized voices of the past.
Grady used journalism for profoundly anti-democratic, racist, kleptocratic purposes. What has American journalism of our own era inherited from this past, if anything?
More thoughts to come . . . but in the meantime, I’d love to hear yours.
Best, Kathy