Why America needs Black journalists: Part one
The future of liberal democracy depends on diversifying our newsrooms and our news
Did you know that white newspaper leaders and reporters spent almost a century after the Civil War crafting, building, and protecting white supremacy in the South? We’re not talking just a few white news leaders. The vast majority did this dirty, anti-democratic work. White supremacy had to be built. It’s a vast structure, after all, not merely a set of attitudes and beliefs.
Today, I’m writing about why America needs Black journalists, not only in the reportorial ranks but also in leadership positions. We also need Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and other journalists of color (of course!), but I want to focus on our need for Black journalists. The future of liberal democracy in the United States depends on it.
First, a bit more history to lay the predicate.
After the Civil War, white newspaper editors and publishers worked hand-in-glove with white elected officials in local, state, and federal governments, white business leaders, and white Northern industrialists and financiers. They worked strategically and cooperatively to build white supremacist political economies and social orders. They would try one tactic in one state—like the use of cumulative poll taxes to disfranchise Black voters in Georgia, which I discussed in yesterday’s letter—and if it worked, it spread like wildfire across the South. Here’s another example. In 1875, the editor of the Jackson Clarion and Democratic Party leader, Ethelbert Barksdale, planned and executed a vicious assault on Black Mississippians to wrest control of state government from the Republicans. Barksdale used his newspaper to help organize violent disruptions of Black meetings and rallies and unleash murderous white mobs on Black neighborhoods. The destruction of Black lives and property was incalculable. The Mississippi Plan succeeded, and other Southern states with large Black populations took note and followed suit.
Robert Gleeds, a Black candidate for sheriff in Lowndes County and former state senator, said, “It was the most violent time that ever we have seen.” The point of the Mississippi Plan, of course, was not only political control of the state but also the disfranchisement and terrorization of Black citizens. White newspaper editors had been airing the ideas that coalesced to form the Mississippi Plan since the end of the Civil War, even before Black men received voting rights with the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. In 1868, Gleeds read an Alabama paper that said, “We must kill or drive away the leading Negroes and only let the humble and submissive remain.” He was shocked.
“The idea of a party being built up on the principle of the open slaughter of human beings. It was startling to me, the advocacy of such a principle.” Henry Gleeds
The Black press and Black leaders in Mississippi organized against these vicious principles and stratagems, but they simply lacked the power to prevail.
This story about the essential role of the white press in building white supremacy in the South is just one of many in Journalism & Jim Crow: The Making of White Supremacy in the New South, my forthcoming book co-edited with Sid Bedingfield and written with an amazing group of contributing authors.
Some readers may think what happened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the South doesn’t matter to American journalism and American democracy today. I disagree. As Jim Crow North scholars like Brian Purnell, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard have demonstrated (check out their book The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North), Jim Crow existed in the North, too. And as Journalism & Jim Crow shows, the white North aided and abetted the creation of white supremacy in the South. To get a sense of what Black journalists and leaders were up against in the North, read Kerri K. Greenidge’s brilliant book Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Trotter was founder and editor of the Boston Guardian).
White supremacist systems, norms, and practices don’t just disappear. They have to be dismantled. The American Society of Newspaper Editors worked for 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement to diversify U.S. newsrooms, with the goal of matching newsroom demographics to those of the nation at large. The effort, well-funded and longterm, was an abject failure. Why? Too many white newsroom leaders clung to professional norms that understood editors and journalists as white and the political and social issues of the day as largely color-blind. (Want to know more? Read my friend Gwyneth Mellinger’s excellent book on the subject.) Today, only seven percent of newsroom employees are Black. And only 24 percent are non-white, although non-whites are roughly 40 percent of the U.S. population.
This state of affairs isn’t inevitable or natural. It is part of a built environment with roots in the past. And it is extremely dangerous to our prospects for building a healthy, multi-racial liberal democracy in the wake of Trumpism.
Tomorrow, in part two of this letter, I’ll review the efforts of Black journalists in our own moment to remake American journalism and American democracy for the better. In the meantime, though, I’d love to hear your thoughts. And please share Letter from a Region with journalists and friends you think might be interested!
Best, Kathy