A major reinterpretation of the role of journalism in American democracy. 

For generations after the Civil War, white newspaper leaders in the South actively built white supremacist political economies and social orders using the tools of racial terror. Black journalists fought back, documenting what happened as it happened, demanding that the United States live up to its founding democratic ideals. 

Working closely with political and business allies, white publishers and editors helped establish and protect a vast anti-Black, anti-democratic, near totalitarian region within the United States that lasted until Black Americans forced a second reconstruction during the Civil Rights Movement.

Journalism and Jim Crow forces us to grapple with a disturbing truth: mainstream journalism in the United States has too often corrupted democracy by propagating disinformation, electoral fraud, disfranchisement, white supremacy, and racial terror. The inheritance of this history pollutes American democracy today.

It’s time for a conversation and a reckoning.