Kathy Roberts Forde

Black journalists have been calling out structural racism in US newsrooms for years, and their calls have received new attention recently. But few Americans understand how these structures got there in the first place. Few understand that white news leaders in the South used racial terror as a weapon in building political and economic systems that served white elite interests, including their own, for generations after Reconstruction. Few understand the South was a white supremacist, kleptocratic, near-totalitarian state within a putatively liberal democratic republic from 1875-1965. And until now, few have recognized the role of the white press in building that world—and the role of the Black press in trying to prevent that world from being built in the first place.

Journalism and Jim Crow helps us contend with the truth that journalism has too often served profoundly anti-democratic goals and ends in this country. Certain right-wing news media are doing this work today. The subject of Journalism and Jim Crow could not be more timely or urgent.

This book has been my passion project for the past five years, and I’m so grateful to Sid Bedingfield for agreeing to co-edit with me and to all the amazing historians and scholars who joined the project and signed onto its vision. The project grew out of conversations and research with my undergraduate students in a specialized history course I teach called The Black Freedom Struggle and the Press. My students’ curiosity and commitment to historical truth-telling inspires me every day.

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Professor, Department of Journalism, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author of Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment, winner of the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Book Award for best book in mass communication and journalism (2009). 

Sid Bedingfield

Sid Bedingfield is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. As a historian and media scholar, he’s interested in the role journalism plays in democratic societies during moments of political and cultural change. Much of his research focuses on racial politics in the United States. His first book — Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965 (University of Illinois Press, 2017) — argues that Black and white newspapers exerted more political influence in the mid-twentieth century than has been previously acknowledged. His interest in journalism’s political role grew out of personal experience. Sid spent more than two decades as a professional journalist covering political contests in the United States and abroad. During that time, he realized that journalists and their publics often disagreed about the role journalism plays in civic life. Sid hopes Journalism and Jim Crow contributes to the growing conversation about this critical issue.

Alex Lichtenstein

For as long as I can remember, I have regarded white supremacy and racism as abiding cancers on our society. I have devoted my life to studying how and why this is so, and to teaching about ways people have found to combat and overturn racial injustice.

As a scholar, this has meant studying both racial oppression and resistance, understanding slavery, convict labor, lynching, segregation and the ceaseless struggle by African Americans and their occasional white allies for civil and human rights. More recently, I have turned my attention to how similar struggles have played out in South Africa, and to contests both there and in the U.S. over how to remember these histories in the public sphere.

I imagine that the editors asked me to provide a foreword to Journalism and Jim Crow because of my “scholarly reputation” in the field. In truth, the honor was all mine. Because, as I always tell my students, we cannot reckon with the legacy of racism and its poisonous persistence today until we acknowledge its existence—in both the past and the present. This project is one engaged in such truth-telling, and thus I was thrilled to be given the opportunity to endorse it and to make a modest introduction to the exciting scholarship in its pages.       

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Professor of History, Indiana University, author of Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor and editor of American Historical Review.

D’Weston Haywood

D’Weston Haywood is Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York. Haywood obtained his PhD from Northwestern University, and his interest in being a part of Journalism and Jim Crow grows out of the complex historical questions that drive his research. Haywood’s work centers on Black protest, Black intellectual history and Black political thought, and the intersections of Black culture, politics, public spheres, and the state. His first book, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (UNC Press, 2018), illustrates this. The study conducts a close reading of the Black press as a powerful tool of Black men’s leadership, public vocalization, and gender and identity formation that shaped the 20th Century Black freedom struggle to wage a fight for racial justice and Black manhood. Yet, Haywood’s academic work also includes forays into an innovative scholarly, pedagogical, and public-facing praxis he calls “Sonic Scholarship.” Sonic Scholarship fuses history and Hip Hop, research and rhyming. His projects in this regard include, “The [Ferguson] Files: A Sonic Study of Racial Violence in America,” released in 2016, examining a year of racial violence, and “MADE MEN,” released in November 2020, examining the Trump era. He is currently working on a second book project, reconsidering the Cold War and Space Age through Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam’s Black Nationalism and newspaper, Muhammad Speaks. 

Indeed, his own work wrestling with histories of ideologies and information drew him to this project, especially because he thinks we continue to wrestle with these very issues today. The present “Post-Truth” moment, which grapples with facts, legitimacy, public opinion, knowledge production, and state institutions, is one of our most current ways of expressing the longstanding phenomena Journalism and Jim Crow illuminates in this timely moment. He hopes that this very critical volume calls us to contend with the power of the press in building, or destroying, democracy.

W. Fitzhugh Brundage

I became interested in lynching during the mid-1980s when I wrote a graduate seminar paper on the topic.  There was very little scholarship on the topic then and I was not satisfied with what did exist.  I quickly became convinced of the importance of lynching in the history of both the American South and the United States in general.

I am especially interested in observing people in the past who were challenged by great injustices and how they responded to them.  One remarkable facet of the history of lynching in the United States is the extent of complicity in the practice. It is dismaying and enlightening to see how many newspaper editors, for example, never lifted their pens to denounce either the justifications for lynching or the actual practice itself.  Indeed, many championed it.  Trying to understand their moral, ethical, professional, and intellectual failure continues to interest me.

The editors of the volume have a strong vision and purpose for the collection so I am honored to contribute it. As a historian, I have long been convinced of the crucial and tragic role of newspapers and journalists in promoting, condoning, and reporting on the culture of lynching in the United States. Yet the scholarship on the topic remains embarrassing thin. This volume is a really important effort to begin to address that need.

Late 19th and early 20th century newspapers and journalists played a key role in “normalizing” lynching. After the 1920s they would play an important role in delegitimizing the same practice that years earlier they had condoned. My essay is a brief overview of that curious but crucial evolution in American journalism.

While lynching is, thankfully, virtually disappeared as a routine feature of American life, we cannot ignore the persistence of narrative tropes in American journalism that have contributed to deadly stereotypes of people of color as well as to the persistence of police violence against alleged criminal suspects.

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William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History, University of North Carolina, author of Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 and The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory, winner of the Southern Historical Association’s Charles Sydnor Award (2005).

Robert Greene II

I was first interested in intellectual history when I read Black Reconstruction in America as an undergraduate student. The book left a deep impression on me, as its research and fervent belief in the basic humanity of Black people made the book stand out in 1935. Since then, I have researched and written on the intersection of race and political and intellectual history, often in the context of the American South. Without question, my parents being so hard working for their entire lives has inspired me. Also, their encouragement of my interest in reading and history from a young age kept me going. 

I believed that Kathy Roberts-Forde and Sid Bedingfield were doing critically important work by looking at the relationship between media and race throughout American history. They convinced me that I had a unique perspective to share in the edited collection. 

Readers should understand that African Americans have also exercised some form of agency during the age of Jim Crow segregation. From before the passage of Jim Crow laws across the South, Black leaders such as T. Thomas Fortune sounded the alarm about how the nation was sliding away from the promises of the Reconstruction era.

This topic is important to learn about today because concern about voting rights rollbacks across the nation, the spike in white supremacist violence, and a rapidly polarizing nation seem to augur a difficult future for the nation as a whole, and African Americans in particular. But this chapter will remind every reader that Black resistance to tyranny and the belief in American democracy has a long and storied history. 

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Assistant Professor of History, Claflin University, scholar of intellectual history, author of “The Newest South: African Americans and the Democratic Party, 1964-1995,” (dissertation, 2019) and “Where Do We Go From Here? The Implications of Black Intellectual History in the Modern South,” in Navigating Souths: Transdisciplinary Explorations of a U.S. Region (2017).

Kristin L. Gustafson

Kristin L. Gustafson is an associate teaching professor at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on journalism history, archives, journalism ethics, community journalists, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. 

Growing up during the Title IX era, Gustafson began noticing media’s representation and misrepresentation of women and girls. She learned that media ownership shaped whose stories got amplified or marginalized. She got her master’s after working for several years at the Minnesota Women’s Press. For her master’s thesis, which later turned into a Journalism History journal article, Gustafson examined how community newspapers covered a lynching that had been erased from the collective memory of most white residents in Minnesota. Her doctoral dissertation examined how ownership and business models shaped parallel arcs of a Seattle Asian American newspaper and a Seattle LGBTQ newspaper. At the School of IAS, Gustafson works to build socially just and inclusive curricula, learning communities, and teaching practices. In her five years as an Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication History Division’s teaching chair, she spearheaded a teaching contest in 2019 featuring “original, tested, and transformative pedagogies” in teaching media history to address diversity, collaboration, community, or justice. 

Her published scholarship appears in American Journalism, Columbia Journalism Review, The Conversation, Journalism, Journalism History, Newspaper Research Journal, and Visual Communication Quarterly. The “Death of Democracy, North Carolina” chapter builds on years of considering the role of media owners and public stories. Gustafson and Kathy Roberts Forde co-authored “A White Supremacist Coup” for The Conversation to connect the racist electoral violence of the Capitol Siege to the past.

Razvan Sibii

Razvan Sibii (Raz) can’t decide whether he’s a journalist, a teacher or a researcher, so he’s all
three. Luckily, all three fields allow him to address the issues he is most interested in: identity,
discourse, immigration and mass incarceration. Doing archival research for a chapter in
Journalism and Jim Crow was an opportunity he couldn’t pass. Each one of the above-mentioned
themes is present in “Industrialist and Editor: How Arthur S. Colyar Used the Press to Build an Industrial Behemoth,” an investigation into how a Tennessee power-broker promoted the use of convict labor to enrich himself and help maintain the white supremacist order in the South. America’s addiction to incarcerating black bodies, in both state penitentiaries and private prisons, can be traced in a straight line back to the post-Civil War political, legal and business activities of men like Colyar.

Raz writes a monthly reported column on immigration and mass incarceration for the Daily Hampshire Gazette (Northampton, Mass.), and a monthly newsletter about issues animating American public life for Romanian-language media outlet Inclusiv.ro.

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Senior Lecturer, Department of Journalism, University of Massachusetts Amherst, scholar of media, identity construction, discourse, author of “’You Can Be a Good Romanian, but not a Romanian’: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Romanian History Textbook Narrative” (dissertation, 2019) and “Imagining Nation in Romanian History Textbooks: Towards a Liberating Identity Narrative,” in The New Politics of the Textbook: A Project of Critical Examination and Resistance (2011).

Bryan Bowman

Bryan Bowman is a Peace and Security Fellow at ReThink Media, a nonprofit organization dedicated to amplifying the power of progressive movements through the media. He previously worked as an editor and reporter at the Globe Post and as a fellow for Middle East Policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. 

As an undergraduate journalism student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Bryan was awarded a research scholarship in 2015 to study the relationship between the press and the origins of America’s exploitative and racially disparate criminal justice system. Working closely with Professor Kathy Roberts Forde, that research project culminated in articles published in the Washington Post and the Conversation US and ultimately in their chapter in Journalism and Jim Crow, “Controlling the Press and Labor: White Supremacy and the Building of the New South State of Florida.” 

As part of his research, Bryan examined primary source documents at the Florida state archives, presented research to the 2017 Media and Civil Rights History Symposium, and became the first journalism student to be awarded the Rising Researcher Student Achievement Award, UMass Amherst’s highest award for undergraduate research. He hopes that readers of Journalism and Jim Crow will take away a better understanding of the role of the press in shaping events throughout history and its capacity to both challenge and perpetuate injustices in our society. 

Blair LM Kelley

Associate Professor of History and Assistant Dean for Interdisciplinary Studies and International Programs for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at North Carolina State University, author of Right to Ride: Streetcar Boycotts and African American Citizenship in the Era of Plessy v. Ferguson, winner of the Letitia Woods Brown Best Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians (2010).