The Press
Assembling penetrating scholarship on the complex roles that newspapers and their personnel (editors, publishers, reporters) played in both establishing white supremacy in the postbellum South and in resisting its imposition, Journalism and Jim Crow offers much fresh insight based on original research. Together, the collected essays highlight the pivotal role of a set of actors (some of them prominent, many previously neglected) and institutions, making substantial contributions to scholarship on the origins of Jim Crow as well as filling a major gap in journalism history and media studies.
SEPT 15, 2022 | Carrie Teresa in Mass Communication & Society
“And so it is here that I offer my strongest praise of this collection as a whole: it is courageous, it is unflinching, and (if its Amazon reviews are any indication) it risks being controversial in order to tell larger, often-ignored truths about the function of journalism in our democracy. . . . as Journalism and Jim Crow shows us, the problems of blindly venerating an institution that wields power—symbolic or otherwise—are not new and do not simply go away if we ignore them. Forde and Bedingfield have set the table for much needed discussions within the discipline and beyond about what is at stake for the study of American journalism as a political influence post Trump.”
Mar 18, 2022 | The Baltimore Sun
The Baltimore Sun must tell the whole story; a half-apology is insufficient
MAY 19, 2022 | AJHA Book Award Committee
No other volume in the book award’s history has promised to make such an important intervention in our understanding of the role of journalists in negotiating systemic racism— insights that promise to affect change in our modern world
JUN 17, 2022 | Atlanta Studies
What Journalism and Jim Crow does best is highlight how white supremacist narratives played a role not only in bolstering the profits of white newspapers, but also in silencing Black journalists.
MAY 16, 2022 | AEJMC History Division Book Award Committee
“Journalism and Jim Crow illuminates the role of the Southern press in building and upholding America’s own system of apartheid in a way that helps us understand how our nation’s current race relations came to be so troubled. It is the right book for this historical moment.” . . . This book makes a “forceful argument that white journalists were not mere observers but active participants in barbaric practices including lynching, convict leasing, and voter suppression.”
JUN 15, 2022 | AEJMC Tankard Book Award Committee
“Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America provides an important explanation and analysis of how Southern newspaper publishers—and the editors they employed—worked to protect white supremacy after the Civil War. This incisively written, multi-authored book examines the complexities of race and the press in the strive for democracy. It adds significant scholarship to an important part of journalism history and vividly informs our understanding of racial issues today.”