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CHAPTER 3 Sidebar Covering the Bomb in the African American Press Across the front page of the Chicago Defender, 27 October 1962, James Meredith’s heroic attempt to integrate the University of Mississippi predominates . Though the story had broken weeks earlier, the Defender probed further in this week’s edition, including a recap of Meredith’s first days on campus ; a headline on Meredith’s wife, now also to enroll at Ole Miss; and a serene photo from the University of Alabama, where the first Negro students since Arthurine Lucy1 had applied for admission but not yet arrived. Bottom center is the title “Crisis Affects African Nations,” and three short paragraphs— followed up at some length on page 2—regarding the reactions of newly independent African nations to the “crisis” in question: the showdown between John F. Kennedy and the Castro/Khrushchev alliance that had days earlier brought the world to the brink of nuclear-armed conflict. Unmoored to any copy save its caption is a photo mid-right of an African American serviceman on duty in Key West, where the military was massing troops and materiel in the event of war with Cuba. On that same date, coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis in the Pittsburgh Courier was even more spare: the only front-page mention is a brief item regarding Castro’s attempt to lure southern Negroes to Cuba with a “Radio Free Dixie” broadcast;2 on page 1 of that day’s New York Amsterdam News, where the Meredith story had already faded, “Harlemites Backing President’s Stand” upper left, competes with the lead stories “Shades of Mississippi: Muslims Chained in N.Y. Courtroom” and “Sarah Vaughn Sorry Police Grabbed Hubby.” On this date, the Baltimore Afro-American was entirely silent on the subject, reporting instead on the latest in the Meredith story, other school desegregation battles about to begin, and the Vaughn scandal.3 The editorial decisions made with respect to the selection and arrangement of stories on this historically significant front page reflect the role played by 101 the African American press since its inception, and comment specifically on the way it adjudicated between this particular moment’s competing dramatic narratives—the integration of US higher education and the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war. In Jet a few weeks later, Larry Still’s article, “The Spotlight is Diverted, but Rights Fight Goes On,” acknowledged that “last week, Americans of all complexions turned their attention from the mounting civil rights crisis in the South to the Cuban crisis 90 miles off the Florida coast” (14). The story quotes NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins, who urges his community to not let this disruption—however important it may be—slow the momentum enjoyed by the movement at this time: “We don’t see any reason why in this emergency,” Wilkins said, “we should not go full steam ahead” (15; see also Goodlett, “USA Peace”). From Still’s report and Wilkins’s statement, one observes that for some African American writers and readers of the period, the arms race, and even the prospect of nuclear war, posed as much of a threat to “the free world” as to the campaign for the freedom they were still very much striving to complete. As placement and location have been themes of import since my opening pages, so the late-October-1962 front pages of the African American press present a dilemma faced by many in the broader black community: how prominently to position the Cuban story in the spectrum of African American news worth noting and whether this same narrative would, however temporarily, sideline the Ole Miss story and the rights struggle it crystallized at that moment . “Place” as well refers here (as it will in Chapter 4) to location on the political spectrum—to a complex understanding of “right” and “left” in the postwar African American context and to the realization that, as progressive as its tendencies ultimately were, every permutation of public opinion and ideological influence is to be found in this era’s black press. As I observe these writers who spoke during this period for an American postwar nation within a nation, I echo the analysis of Eve Dunbar, who reads “blackness as the ultimate segregated region in the United States” and argues that “during the 1940s . . . blacks literally and literarily occupied a space outside the confines of mainstream white America” (188). Of several postwar African American periodicals surveyed for this discussion , Jet...

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