Struggles for Equal Voice: The History of African American Media Democracy

Preface

xv Preface as a high school student in Tokyo, Japan, i nearly failed my history class. approximately ten years later, i was in the final process of finishing up my doctoral dissertation—the base of this book—writing about history. a few years later, i was standing in front of more than one-hundred students at Michigan State university, giving lectures twice a week in my african american history class. a lot changed over those ten years, both personally and professionally. But a change that affected me on both those levels was my deepened understanding and appreciation of history. as a high school student, history simply meant rote learning of different names, facts, and years. it is true that this field requires much reading and remembering. No matter how much the students in my history class may complain, they still have to spend hours reading hundreds of pages, writing essays, and memorizing names and years in order to pass my class. it is a foundational part of the profession of historians. Facts and years create the sense of objectivity, an important responsibility that we have to fulfill. Without them, we would not have the basis to discuss, analyze, or explore history. Of course, this is not to say that there is singular objectivity or that an amalgamation of proper nouns makes up history. however, our day-to-day work as historians often is far from the kind of glory that other fields may have, at least in my eyes more than ten years ago. What i learned as i pursued my career as a historian, however, is that this field can be filled with personal interests and passion about topics of study. We spend days and weeks, if not months, deciphering handwritten primary documents from decades or centuries ago. in an archive, we go through dozens of storage boxes until we finally find the one with all the information we need. We spend years typing our manuscripts in a converted home office surrounded by stacks of photocopied documents. Probably the only colors we see around us are from the covers of the books we have accumulated over xvi Preface time that now seem to serve as a fort. But as we immerse ourselves in our rich history, we become increasingly filled with passion. This book is a fruit of my enthusiasm in african american history and Study, a field that is filled with african american individual and collective memories—often times erased from the mainstream academic discourse—of struggles, achievements, disappointments, rejoice, displacement, and empowerment. as historians, we can give voice to those who never had a chance to have their voice heard while alive. We also can unearth the voice of the silenced. This is where my very personal, not just professional or intellectual, passion exists. The origin of my fascination in this field exists in my experience of awakening in 2002. During my three-year experience in Boston as an international student from Japan where racial homogeneity is so strong and pervasive that seeing a non-Japanese or non-asian–looking person at a local supermarket could be a topic at my grandparents’ dinner table, i was shocked by the intricacy of american society. in the united States, there not only were different skin colors but also different color tones. The more i familiarized myself with Boston, the more aware i became of what Washington Street signified in the mind of many Bostonians. “Things could be rough on the south side of Washington Street. You don’t want to go there after dark,” one of the administration workers at my undergraduate institution once told me. This is when my rosy idea about american diversity and pluralism began to subside and take on a different meaning in my life. Except for one year i spent in France, i had spent twenty-one years of my life in Japan. i believed that the united States was a true melting pot where racism was a thing of the past and skin color no longer mattered. as much as it sounds like a cliché, that was what i believed before my arrival in the united States. i was only ten years old when Rodney King was beaten by Los angeles police officers. i was eleven when the controversy around anita hill and clarence Thomas took place. i was fifteen during the O. J. Simpson murder trial. More importantly, i was on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. For a high school...