Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914-1920 (review)

Violent conflict in pursuit of freedom and democracy has served to illuminate the hypocrisy of racial injustice in America since 1770, when Crispus Attucks, a black colonial patriot, was the first to die in the Boston Massacre. Less than a decade later the tenets of the Declaration of Independence—specifically that all men are created equal and have certain inalienable rights—erroneously led colonials of African descent to believe such noble ideals would be applicable to them in a new political order apart from British rule. Attucks's martyrdom was a clear example of their support of the ideals so nobly articulated by Thomas Jefferson. The prevailing notion was that their participation in the revolution would solidify for them those "inalienable rights" and earn them equal status as American citizens.

Within a few short years, however, it was all too evident that the freedoms and social equality that had been so passionately sought and promised were not being accorded to either the free black patriots or their enslaved brethren in the new nation. Thus, only 50 years after the beginning of the Revolution and 40 years after ratification of the U.S. Constitution, African Americans found it necessary to establish their own newspaper press to express their grievances and advocate their case for equality in the fledgling "democracy."

Now comes William Jordan's book that masterfully describes the role of the black press in forcing America to confront the hypocrisy of its domestic racial policies and practices during World War I—fought on European soil—and labeled by President Woodrow Wilson as America's "war for democracy." The author's well-documented work reveals how the U.S. black press used the war to promote advancement of its agenda while walking a tightrope over the threat of government censorship and accusations of disloyalty. The result was what the author terms "damnable dilemmas" for both Wilson's administration and black press editors.

The author selected six "leading" black weekly newspapers and The Crisis, a monthly magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) edited by W. E. B. DuBois, as the focus of his study. The newspapers were the Chicago Defender, the Cleveland Gazette, the New York Age, the Richmond Planet, the Savannah Tribune, and the Baltimore Afro-American. In addition the author sampled editorial matter from the California Eagle, the Boston Guardian, the Norfolk Journaland Guide, and the Indianapolis Freeman, among others. The author rationalized inclusion of The Crisis—neither a newspaper nor a black-owned publication—because black newspapers frequently commented on it as a "faithful representative of Black opinion" (8).

The book's premise is that black press editors "were less interested in articulating even their own ideas than in becoming involved in the national discussion about the war in such a way as to promote policy decisions or attitude changes that would benefit African Americans" (39). The author proceeds to trace the development of the social phenomenon known as the "New Negro" to the stance taken by the black press during the First World War. Indeed, the author does an admirable job of placing his work in the historical context of Social Darwinism and the rise of individualism manifested by the public reception accorded to Booker T. Washington's biography Up From Slavery in 1900.

Several examples illustrate and support the notion that black journalists cleverly used President Wilson's framing of the U.S. entry into the European conflict as a "war for democracy" to great advantage. The black press tied the racial segregation policies recently legitimized by the Plessy v. Ferguson U.S. Supreme Court decision and the numerous lynchings of African Americans to the basic rights Wilson sought to guarantee for Europeans. On the domestic front, some black newspapers characterized the film Birth of a...