Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century by Fred Carroll, and: The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox by Gerald Horne, and: Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations by Burnis R. Morris (review)

Scholarship on the black press is undergoing a great revival. While newspapers and magazines have long constituted a valuable resource for African Americanist scholarship, few researchers had devoted critical attention to the primary sources themselves. Until recently, black press studies had been a niche interest of scholars in journalism and library science. All of that began to change with the early twenty-first century's wave of digitization. Scores of newspapers were made available on ProQuest and other databases, while the archive of John H. Johnson's family of publications found an online home with Google. Now scholars from a range of disciplinary backgrounds have access to materials once confined to scarce physical copies and the dreaded microfilm. That expansion of access has brought interdisciplinary research questions to bear on black press studies. Of these, none is more compelling than how the black press shaped and contributes to our understanding of the everyday reading practices of African Americans.

That question animates the three titles under review here. The first, Burnis R. Morris's Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations, adds a new dimension to the biography of one of the towering African American intellectuals of the last century. As the founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) and its scholarly organ Journal of Negro History (now Journal of African American History), Woodson aimed to legitimate an oppressed people's history by professionalizing its academic study. But his advocacy did not end there. Woodson proved to be a talented self-promoter, advancing his institutionalizing efforts by turning to an existing institution—namely, "the weekly newspapers, among the oldest and most powerful organizations in the black community" (xix). The black press, Morris argues, played a pivotal role in popularizing Woodson's belief that black history was extant and valuable. Revealingly, when the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History ventured something called "Negro History Week" in February 1926, Woodson brought the academic message to the masses in a column that appeared in the black press. The idea of celebrating black achievement during a specified period was novel; the mode of disseminating it across the country was not. Negro History Week lay the foundations for what we know today as Black History Month.

Carter G. Woodson draws on the more than 200 syndicated columns Woodson wrote for African American newspapers between 1926 and 1949, as well as press coverage of his and the Association's activities and achievements. Rather than mine these materials for their content (or what they were "about"), Morris approaches them, individually and in the aggregate, for what they tell us about Woodson's promotion strategies. He concludes that Woodson was as savvy a public relations agent as he was a historian and educator. Although Woodson "prided himself on not profiting from his newspaper column" (101), his popular writing elevated the Association's status while making it a household name. Negro History Week was the perfect encapsulation of this dual function. In turn, the black press benefited greatly from Woodson's crusade to legitimate black history. Journalists regularly participated in Association meetings, newspaper publishers sat on the group's Executive Council, and some news stories recirculated verbatim in the pages of Journal of Negro...