Gender and Celebrity Activism in Twentieth-Century Black Press History

Among the institutions that advanced African American life throughout the twentieth century, the Black press held a key but complex position. Both a vehicle for and a reflection of the changes that African Americans and the nation underwent throughout this period, the Black press galvanized amid global interface, technological innovation, and racism that deeply shaped African American experiences. From national, monthly journals to local weeklies, the Black press operated as an alternative but strident communication network for African Americans as they navigated contested citizenship and affirmed racial pride. As a result, scholars from a range of disciplines have studied the emergence, operation, influence, decline, and continuing relevance of the Black press. Taken together, these studies not only reveal the heterogeneity and competitive nature of the Black press, but they also point to a rich, documentary, even extratextual, history worthy of continued study. Carrie Teresa's Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America and D'Weston Haywood's Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement reflect the potential of this ongoing work and add compelling considerations of the nuances and complexity in Black press history. With a common focus on the early twentieth century, Teresa and Haywood provide readers different but related assessments of what enabled the Black press to become a central, if not the, chronicler and arbiter of Black public opinion.

For Teresa, the Black press's turn to and development of celebrity journalism, especially within urban weeklies, is an understudied but important context of this dual function. In tracing the emergence of entertainment sections in papers such as the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Pittsburgh Courier, Teresa argues that "The pages of the black press were one of the few sites where blacks controlled the conditions of looking" and that Black journalists employed such looking through celebrity journalism to "empower readers and fans by promoting exemplary figures to whose achievements they themselves could aspire" (9). The chapters of Looking at the Stars treat a range of publications, celebrities (e.g., Josephine Baker, Jack Johnson, and Bert Williams), and journalists (e.g., Fay Jackson and Ralph Mathews). Teresa thus writes against what she describes as the "'color line' trope" to "critically examine the discursive strategies that black journalists used in writing about black celebrities (26–27). Teresa attends especially to how Black "citizen-activist journalists" like Jackson and Matthews practiced celebrity journalism. For example, Teresa contends that when covering vaudeville performer Bert Williams and boxer Jack Johnson, Black journalists tried to "articulate a definition of celebrity that acknowledged the importance" of Williams's and Johnson's "visibility across racial, geographical, and national borders" (52). Similarly, she later argues that Black celebrities, including Baker, Cab Calloway, and Jesse Owen, "were not simply diversionary figures designed to distract from the more pressing matters of the struggle for freedom" (188). For the Black journalists and newspapers that Teresa studies, these celebrities "exemplified the struggle, whether they set out to or not" (188).

More comprehensive in terms of chronology—reaching from the Harlem Renaissance to the early 1980s—Haywood's Let Us Make Men considers male editors and publishers and their publications, including their intentional embrace of race leadership and use of language placing journalism in the service of African American advancement. As Haywood notes, Let Us Make Men shows how "newspapers served as tools for Black men's pursuit of personal and racial manhood, racial leadership, public vocalization, public influence, and manly public performances in order to help the race and Black men themselves resist racist and emasculating forces in America" (8). Though different than the celebrities that Teresa considers, the men of Let Us Make Men—Robert Abbott, W...