The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox by Gerald Horne (review)

Book Reviews 129 occasionally veers onto shakier ground in speculating about Kahn’s private thoughts and opinions. Building the Modern World is richly illustrated with historic photographs, Kahn’s renderings, and images from Hodges’s own extensive collection of photography. Hodges confesses that he does not utilize Photoshop or other photo editing software, and the book is almost always the better for it. Aside from a few images with deep shadows that detract from, rather than enhance, their subject, the photos show Kahn’s buildings realistically, as they would be seen by Detroit’s residents and visitors. Hodges’s work is insightful while remaining accessible, an enjoyable introduction to the life and legacy of Albert Kahn in Detroit. Ruth E. Mills Senior Architectural Historian Quinn Evans Architects, Ann Arbor Gerald Horne. The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Pp. 279. Illustrations. Index. Notes. Paper: $24.95. Claude Barnett’s Associated Negro Press (ANP) was far more than an ordinary wire service; rather, it was, recounts Gerald Horne, black press historian and author of the latest and most comprehensive treatment of Barnett’s legacy, “the most ambitious black press institution in the country before the advent of Johnson Publishing” (p. 5). The ANP not only served over 250 black press newspapers across the United States and Africa, it also forged important connections with leading black intellectuals of the time including the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, author Langston Hughes, and professor W. E. B. DuBois and served as the proving ground for some of the black press’s most accomplished career journalists, including P. L. Prattis, Harry Levitt, Fay Jackson, Enoch Waters, and Frank Marshall Davis. In his critical history of Barnett and the ANP, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox, Horne explores the contradictory nature of Barnett’s life and career as a microcosm of the clash between black and Pan-African activism and American upward mobility. Horne argues that Barnett’s experience exemplifies the “paradox of the struggle against Jim Crow,” with Barnett as the main protagonist: “Yet Barnett was a contradictory figure,” writes Horne in the introduction to his work, “which reflected his anomalous post as a member of the black elite and thus feeling the tug of 130 The Michigan Historical Review the progressive black masses, while also being an aspiring member of the U.S. elite, which pulled him in an opposing direction” (p. 2). Horne charts Barnett’s ascent as the founder of the ANP, “unofficial Secretary of State,” and role as an African American socialite who was married to singer and actress Etta Moten and counted among his friends the likes of Zora Neale Hurston and Mary Church Terrell. Horne crafts his narrative through the generous use of quotes and passages from personal correspondence, press releases, and news clippings collected from the Claude A. Barnett/Associated Negro Press Papers housed at the Chicago History Museum and North Carolina State University-Raleigh, as well as supplementary materials from the Robert S. Abbott Papers in the Chicago Public Library. The aims and scope of the work are broad and admirable: it is both a narrative history of Barnett’s life and a critical reading of the ANP’s body of work, paying particular attention to its foreign reportage and dedication to Pan-Africanism. As a critical history, it is similar to Ethan Michaeli’s well-received The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (2016). Unlike that work, however, Horne is far more comfortable than Michaeli in problematizing his subject’s legacy and, too, is far more deliberate in positioning the ANP—and the black press generally—as an early adversary of the American status quo and emphasizing the irony of its collapse as a result of integration. These critical interventions in black press historiography, which tends on a whole to replicate the celebratory narratives of progress often seen in early mainstream journalism histories, makes The Rise and Fall of the Negro Press a turning point in this body of literature and a...