In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

claUde a. Barnett (september 16, 1889–august 2, 1967) Bill v. Mullen Claude Barnett, along with the founders of the Chicago Defender and Ebony magazine Robert S. Abbott and John Johnson, respectively, stands as one of the three most important African American media entrepreneurs in Chicago in the twentieth century. The founder of the Associated Negro Press, the first Black news service in the country, Barnett significantly advanced the role of the Black Press in Chicago and nationally from 1919 to after World War II. An innovator in press coverage, news sharing, advertising, and public relations, Barnett professionalized Black journalism and displayed a middle-road commitment to racial progress and civil rights. He was also friend, correspondent, and publisher to many of the most important African American writers of his day. Up until his death in 1967, Barnett arguably played the single largest role in nurturing the modern Black Press we know today. Barnett was born in Sanford, Florida. His father, William Barnett, was a hotel worker. His mother, Celena Anderson Barnett, worked as a housekeeper. He moved to Chicago as a child, where he attended elementary schools and Oak Park High School and worked as a houseboy in the home of Sears Roebuck and Company founder Richard W. Sears. In 1904, he began attending Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he became enamored of the self-help Black capitalist ideology of Tuskegee founder Booker T. Washington. After graduation he returned to Chicago and took a job at the post office. Subsequently, he took a number of jobs, selling photographs and working in advertising before setting up his own agency, C. A. Barnett Advertising, and shortly thereafter Kashmir Chemical Company, manufacturer of Nile Queen cosmetics. His commercial ventures, reminiscent of the barnstorming entrepreneurship of Madame C. J. Walker, foreshadowed his sound instincts for entrepreneurship and a savvy understanding of the emerging African American market for products and issues surrounding African American identity.1 Barnett was working for the Chicago Defender selling advertising on commission in 1919 when the idea for the Associated Negro Press (ANP) was born. 54 • Bill v. MUllen Barnett recognized that many small Black newspapers across the country were in desperate need of a centralized news service that could regularly provide stories for publication on issues relevant to Black Americans. The ANP began as a tiny office on Chicago’s South Side with a small staff providing news releases and other noteworthy materials to Black newspapers through the mail for publication. In return, the newspapers paid modest fees and provided ANP credit lines. ANP news releases initially concentrated on Black joblessness and problems of political representation. The ANP’s rise coincided with the proliferation of new Black newspapers not just in Chicago but in other large cities such as Norfolk, Virginia; Houston; and Oklahoma City. Barnett provided for those papers the valuable service of news by and about Black Americans. Barnett also innovated advertising techniques, offering ANP service to newspapers in exchange for advertising space paid for by Black-owned businesses, especially successful cosmetics businesses, including his own. This allowed the ANP to profit and began to challenge the white domination of American commercial advertisers who tended to shun the Black Press. It also linked the rise of the Black Press to commercial prosperity in various sectors of the Black economy. During the 1920s Barnett was also active in Republican Party politics earning minor appointments from then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.2 During the 1920s, the ANP was directed in large part by Percival L. Prattis. The first editor of ANP was Nathum D. Brascher. Yet in the early days of the ANP, Barnett himself wrote and revised many of the company’s news releases. He was a skillful and efficient writer and used as his model the wire service reports of the established white press services like Associated Press. The ANP also promoted black achievement in all areas of life and encouraged mass education, a recurring theme in Barnett’s own life. The ANP paid special attention to news about Black churches and fraternal organizations while also covering Black entertainers . Internationally, the Press paid special attention to Black Americans traveling overseas, giving coverage to W. E. B. DuBois’s efforts to organize the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Tunis in 1929 and reporting on James Weldon Johnson’s trip to Japan in the same year to attend a conference at the Institute of Pacific Relations. Regular coverage was also paid to events in Liberia, the Philippines...

Share