Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 40
VII. Government Moves to Suppress Black Journalism
ATTEMPTS TO SILENCE THE MEDIA OF RESISTANCE
Black newspapers in Memphis and Wilmington had to be
silenced when they threatened the white political-power
structure. Attacks on the Black press continued during
World War I — but this time it was the federal government
cracking down on Black publishers for political dissent.1
Congress passed the Espionage Act in 1917 and the
Sedition Act in 1918. Both criminalized free speech and
attacked the press for criticizing the government’s war
efforts.2 The government used these powers to threaten
Black publications, such as The Crisis, for condemning
racism and other injustices.3
In 1917, after a white policeman attacked a Black woman
in Houston, a riot that killed at least 15 people ensued.
A Black newspaper, The San Antonio Inquirer, published
a letter from a Black woman who praised Black soldiers
involved in the riot. “We would rather see you shot by
the highest tribunal of the United States Army because
you dared to protect a Negro woman from the insult of a
Southern brute in the form of a policeman, than to have
you forced to go to Europe to fight for a liberty you can
not enjoy,” wrote C.L. Threadgill-Dennis, a Black Austin
woman.4
The government arrested G.W. Bouldin, the paper’s editor,
and charged him with espionage — even though he was
out of town when the letter was published.5 In 1919, he
received a two-year prison sentence and spent about a
year incarcerated.6 Meanwhile, 13 Black soldiers who
participated in the riot were hung, and 41 other soldiers
were given life sentences.7
This environment put pressure on the Black press to stand
down to avoid facing sedition charges.8
But the socialist publication The Messenger, which
Chandler Owen and legendary civil-rights and labor leader
A. Philip Randolph co-founded in 1917, did not. It called
on the Black community to oppose the war. “No intelligent
Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as
it now exists,” the paper wrote. “Intelligent Negroes have
now reached the point where their support of the country
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is conditional.”9The paper faced government retribution
due to its editorial position. A biography of Randolph
notes that “for such statements, the Messenger’s editorial
office was visited in the dead of night by agents of the
Justice Department. Several mornings, the editors arrived
to find their files had been ransacked, furniture broken
and back issues of their magazine confiscated.”10
A Justice Department official arrested Randolph and
Owen at a Cleveland antiwar event — where the two were
speaking — after purchasing a copy of The Messenger that
was being sold to audience members. The agent arrested
both men, who were charged with violating the Espionage
Act. They spent two days in jail.
A judge threw out the case because he “couldn’t believe
we were old enough, or, being black, smart enough, to
write that red-hot stuff in The Messenger,” Randolph
recalled.11 But the outlet lost its second-class mailing
privileges, which had subsidized the cost of mailing the
paper to subscribers.12
After the war, Black publications returned to criticizing
the government and racism in our society. Troubled by
this development, a young J. Edgar Hoover, who had
joined the Justice Department in 1917 and became a
special assistant to U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell
Palmer in 1919, recommended that “something should
be done to the editors of these publications as they are
beyond doubt exciting the negro elements of this country
to riot and to the committing of outrages.”13
The Justice Department investigated the Black press
and authored a 1919 report — Radicalism and Sedition
Among Negroes as Reflected in Their Publications — that
unsuccessfully attempted to convince Congress to pass
peacetime sedition laws.14
“At this time there can no longer be any question of a
well-concerted movement among a certain class of negro
leaders of thought and action to constitute themselves a
determined and persistent source of a radical opposition
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