Media 2070 FINAL - Flipbook - Page 43
VIII. Black People Fight to
Tell Our Stories in the Jim Crow Era
DEFIANCE IN THE FACE OF WHITE MEDIA CONTROL
Black people have advocated for centuries to tell our own
stories so we can speak for ourselves.
The nation’s first Black newspaper — Freedom’s Journal
— was founded in New York City in 1827. The paper’s
inaugural issue stated: “We wish to plead our own cause.
Too long have others spoken for us. … From the press and
the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly
represented.”1
The North Star — the first of several papers that Frederick
Douglass published — proclaimed in its inaugural issue in
1847 that it would fight to abolish slavery and advocate for
the rights of full Black citizenship in the North. The paper
wrote “to the cause of our long oppressed and plundered
fellow countrymen” that it would “fearlessly assert your
fights, faithfully proclaim your wrongs” and fight against
“every effort to injure or degrade you and your cause.”2
Ida B. Wells was a trailblazing journalist who used data to
document and investigate lynching in a pamphlet called
Southern Horrors as well as in the booklet The Red Record.
Her fearless journalism finally received the recognition it
deserved when she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer
Prize in 2020 for “outstanding and courageous reporting
on the horrific and vicious violence against African
Americans during the era of lynching.”3
The emergence of broadcasting during the 20th century
ushered in a powerful medium that would transform
our media industry — first with radio, and then with
television.
Like so many powerful white-owned and
-controlled newspapers, the broadcast
industry spread the myth of Black
inferiority to protect a white-racial
hierarchy. And it did so with the aid of
government policies.
The government began to regulate commercial radio in
1927, and nearly all of the nation’s commercial radio
licenses — and later TV licenses — went to white men and
white-controlled companies. Nearly two decades would
pass before Jesse Blayton became the nation’s first Black
radio-station owner.4
But the government did award a radio license in 1927 to
the Independent Publishing Company, which published a
newspaper called The Fellowship Forum that was an organ
of the Ku Klux Klan. The station served Northern Virginia
and the Washington, D.C., area, before being sold to CBS
in early 1932. Today, that station — WTOP 103.5 FM — is
an all-news station that still serves the D.C. area.5
This is why Black people have embraced new methods
of telling our story whenever new technologies have
emerged. Each new technology has offered us a chance
to own and control the telling of our own stories and
challenge damaging narratives.
The Pittsburgh Courier sponsored a 1927 radio program
— The Pittsburgh Courier Hour— that aired on WGBS in
New York City. It was the first radio program devoted to
“Negro journalism.” The Harlem Broadcasting Company,
founded in 1929, leased time on WRNY in New York
City and aired the program — A Raise to Culture. But
the company, the “first independent African American
venture of its kind,” was unsuccessful in its effort to
acquire a radio station.6
In Chicago, the “dean of African American disc jockeys,”
Jack Cooper, leased time in 1929 on a lower-power
radio station — WSBC — to air The All-Negro Hour, the
“first successful weekly radio show featuring African
Americans.” Cooper partnered with the Chicago Defender
— and later with the Pittsburgh Courier — to produce
the first Black newscast in the Midwest. And in 1946,
he created the first roundtable program for the Black
community.7
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