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CHAPTER 1
An Abundance of Outright Untruths
From its inception in 1945, Ebony's mandate to "mirror the happier side of Negro life" appeared to offer an alternative editorial philosophy than the one familiar to many readers of the black press. Over the previous century black periodicals had developed a reputation as a "crusading press" that campaigned tirelessly against racial injustice. The names of newspapers such the Chicago Defender aptly reflected a steadfast mission to protect black lives and, as Langston Hughes argued, provide "the journalistic voice of a largely voiceless people." By contrast, Ebony's aspirational vision of black middle-class living seemed at best a half-hearted attempt to soft-pedal civil rights. For critics such as E. Franklin Frazier, it was unclear how the magazine's enthusiastic embrace of conspicuous consumption or its exposés of "why Negroes buy Cadillacs" contributed to the ongoing struggle for racial equality. Reflecting on his own childhood memories of the magazine, historian Jonathan Scott Holloway recalls that Ebony's "editorial agenda was strikingly consistent: share local black success stories; visit movie stars or athletes or musicians at their homes; emphasize glamour and entrepreneurship; and above all, make sure everyone is smiling and has beautiful skin, hair, and teeth."
However, if we choose to center other aspects of the periodical's coverage — most notably its efforts to promote black history — we can see how Ebony's content marked not a departure from but an extension of an enduring black print tradition. While the magazine's content was mediated by its broader focus on consumerism and celebrity culture, Ebony's black history and historically oriented content expanded the black press's long-standing role as a conduit for "black cultural heritage, moral values and educational knowledge." Articles profiling the historical contributions of black pioneers maintained the magazine's promise to "mirror the happier side of Negro life" and expanded its preoccupation with "black firsts" to offer a celebratory engagement with the African American past. Intersecting with its developing coverage of the postwar black freedom movement, Vincent Harding has suggested that such content solidified its status as "a kind of running contemporary history of [the] black struggle in America."
As this chapter demonstrates, Johnson's own interest in black heritage can be seen to have helped underpin an admirable, if uneven, push to promote African American history during the magazine's formative years. This was encouraged by early editors such as Allan Morrison and Era Bell Thompson, who agitated to see their own interests in black history and the black diaspora represented on the magazine's pages. The addition of Lerone Bennett Jr. to Ebony's editorial team during the mid-1950s, coupled with the impact of the growing civil rights movement, provided further impetus for new historical articles and exciting public history projects such as the "Ebony Hall of Fame." Housed at the magazine's Chicago headquarters, this "unique historical gallery" encouraged reader participation in the construction and commemoration of the African American past. While such projects were often short lived, they helped to lay the ground-work for a more comprehensive editorial engagement with black history, which took root from the beginning of the 1960s.
Black History and the Black Press
In late 1826 a group of activists and freemen gathered at the home of M. Boston Crummell, a former slave and prominent spokesman within New York's black community. The meeting had been arranged to combat the abject racism of the city's white-owned newspapers and their continued attacks on its black residents. Against such woeful misrepresentation, it seemed vital for the black community to formulate its own paper. On March 16, 1827, the first issue of Freedom's Journal was released, marking the origins of the black press in America. In its inaugural edition, the Journal's editors, John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish, addressed their readers directly, declaring, "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly." In the pursuit of civil rights and emancipation for all, the newspaper emphasized the importance of education in matters pertaining to both the present and the past. This extended beyond the black experience in the United States to include the ancestral homeland, with its editors contending that "useful knowledge of every kind, and everything that relates to Africa, shall find a ready admission into our columns."
Such statements enunciated the desire of African American people to be seen and understood on their own terms. More specifically, Russwurm and Cornish's words powerfully articulated the role of black history and a shared African past in establishing a sense of community for both antebellum free blacks and the enslaved majority. For the Journal's editors, education was an "object of the highest importance" and a critical weapon in the battle for mental and physical emancipation. As such, Russwurm and Cornish strove to advertise black schools, celebrate black history, and draw connections between individual enlightenment and the collective advancement of the race. While Freedom's Journal would fold after just two years, it was followed by dozens of black newspapers in the decades leading up to the Civil War. As scholars such as Eric Gardner and Elizabeth McHenry have noted, these pioneering publications continued to emphasize cultural and historical literacy as a way for enslaved Africans and free blacks to achieve respectability and join "the enviable ranks of virtuous, intelligent and useful men."
Black periodicals continued to function as key outlets for black historical education during the postbellum era, a role necessitated by the desperate state of black history within the American educational system and the academy. In the aftermath of the Civil War, African American efforts to promote a more representative account of American history were hindered by the entrenchment of institutional racism within the nation's fledgling public-school system. School textbooks became a key tool for the dissemination of racial hatred and the distortion of black history. In the preface to his 1890 study A School History of the Negro Race in America, black educator Edward A. Johnson attacked the biases of school textbooks that appeared to have been "written exclusively for white children, and studiously left out the many creditable deeds of the Negro." A similar scene emerged within American academia, where antipathy of black equality during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would manifest itself through the work of the Dunning School and other apologists for white supremacy.
Despite such opposition, African Americans remained committed to the recovery and preservation of their own heritage. In coming to terms with what Orlando Patterson has described as the "social death of slavery," emancipated black Americans placed increasing faith in the historical record as a tool to help construct a "legitimate social identity." Such efforts often manifested themselves through African American literary history, with literature becoming a means to complicate and reformulate black popular memory. Black scholars and historical enthusiasts also looked to create a range of learned societies, libraries, and reading rooms, which were pointed toward the dual goals of "increasing literacy and historical knowledge of the race." Black periodicals played an important role in this process, both in helping to promote the activities of fledgling black history organizations and in functioning themselves as alternative spaces for black history education.
Given the role of black periodicals as outlets for popular black history, as well as the myriad interests of a burgeoning black elite, it is unsurprising that many figures straddled the line between journalism and historical scholarship during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1875, civil war veteran and Baptist minister George Washington Williams founded a short-lived black newspaper titled The Commoner in Washington, D.C., which he used to publish a number of black history columns. Seven years later, Williams published his two-volume History of the Negro Race in America, which John Hope Franklin has contended marked the beginning of the "first generation of scholarship ... in Afro-American history." Williams was followed by figures such as Booker T. Washington, another renaissance man who, prior to the publication of his 1909 book The Story of the Negro, was able to cultivate a significant degree of influence over the black press. An impressively ambitious text, The Story of the Negro attempted "to sketch the history of the Negro people in America" in a way that mimicked the bootstraps rhetoric of Washington's influential memoir Up from Slavery.
The links between journalism and black history scholarship remained strong into the "second generation" identified by Franklin, which was characterized by professionalization and an increasingly scientific approach to the study of the African American past. Perhaps the most famous member of this generation was W. E. B. Du Bois, who became the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard in 1895. Du Bois would later parlay his academic training into an illustrious journalism career, most notably as the editor of The Crisis, the monthly magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He envisioned The Crisis as a complementary vehicle for scholarly treatises such as his 1915 survey text The Negro, with early issues including features on African civilization, black soldiers in the American Civil War, and the Underground Railroad. Other scholars who straddled this divide included William H. Ferris, who balanced his role as the literary editor of Marcus Garvey's Negro World with the production of a two-volume history of black life in the New World, titled The African Abroad.
At the same time, the increasing professionalization of black historians threatened to create an intellectual hierarchy between black scholars trained by the academy and the continuing work of black journalists, lay historians, and bibliophiles. This apparent bifurcation has tempted scholars to contrast the "scientific methods" of the second generation with the lack of formal training and academic credentials, which "remained the Achilles heel of the Afro-American popular historians." Certainly, the institutionalization of the black history profession created new challenges for self-taught and self-trained "outsider" historians such as Joel Augustus Rogers, described by The Crisis in his 1966 obituary as "one of the great popularizers of Negro history." For these figures, the black press remained a key tool for circulating historical material — most clearly seen through Rogers's long-running illustrated series "Your History," which was serialized in the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most widely circulating black periodicals.
Yet this narrative framing risks creating a rigid binary between "professional" and "popular" black historians, and between "reputable" black history outlets (such as academic books and journals) and mass market alternatives (such as the black press). To discuss black historiography in these terms detracts from the myriad overlaps and intersections between a growing but still relatively small cohort of academically trained historians and a much larger pool of lay historians and black bibliophiles. As Stephen Hall has argued, the "wide variety of theoretical, methodological, and ideological tools" used by this diverse cohort of activists, academics, and intellectuals helped to build a "faithful account of the race." Despite its limitations, the work of Rogers and other "lay" historians would have a telling influence on later generations of academically trained but increasingly nationalist-oriented historians.
In turn, professional black historians such as Carter G. Woodson were not averse to using "popular" outlets in spreading the gospel of black history to a wider audience. Often described as the "father" of the black history movement, Woodson was an academically trained historian par excellence who, through his individual scholarship and his role in establishing the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, arguably did more than any other figure to help professionalize black history as a scholarly discipline. He was also a passionate advocate for the promotion of popular black history and consistently utilized the black press to spread his message. Many of Woodson's book-length contributions were rooted in articles printed in black newspapers, while the black press helped to build mass support for his black history campaign. Woodson would go on to create his own magazine, the Negro History Bulletin, which aimed to "reach the masses with authentic historical information."
The Bulletin and other black periodicals continued to play an important role in promoting black history during the 1930s, even as support for black history education diminished within public-school systems across the country. More broadly, the World War II era proved to be a pivotal moment for the black press in America. Frustrated by the contradictions between a "war for democracy" abroad and the entrenchment of Jim Crow at home, black newspapers orchestrated the "Double V" campaign, characterized by the Courier as a "two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us." The campaign brought retribution from the federal government by way of mailing restrictions and indictments for sedition. However, it also served to galvanize black communities across the country and helped lay the groundwork for the postwar civil rights movement.
From a different perspective, the war years saw a new wave of black periodicals emerge that struck a different editorial tone from that of "crusading" black newspapers such as the Courier. As the average black reader became more educated and urbane, they looked for periodicals that were "less an initiator of protest than ... a reflection of the tastes and habits" of the black community. Among the new periodicals created in an attempt to meet this demand were Color magazine, published out of Charleston, West Virginia, by I. J. K. Wells, the first state supervisor of Negro education in the country. Other periodicals included Negro Story, created by Chicago schoolteacher Alice Browning and social worker Fern Gayden, and Our World, the brainchild of John P. Davis, a former Crisis editor and a founder of the National Negro Congress. At the forefront of this trend was the Negro Digest, which was created in 1942 by an ambitious young entrepreneur named John H. Johnson, with the help of his wife Eunice Johnson and Defender contributors Ben Burns and Jay Jackson.
Adam Green has contended that Negro Digest was a periodical "unlike any preceding it in black journalism." Adopting an altogether more moderate tone than the one espoused by "race periodicals" such as the Defender, the Digest introduced itself to readers with the claim that it was "dedicated to the development of interracial understanding and the promotion of national unity." Envisioning his new publication as a black equivalent to Reader's Digest, Johnson gambled that the magazine would prove to be a hit with a growing black middle class "desperate for news about itself that existed beyond what was printed in the weekly police blotter or crime column." This gamble proved to be a wise one: within eight months of its initial release the Digest was selling around fifty thousand copies a month. A little more than two years after its first publication, the periodical accounted for 20 percent of all black magazine sales in the country.
The Digest initially stuck closely to the format its name implied, compiling existing articles on "racial issues, black history, and black identity" from other sources. However, as its influence and popularity increased, the magazine became more ambitious, inviting original contributions that assessed black culture and history within and beyond the borders of the United States. Pero Dagbovie has argued that the Digest "served as an important outlet for black historians to share their philosophies of black history." The magazine also printed articles from influential activists such as Eslanda Robeson, whose January 1945 article "Old Country for Thirteen Million" criticized the teaching of black history in American schools and encouraged readers to engage with their own heritage. By this date, Johnson had already set his eyes on an ambitious new project — a glossy black photo-editorial magazine that would champion black middle-class respectability and the power of the "Negro Market."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr."
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