New book co-edited by UMass Journalism's Kathy Roberts Forde examines how journalism helped establish - and oppose - Jim Crow

AMHERST, Mass. – White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. At the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals.

“Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America,” a new book of collected essays co-edited by University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of journalism Kathy Roberts Forde, centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. Forde and her fellow contributors explore the leading role of the white Southern press – allied with white political and business interests – in constructing an anti-democratic society of white supremacy by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor, but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment.

“After reconstruction, white publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture and protect white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South that lasted for generations,” Forde and co-editor Sid Bedingfield, associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, write in the book’s introduction. “Black journalists fought these regimes as they were being built. The stakes could not have been higher: the future of liberal democracy in the newly restored United States was on the line.”

Forde and Bedingfield write that “Journalism and Jim Crow” is the first extended work to examine the foundational role of the press at this critical turning point in U.S. history. It documents the struggle between two different journalisms – a white journalism dedicated to building an anti-Black, antidemocratic America, and a Black journalism dedicated to building a multiracial, fully democratic “New America.” Ultimately, they write, “the Southern white press and its political and business allies carried the day, effectively killing democracy in the South for nearly a century and shaping a tragically durable system of racial caste in America.”

Forde also provides two chapters to the book, which was published by University of Illinois Press. In one essay she examines how Henry W. Grady, the prominent managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution and national spokesperson of the New South, led his “Atlanta Ring” of powerful Georgia Democrats in building white supremacy in the state and the region. “More than any other New South leader,” Forde argues, “Grady provided the intellectual predicate and political blueprint for the erection of white supremacist political economies and social orders across the South.”

Her second essay, co-written with Bryan Bowman, a Peace and Security Fellow at ReThink Media, examines how Standard Oil tycoon Henry M. Flagler and railroad magnate Henry B. Plant built the modern state of Florida and controlled newspapers to protect their business interests, including quashing a Justice Department investigation of slave labor camps in the Florida Keys.

Also contributing to the collection is Razvan Sibii, senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst, who writes of Arthur S. Colyar, who was to Tennessee what Grady was to Georgia. But, unlike Grady, Colyar was an industrialist – the founder of the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company and holder of the state convict lease, he used newspaper campaigns to protect the convict lease and his business interests and to fight against free labor.

Additional contributors to the book include: W. Fitzhugh Brundage, William Umstead Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina; Robert Greene II, assistant professor of history at Claflin University; Kristin L. Gustafson, associate teaching professor at the University of Washington; D’Weston Haywood, associate professor of history at Hunter College, City University of New York; Blair LM Kelley, associate professor of history at North Carolina State University; and Alex Lichtenstein, professor of history at Indiana University.

More information about the book, which is available now at bookstores, and its contributors can be found at https://journalismandjimcrow.com.