The Importance of Black and Mass Media

By Zebulon Miletsky Associate Professor, Africana Studies

This past semester, I taught my AFS 363: Blacks and Mass Media course just like many semesters before. Arriving at class that first day in a small, dark, windowless classroom in Staller, I could do nothing but let my eyes take in what would be our new learning space. As I did, I spotted an older-looking wooden blackboard in the corner—perhaps an antique—but it had a strange appeal. To say that this classroom was different from others I have taught in was an understatement, yet there was something special about its lack of amenities.

I mentioned this to the class the first week to help them visualize the kind of educational experien- ting and “the power of the pen”— utilizing what would become the medium to aid in the campaigns for full citizenship that lay ahead.

As we learned in class, 1827 was the same year that slavery was abolished in the state of New York. It would be no coincidence that “Freedom’s Journal” was born that same year by editors Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm.

According to Catherine R. Squires, author of the textbook of our class, African Americans & The Media, “For free Blacks to be able to speak on a range of issues regarding race and citizenship, they needed—and successfully created—a separate press. In the Black press, writers and editors could

As Cornish bravely stated in the pages of the Colored American, “We are Americans—Colored Americans .... in complexion, blood, and nativity, we are decidedly more exclusively ‘American’ than our white brethren, hence the propriety of the name of our people, Colored Americans, and of identifying the name with all our institutions, despite our enemies, who would rob us of our nationality and reproach us as exoticks [sic].”

The Black press has been a significant engine for conveying African Americans’ hopes, frustrations, culture, and political strategies. We are seeing the need for Black media perhaps more than ge—in news broadcasts, in reality, on television, and today even through social media.

Another conclusion that our class came to was that the advent of integration in the 1960s and 1970s spelled a slow death knell for the independent Black press, which had been very strong—starting in the 19th century—and flourished in the early 20th century. Some of the most famous are the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, The Omaha Star, The Boston Guardian, and the Baltimore Afro-American. Still, hundreds and hundreds of them—some ceasing publication or restarting under new names—many becoming a treasured part of the Black communities in which they reported. That independent Black media protected the Black community— reporting on lynchings and other acts of injustice against Black people based upon their race. That includes racial injustice on the part of the military, the government, the police, and White supremacy ce we would be learning about. It reminded me of the one-room schoolhouses many African Americans had learned in the years after the Civil War. Many African Americans endured similar educational surroundings in the ongoing struggle to become educated at any cost. In that grand tradition, we would be learning about Blacks in the Mass Media. And in light of that consideration, I realized it was the perfect classroom for us.

Slowly, week after week, the lack of modern educational tools faded into the background. In similar circumstances, a group of prominent free African American citizens from states along the Eastern seaboard met in New York City to form the first Black independent newspaper, “Freedom’s Journal,” in 1827. They would liberate themselves through wri- support abolitionism and construct arguments supporting their humanity and equality as citizens of the United States.” ever. Weekly, almost daily, we see the lives of Black men and women being threatened and taken away due to violence of all kinds.

Although it only lasted two years, many others would follow.

It is challenging to know the exact number of early Black newspapers, partly because many did not make it for more than a few months, and few libraries archived copies of these publications.

But we know that 17 publications emerged between 1827 and 1861, with many having been founded in the Northeast. New York State alone produced 18 Black periodicals in the same period. Some of them are The North Star (NY); Frederick Douglass’s Paper (NY); The Colored American (NY); Freedom’s Journal (NY); The Mystery (PA); The Christian Recorder (PA); and The National Era (Washington, DC).

As mentioned in the class many times, much of this began in the 1990s with shows like “COPS,” which showed African Americans and often poor whites in a negative light week after week. In areas of the country with very few African Americans, it was the one (and usually only) image that many were offered. In the news industry, it is often said: “If it bleeds, it leads.” In other words, it is often the sensual or the shocking that drives media decisions—in newsrooms, in the production booth. There is nothing to prevent or stop the profit-driven mainstream media from choosing which stories it wishes to run over and over again. In many cases, it has meant the destruction of the Black ima- itself. The Black press helped to explain the details and, therefore, to fight against it with the only power available to many—the power of information and ideas.

Today, because of the massive injustice going on with police brutality and the scores of deaths of young Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement— being pulled over for driving the wrong kind of car in the bad neighborhood at the wrong time (really being pulled over for the crime of being Black)—we see a resurgence of a new Black press being rekindled. The rise of mass incarceration—what many folks call the New Jim Crow—the rise in mortality of Black women in childbirth, the high incidence of COVID-19 in the Black community, and the lack of hospitals and health clinics that saw coronavirus numbers spike during the pandemic, and the many cases where police shoot first and ask questions later. Only this week, a high school English teacher man was tased to death after saying, “You’re trying to George Floyd me.” Most of us saw the video footage on Black media sources—on Instagram, not CNN. On Twitter, not on the Network Television news. Social media has changed everything about the way these injustices are reported, and have even played a role in getting those who commit them punished.

Indeed, we’ve the seen the resurrWe see the importance once again for Black media to return to the airwaves or to print and digital media pages. Indeed, we have witnessed the resurrection of abolition-era newspapers: The North Star under Shaun King; The Emancipator in Boston under Ibram Kendi; and other digital and new media efforts to spotlight injustice on Instagram, Twitter, and social media. As social injustice rises, the need for independent Black media has also grown.

As the semester ended, I realized we might have had outmoded educational tools. Still, like those who came before us—lacking the funds for new or modern everything—we made the most of what we had, reasoning that if it was something that generations before us could deal with, then we could too. In that sense, the class bonded us with our forebears and their burning desire to find their way to educate and to become free. We used the tools of reading and writing that had been forbidden to them during Slavery. Like them, we used a chalkboard. We used it to describe the many examples of the ever-changing technological ways the media has grown and changed over the years.

What had not changed, we rea-