Preface

Summary

Negro weeklies make no pretense at being newspapers in the strict sense of the term. They have a more important mission than the dissemination of mere news. … They are race papers. They are organs of propaganda. Their chief business is to stimulate thought among Negroes about the things that vitally concern them.

– James Weldon Johnson, “Do You Read Negro Papers?” (New York Age, October 22, 1914)

Writing America Black resurveys Walter Lippmann's “American Century of public opinion” from the perspective of African Americans committed to what W. E. B. Du Bois called “the real needs of the people,” the actualization of democracy, and the authentication of the historical record. Americanism for these native sons and daughters meant a destabilizing, institutionally enforced signification subject to revision or erasure in the black independent press. Paradoxically, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson's revolutionary conception of “the people as the only censors” and Walt Whitman's concern that “a true poem” be as realistic as “the daily newspaper,” writers for the black press assumed that the “true principles” of government were located in the public sphere – and that community news, with its unrestrained airing of dissensus, was instrumental in the construction of authentic race narratives.