Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield (review)

Reviewed by: Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America ed. by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield Pete Smith Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 360pp. $24.95 paper. In the published research on the intersection of race and American journalism, there is valuable scholarship describing the role of the white mainstream press in stoking the fires of racial violence, particularly during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and using social and political influence to create a cultural ideology of suppression and discrimination. Likewise, there is scholarship dedicated to the Black press and its part, in the words of historian Carrie Teresa, in speaking "truth to power on the experience of racism" during those same time periods. In Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield skillfully bring together a collection of thoughtful, detailed essays that "[document] the struggle between two different journalisms"—white newspapers' efforts to create and maintain Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction New South and the Black press's valiant pushback to those efforts. The end result is a book that is necessary reading for any serious scholar of race and the American press, for it expands the scholarship on both topics by focusing on a time period, the late nineteenth century, and a geographic area, the American South, often overlooked by historians. Each of the ten essays stands on its own merits, with the book divided into four parts. Part one, "The Contested New South," examines the role that white supremacist and newspaper editor Henry W. Grady played as a vocal leader of the New South—as part owner of the Atlanta Constitution, Grady was "the most prominent New South spokesperson in the nation and the most influential newspaper editor in the South" (Forde 31). As such, he helped create and sustain the myth of white superiority in the post-Reconstruction South—from the election of white supremacists to political office to the "separate but equal" mindset [End Page 355] that shaped the state's social order. "Relatedly, he used his newspaper as a blunt weapon against the political, economic, and social interests of Black Georgians and Southerners," Forde says (33). The following essay examines a number of militant Black journalists who took on the political and social hegemonies that Grady and other white supremacists championed. As the legal rights that Black southerners gained during Reconstruction vanished, as both public opinion and discourse weighed heavy against them, and as racial violence surged, Black journalists, including T. Thomas Fortune and Garland Penn, were the architects of "a new tide of Black activism," argues historian D'Weston Haywood (58); to do so, they had to speak to the realities of racial violence and the social and legal discrimination that plagued freed men and women in the post-Reconstruction South. "Thus, Black journalists worked to expose the New South for what it really was and to raise public consciousness to the realities of racial injustice that proponents of the New South attempted to mask," Haywood writes (58). Part two, including the essays "The Press and Lynching" and "Mississippi Plan," explores the most common form of racial violence enacted against Black southerners in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how white southerners used it, and other forms of physical violence, intimidation, and fraud to all but eliminate the Black vote. The press played a critical role here: as white editors used their newspapers to rationalize (and gloat about) the mass murder of Black southerners (mostly men), Black news editors and journalists responded by crafting a powerful counter-narrative, one that spoke melodramatically about the brutality and terror of what Black columnist John Edward Bruce labeled "A Southern Pastime" (Brundage 98). As white editors spread the word about the effectiveness of the Mississippi Plan—named after the blueprint that white Mississippi Democrats devised to violently roll back the political gains that Black Mississippians made during Reconstruction—to their readers, thus undermining any opportunity for racial...