Giving a Voice to the Voiceless

Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists

Jinx Coleman Broussard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135938291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This work describes the journalism careers of four black women within the context of the period in which they lived and worked. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Amy Jacques Garvey were among a group of approximately twenty black women journalists who wrote for newspapers, magazines and other media during the late n

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

The history of the journalism profession has long been documented in hundreds of books, journals, television shows, movies, and speeches. In virtually every instance, the contributions of individuals to the field have been highlighted. Scholars have introduced men such as Benjamin Franklin, William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Pulitzer, and Lincoln Steffens to succeeding generations through textbooks and biographies. Likewise, the careers of women journalists Ida Tarbell and Nellie Bly are highlighted in journalism literature.¹ During the last thirty years, scholars have explored the black press with increasing frequency, giving most attention to the men who wrote for, edited, or owned black newspapers and other publications. However, investigators have given scant attention to the black women who worked as journalists during the formative years of that medium.

From the late 1890s to the 1930s, some twenty black women journalists used their writing and speaking abilities to present information aimed at calling attention to the ills in American society, championing causes, and enlightening and uplifting their race.² These women lectured extensively and wrote hundreds of articles for magazines, newspapers, and other publications during careers that spanned decades. Although they actively engaged in journalistic pursuits and received acclaim for their work at the time, these turn-of-the century black women journalists have remained virtually invisible in the literature about the history of the black press, the feminist, and the mainstream press. The historical experiences of the female journalists have received little attention and, likewise, neither have the issues they addressed.

This book, therefore, examines the lives, works, and practices of four late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century black women journal-ists within the context of the period in which they lived. The journalists are Ida B.Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Amy Jacques Garvey.³ By looking at these women, the publications for which they wrote, the themes they addressed, the audiences they reached, and their views on issues, this study provides insight into the breadth of their contributions to the journalism profession. The research also focuses on the extent to which the women accomplished their activism through journalism. Ultimately, the goal of this study is not only to describe the women and their journalism output, but also to fill a gap in the literature by placing these women into the pages of journalism history.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

An oppressive, limiting, and dehumanizing society provided the backdrop through which these black women journalists picked up their pens and wrote. These late nineteenth and early twentieth century journalists wrote during a time when black people who had been freed after the Civil War were struggling to gain an economic foothold, equality, and access to opportunities that would allow them to do more than merely exist. Although slavery had been abolished, numerous written and unwritten rules assured that blacks would be relegated to the lower rungs of the economic and political ladder.⁴ Writing in The Colored American magazine in 1908, W.R.Lawton described the status of blacks by calling their situation “peculiar.”⁵ Lawton said blacks needed the white man’s help because, “the land is his, and the government is his.”⁶ Gloria Wade-Gayles used similar words a quarter century later when she asserted that blacks were freed from slavery and “delivered-with all deliberate speed-into a new-style [peculiar institution].”⁷ Wade- Gayles wrote that the institution included “…Jim Crowism, disfranchisement, economic exploitation, lynching, rapes, and other institutionalized barbarities” that “sought to keep the race forever in a state of powerlessness.”⁸ Historian Harvard Sitkoff echoed those words when he explained that beginning in 1876, a “legal counter-revolution had occurred” in this country. Sitkoff observed that

the Supreme Court legitimized the right of states to exclude blacks from jury service; to prohibit intermarriage; to segregate school children; to deny blacks equality in public accommodations; to permit the disfranchisement of Negroes; and finally to bar all interracial contact, however selective or voluntary.⁹

Historians characterize the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the “Nadir,”¹⁰ a period of some forty years that reflected a low point for blacks in the United States. During that time race relations was volatile and racial conflict manifested itself through riots in the southern cities of New Orleans, Louisiana; Wilmington, North Carolina; Statesboro and Atlanta, Georgia; and Brownsville, Texas.¹¹ Moreover, racial segregation, misrepresentations of blacks, and lynching of black men and women were commonplace. Elaborating on the situation, Dorothy C.Salem pointed out that “blacks earned their living through domestic or personal services and agriculture” and “their children were less likely to attend schools and were six times more likely to be illiterate than their white counterparts.”¹²

As the 1920s dawned, African Americans were further disillusioned with their country after having fought for freedom in Europe during World War I, and subsequently, denied rights at home when they returned. Lawrence W.Levine wrote that blacks who served “heroically” and with “devotion” believed that their “second emancipation” would come when they returned from the war.¹³ According to Levine, their

loyalty and hopes were rewarded by inferior treatment for black troops, by a hardening of the lines of discrimination by increased humiliation, and by the bloody summer of 1919 which saw major race riots in city after city. Blacks had played the game by the rules and discovered definitely that the rules simply did not apply to them.¹⁴

Blacks migrating to northern cities between 1910 and 1920 did not fare much better than their southern brethren.¹⁵ The editors of The Making of Black America wrote:

The Great Migration during and after World War I accelerated a trend toward greater segregation in northern cities, which had been evident for a number of years. By the 1920s Negroes were already barred from countless recreation centers, restaurants, and hotels. Many northern communities extended segregation in the schools.¹⁶

“In New York and Philadelphia,” Salem explained, “the increasing number of attacks on blacks by crowds of white males demonstrated the racial hatreds of northern urban residents.”¹⁷ Sitkoff confirmed this, arguing that whites who viewed the arrival of blacks during the Great Migration as a threat to their jobs and the status quo, frequently attacked them.¹⁸ He offered that most African Americans “found squalor, discrimination by labor unions and employees, decayed housing milked by white slum lords, and liquor and narcotics the only escape from despair.”¹⁹ Despite those conditions, “for millions of Afro- Americans, the Northern urban ghetto also meant surcease from permanent tenantry, poverty, disease, and ignorance.”²⁰

The early 1920s saw the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, a literary movement during which many African Americans believed their talents and contributions in art, music, literature, and drama were the means to gaining white America’s respect and acceptance.²¹ Providing further elaboration, Edward Peeks wrote, “the Roaring Twenties proved no exception to the rule of violence against Negroes, violence arising especially from the issues of jobs and homes in the North and from more general animosities in the South.”²² For years to come, dashed expectations and disappointment characterized black communities throughout the United States.²³

A REVIEW OF EXTANT LITERATURE

BLACK WOMEN

Contemporary historians who have written during the last quarter century about African- American women argue that they faced the double burden of racial and gender discrimination because they were both black and women.²⁴ Like white women, black women were not allowed to exercise the franchise, thus they faced sexual discrimination. Like black men, African-American women faced discrimination in the woman suffrage movement and other areas because of their race.²⁵ Wade-Gayles stated that “according to nineteenth century racist definitions, black women were inferior members of the sex whom God himself had colored a distasteful hue and imbued with insatiable sexuality, phenomenal strength and limited intelligence.”²⁶ Dorothy Sterling voiced a similar sentiment in 1984 when she wrote:

To be a black woman in nineteenth-century America was to live in double jeopardy of belonging to an “inferior” sex of an “inferior” race. Yet 2 million slaves and 200,000 free women of that time possessed a tenacity of spirit, a gift of endurance, a steadfastness of aspiration that helped a whole population to survive.²⁷

Black women, according to author Paula Giddings, struggled to define themselves and their world politically as they fought racial and sexual oppression.²⁸ Cynthia Neverdon-Morton asserted, “regardless of their social class, black women often suffered humiliation or physical harm simply because of their race.”²⁹

Scholars have begun to reclaim African-American women from marginalization.³⁰ Some professed that the women have been neglected and ignored largely because of racism and sexism.³¹ Gerda Lerner noted,

black women have been victimized by scholarly neglect and racist assumptions. Belonging as they do to two groups which have traditionally been treated as inferior by American society—blacks and women—they have been doubly invisible. Their records lie buried, unread, infrequently noticed and even more seldom interpreted.³²

Writing in Black Foremothers: Three Lives, Dorothy Sterling concurred. She suggested that “because of the nature of American history, and particularly because of the institutions of slavery and segregation, the names of black women leaders are all but unknown in American society.”³³ Glenda Gilmore added that black women have disappeared from the historical record,³⁴ and Darlene Clark Hine maintained “race, class, and class status combined to consign the women to historical oblivion.”³⁵ Historians maintain that society viewed turn-of-the-century black women journalists as negatively as other African-American women of the time. Nevertheless, the women defied the odds, surmounted obstacles, and became social and political activists. Within the context of racism and sexism, the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century black women journalists picked up their pens and began to write. They gave a voice to the voiceless.

BLACK WOMEN JOURNALISTS

A review of the literature confirms that although nineteenth century black women journalists were very active during the period, their works and contributions are not widely chronicled by those who write journalism history. Publication of the autobiography of Ida B.Wells-Barnett almost a half century after the pioneering journalist died illustrates the historical disregard of African-American women. Wells-Barnett, who distinguished herself as a champion of the rights of blacks, women, and children, had almost finished the final pages of her life story when she died in 1931. However, the Wells-Barnett autobiography was not published until approximately forty years after her death.³⁶

Two decades after publication of the autobiography, Roland E.Wolsely called attention to the historical neglect of black women journalists. In his history of the black press, Wolsely stated that “female editors and writers of the nineteenth century had been ignored as journalists by almost all who had written on black journalism before 1970.”³⁷ Other writers acknowledged that while histories of the black press give early black women writers scant attention, apart from brief references to one or two pioneering black women journalists, the history of the mainstream or established press also does not acknowledge the existence of these women.³⁸ Some historians argued that scholarly neglect has rendered African-American women invisible, regardless of their class, status, or profession.³⁹

Writing specifically about nineteenth century African-American women journalists, Rodger Streitmatter declared that because of “prejudice, injustice, and hatred… American historians have, until recent decades, largely ignored women of African descent.”⁴⁰ Streitmatter maintained that “despite racial and sexual discrimination,”⁴¹ black women journalists fought against racism and oppression. The author offered that they were “defiant, strong-minded, and independent,”⁴² and they refused to be silent victims of their times. They became journalists and racial activists who advocated equality for their race, sisters, and for humankind.⁴³ Bernell Tripp stated that black women journalists before the advent of the Civil War “were the most visible and significant teachers, lecturers, and writers of the period—making their presence known in the classroom, in the public auditoriums, and in the newsroom.”⁴⁴ Black women continued to wield influence after the war and into the new century.

Despite works by Tripp, Strietmatter, and other scholars that elevated African-American women journalists from the footnotes of history, most existing studies on journalism inadequately reflect the lives and contributions of the women. One critically acclaimed history describes the career of Ida B.Wells in less than ten lines and devotes even less space to several other black female journalists of the period.⁴⁵ Streitmatter pointed out that a major journalism textbook, although “generally sensitive to the contributions of women and minorities,” had no mention of black women journalists.⁴⁶ Another widely used college text makes no mention of specific black women journalists in the chapter that highlighted the black press.⁴⁷ As recently as 1998, a history of the black press devoted only three pages to four nineteenth-century black women journalists....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Studies in African American History and Culture
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Notes
• Bibliography