A history of two centuries of Black journalism, resistance, and community. For two hundred years, the Black Press has served as one of Black America's most durable and influential institutions. A Full Measure of Freedom marks this bicentennial with a sweeping account of Black journalism's past, present, and future. In this edited volume, Kim Gallon and E. James West bring together essays by scholars working across history, journalism and mass communication, political science, literary studies, and the history of science. This collection provides exciting new perspectives on the history of Black journalism and direction for the development of Black Press Studies as a field. The book traces the Black Press from its origins in the 1820s through the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, the postwar period, and the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Contributors examine how Black newspapers documented everyday life, challenged racial violence, shaped public opinion, and connected local communities to national and diasporic movements. The volume also considers the Black Press's changing forms and futures in an era of digital media, declining local journalism, and renewed struggles over democracy and representation. A Full Measure of Freedom offers both a landmark historical synthesis and a field-defining intervention to scholars and students of Black history, journalism, and media studies, as well as readers interested in the institutions that have sustained Black public life across generations.
Kim Gallon is an associate professor of Africana Studies at Brown University. She is the author of Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press. E. James West is a lecturer in the arts and sciences at University College London. He is the author of A House for the Struggle: The Black Press and the Built Environment in Chicago.
Table of Contents Introduction, by Kim Gallon and E. James West 1. Antislavery, Citizenship, and the Early Black Press, by Dexter Gabriel 2. Frederick Douglass' Paper and the Project of Black Leadership, by Benjamin Fagan 3. Seeking Family, Asserting Rights: Black Women, the Black Press, and Information Wanted Ads, by Teresa Zackodnik 4. The Cleveland Gazette: Paper-Reading Citizens in the Post-Reconstruction Era, by Jeon Woo 5. Seen and Not Heard: Black Women, Gender and the Radical New Negro Press, by Jane Rhodes 6. "The Ever Present Sex Question": Black Women Health Concerns in the Chicago Defender, 1913-1935, by Wangui Muigai 7. Antifundamentalism in the Black Religious Press: Afro-Protestant Critical Religious Orientations in the Star of Zion, 1921-1939, by Vaughn A. Booker 8. The Women of Abbott's Monthly: The Visual Economics of Modern Black Womanhood, by Kim Gallon 9. Population Density and Newspaper Development: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Demography of the Great Migration, by Thomas Aiello 10. In the Shadow, for the Struggle: The Black College Press and the Fight for RacialJustice, by Sheryl Kennedy Heydel 11. Gerri Major's "Freedom Song": Chronicling Gender, Class, and Pleasure in the Black Press, by Tiffany Gill 12. Up Against a Deadline: Malcolm X, the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Blacklash, & a Race Against Time, by D'Weston Haywood 13. From the Same African Womb? The Transnational Black Press and Black Power Networks, by Lynette Mills 14. Visibility is Survival: BLK Magazine, the Black Gay Renaissance, and the Queer Politics of Black Print, by E. James West 15. The Center of the Black Universe? The City Sun and New York's Black Press in the 1980s, by Wayne Dawkins 16. Shifting Mediums: The Affordances and Limitations of a Digital Black Press, by Miya Williams Fayne 17. Hearing Our Voice: The Legacy of the Black Press, from Print to Podcast, by Tegan R. Bratcher 18. A Place of Our Own: Real Estate as a Tool for Community-Building and Sustainability at the Afro-American, by Savannah G. M. Wood 19. A Legacy Preserved: The Black Press Archives at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, by Brandon Nightingale 20. A Credo for Black Press Studies: The Next 200 Years, by Kim Gallon and E. James West
A history of two centuries of Black journalism, resistance, and community.
