INTRODUCTION
The Black Press and White Institutions

JAMES P. DANKY

The year 1998 marks the 171st anniversary of the publication of the first newspaper produced by African-Americans in the United States. When Freedom's Journal appeared in New York on March 16, 1827, its editors, Samuel Eli Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, stated that its mission was to be an authentic voice of black Americans, for others had "too long spoken for us." By 1929, politics and economics had claimed the paper, as they did tens of thousands of other newspapers before and since.

The fervor and enthusiasm that launched Freedom's Journal were common for newspapers of that age. What made this publication distinctive were its origins and audience. Unfortunately these qualities have not impressed librarians as they made selections for their collections. When Winifred Gregory's American Newspapers, 1821-1936 appeared in 1937, only nine institutions reported owning copies of this journal, all on the east coast except the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. None of these institutions reported complete files, and Gregory neglected to include her usual notation: "negro." This treatment of the first periodical produced by and for African-Americans in this country shows the pattern of libraries' paying scant attention to publications produced by black Americans.

The short lifespans and archival neglect of these publications, both of which still persist, have had profound consequences for anyone interested in African-American history. Periodical sources are often hard to identify and locate. The need for better documentation of these sources was the point of origin for the African-American Newspapers and Periodicals Bibliography Project, based at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. In 1989 Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institution sponsored a small conference on needs and opportunities in African-American studies. After two days of intensive discussion by scholars, librarians, and archivists, a consensus emerged that three large tasks needed to be undertaken: a "Harvard Guide" to African-American history; a national finding aid for black manuscript collections; and a comprehensive bibliography of African-American newspapers and periodicals. The guide to history is currently in preparation, and the guide to manuscripts remains to be undertaken. The present volume is the result of the third proposal.

Textbooks of the 1950s and 1960s, the apotheosis of the Great White Man view of history, were almost inevitably organized by presidential administration and featured virtually no individual actors beyond senators, governors, and ranking politicians, save for the barons of industrial capitalism. They sometimes added inventors--some of whom achieved sufficient financial success to warrant mention--as well as literary and moral figures such as Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville. A few even included some African-Americans and women--Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example. But textbook history was mostly a tale of a few leaders and the anonymous masses they led.

The 1970s brought little change in the way history was taught. Supplementary readings expanded the acceptable scope for historical inquiry, but the fundamental texts reflected the older values and perspectives. Although a few black faces were introduced, along with some voices speaking in languages other than English, they played passive, supporting roles. But enormous changes were occurring in the world beyond the classroom. First there was the modern movement by black Americans demanding their civil rights, followed by the anti-war movement. It is only mildly reductionist to suggest that these challenges--by women, by Hispanics and Native Americans, by gays and lesbians, by the aging and the disabled--have continued to redefine history. Today's textbooks read very differently from those of fifteen or twenty years ago.

The change in the agenda for American history has also challenged the libraries and archives that serve historical research. The principal challenge has been in collection development. In the past a library could meet scholars' needs with government publications, the major newspapers, and the manuscript papers of those aforementioned Great White Men. There were exceptions--for example the Schlesinger Library for women's history, begun at Radcliffe College in 1939--but for most libraries past patterns of collecting continued into the 1960s and frequently beyond.

The rise of this new approach, the now middle-aged New Social History, has required libraries to develop different and much larger collections. No longer is it sufficient for students of history to quote the New York Times or even the local newspaper. When the focus of study moves from the formal political process to the lives of ordinary people, legislative journals are of minimal use. As scholars demand more and different materials, most libraries have discovered that they have been collecting for the past, not for the future.

The challenge of new ways of historical thinking did not mean a retreat from the appropriate standards of authenticity and accuracy. It simply meant applying those standards in a more equitable way. For example, instead of quoting President Chester A. Arthur on the proper role of black Americans, historians might seek out the thoughts of the Rev. H. H. Williamson in the pages of the Buxton Eagle, as he sought to minister to the temporal as well as spiritual needs of black coal miners in southeastern Iowa at the turn of the century. Scholarly as well as popular history written over the last thirty years reflects this drive for more authentic and more particular voices. The challenge for libraries has been to revisit selection decisions and attempt to acquire the resources that current scholarship demands. In many cases, a library can buy or borrow materials on microfilm and thus redeem its earlier failure to collect important parts of the printed past.

However, there is still a tremendous amount of material that has not been recovered. The African-American Newspapers and Periodicals Bibliography Project has identified thousands of titles that were reported as published but which cannot be located today. The project also turned up a great number of supposedly lost titles. To give just one example, in the course of our work we contacted the State Historical Society of Iowa to alert them to the Project and to provide them with a copy of a printout of Iowa titles we had already identified. The librarians in Iowa City suggested that we write to a woman named Ada Tredwell, in Waterloo, who was said to have some African-American newspapers. According to published or official sources, no African-American newspapers had ever been published in Waterloo, a city of just under seventy thousand in northeastern Iowa. But when we contacted Mrs. Tredwell, she indicated that she had a number of Waterloo imprints and agreed to lend the issues to the Project for filming. This resulted in a real of film which contains the first publicly known issues of the Waterloo Defender, the Waterloo Post, and the Waterloo Star. The Project cataloged the titles on OCLC and provided a positive copy to the Iowa Historical Society.

Iowa is a state with a miniscule black population, but the pattern of ignoring the publications of African-Americans is national. In the 1980s in Texas, a large state with a large black population, a committee was convened to address the chronic lack of preservation of the state's newspapers. Lacking the funding to collect more widely, these librarians, historians, and journalists determined that at least one newspaper from each of the state's 254 counties should be designated the "newspaper of record," as determined by country government. Not surprisingly, every paper selected was published primarily by and for white residents. In another instance, our Project received a request from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for microfilm of a title they were interested in. In exchange we requested microfilm of an equal number of black newspapers, starting with the first titles in the nineteenth century. They replied that the best they could do was to start with the 1930s. Although we knew of the earlier publications' existence from Julius Thompson's bibliography, supplemented by our own work, it was clear that most of them are no longer extant.

Out of these few anecdotes a trend emerges. The effects of slavery, of Jim Crow, of segregation, of racism, have permeated all aspects of American life, black and white. As official institutions of the dominant society, libraries could not possible be exempt--and they were not. Libraries and the men and women who staffed them, again with a few exceptions, selected materials for their collections reflecting their own experiences: nearly all white, middle-class, English-speaking, and, despite the female presence, male-dominated.

Because no institution can collect everything, building a collection inevitably involves some process of selection. But I have come to believe that when a library specializes in a given place, a given time, or a given subject, its efforts should be comprehensive. Otherwise the selections made can nearly always be categorized in terms of race, class, and gender, which the possible additions of divisions such as religion, national origin, or sexual persuasion. The typical canonical defenses of "best," "most substantial," and so forth can all be shown to be personal and subjective, and they always result in a collection that is a false, or flawed, representation of the larger society.

A recent experience has strengthened my conviction that only through universal bibliography--and by that I mean comprehensive collecting conjoined with full bibliographic control and as close to universal access as possible--can fairness and equity be served. In 1991 the Center for Research Libraries, a cooperative institution in Chicago serving America's major university and research libraries, completed a comprehensive microform edition of the camp newspapers published by the Civilian Conservation Corps. A massive undertaking, the more than 7000 pieces of microfiche and more than 300 reels of microfilm constitute a nearly complete record of the newsletters and newspapers produced by and for the millions of young men who participated in the program in its decade of existence.

Beyond the CCC's general goals of vocational training and socialization, it also offered journalism courses in the camps. Along with some journalistic history, these programs emphasized the writing of news stories, commentary, fiction, and poetry. Although some of these literary efforts were contributed to the national paper, Happy Days, the 1935-36 CCC annual report stated that more than 1600 camps published their own newspapers. The CCC program peaked at this same year, with more than 2600 camps and more than 500,000 participants. Some of the camps printed their papers on conventional presses, but most issued mimeographed or hectographed papers. The frequency of publication varied with the levels of enthusiasm and creative production in the company, but generally the papers appeared weekly, semimonthly, or monthly. Newspaper titles changed often, sometimes because companies moved to new camps and sometimes apparently just by whim.

Olen Cole, in a doctoral dissertation and an article for Forest & Conservation History, has studied African-American youth in the CCC in California. Although black youth experienced a disproportionately high rate of unemployment in California in the early 1930s, African-Americans were not recruited by the CCC at a level that reflected this higher rate. California had nine segregated African-American camps, including some which published their own papers, such as the Foothill Tipoff, from Alta Loma, and the Pine Cone and White Rock, from Hemet. In all, 134 black camp newspapers were published and have been preserved.

When I first served as an advisor on the CCC newspapers project, I thought about it only in terms of documenting a federal program, not as a source for black history. Then I discovered that the CCC appended a "C" to the numbers of the African-American camps. A quick scan of the titles with this mark indicated that they were surely the black periodicals and newspapers I had hoped to find. The titles could not be clearer: The Dunbarite, Dunbar News, The Southern Cotton Camp Cannon, Hi-de-hi-de-ho, and Little Ethiopia. These publications and the collateral records available through the national and state archives are a potential goldmine for researchers. It is not too late for scholars to interview black CCC veterans, as Olen Cole did; the Indiana Park Service recently sponsored a reunion of veterans as part of a national initiative to document the program and black participation in it. The CCC newspapers offer the opportunity to read literature, including the ubiquitous doggerel, written by African-Americans, and to revisit the undiscovered black writers who were the black proletariat.

The New Social History of the 1960s challenged historians and librarians to think in new ways about the meaning of their work. One unfortunate result has been the claim that history of a particular group is the rightful and exclusive province of its members. This can sometimes take the form of asking why white people should study black history. While it would be wildly reductionist to say that all American history is black American history, there is an element of truth in it. There is no separate white or black American history. As Paul Gilroy [link to The Black Atlantic?] has recently reminded us, the Atlantic worlds of discovery of the New World and of slavery grew up together, and are in fact inseparable. A similar historiographic strain appears in the work of Dirk Hoerder on immigration history. Hoerder notes that the continued rise of the Atlantic economy in the period after Emancipation depended on massive immigration from Europe and to a lesser extent from Asia.

The rise of the Atlantic system clearly depended upon cheap labor, with black slaves a major component. Once slavery--meaning Africa--was introduced into the arena, American history was changed forever. The notion that "black" and "white" history are hermetically sealed off from each other not only fails to provide us with a useful basis for considering our own lives but also does injustice to the past. The information collected in this volume is intended to contribute to the effort of all historians to gain fuller understanding of our shared American history.

Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.