Note:
Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
Therefore, this work is protected by copyright,
restricting your legal rights to reproduce it.
However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now.
Read more about copyright.
Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 42. The Negro Press - 1. An Organ for the Negro Protest
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
910 An American Dilemma
conclusion that Negro opinion—at least among the more alert and articu-
late groups—can be ascertained and studied in the Negro press.
The opinions expressed in the Negro press—directly in the editorials
and columns and indirectly in the type of news selected—are remarkably
similar all over the country. This is undoubtedly caused by the common
demands of the reading public and the similarity of milieu of the competing
journalists. Negro papers in the South tend to be more cautious and less
belligerent. But a large proportion of all Negro papers bought and read
in the South are published in the North.® This Northern competition
explains to some extent why even Southern Negro newspapers give such a
relatively blunt expression to the Negro protest. The more basic explana-
tion, however, is that this is what the Southern Negro public wants to read,
too. In the South, where concerted action on the part of Negroes is usually
so severely checked, and where Negro leadership in all practical matters
has to be accommodating, most of the time,® the Negro press serves as a
safety-valve for the boiling Negro protest.
This is possible—^like the great amount of Negro protest within the walls
of the Negro church and the Negro school—^because the whites seldom
know much about it. Whites, apparently, very rarely see Negro papers.
Even when they do come across them, there is a certain abstract feeling
among all Americans for the freedom of the press which, even in the South,
covers the Negro newspapers. The Southern Negro press, further, usually
takes the precaution of not attaching its protest too much to local issues and
news, but to general principles, national issues, and news from distant
points. The local pages in Southern Negro papers are usually restrained.
Northern Negro papers are less afraid of carrying the Negro protest into
locaJ news and issues. But even in the North most of the local coverage
tends to be restricted to news and gossip about the town. Indirectly, how-
ever, even the pages devoted to the local community have a protest pur-
pose as well as an informational purpose in both the North and the South.
All Negroes, and particularly the ambitious upper and middle classes of
Negroes who make up most of the reading public, are aware that white
Americans deny them social status and social distinction. This makes class
and accomplishment seem tremendously important. The display of Negro
^‘society news” in the Negro press is partly an answer to the social deroga-
tion from the whites.
The more important and open expressions of the Negro protest are to be
found in the news coverage of the whole American Negro world and, to
an extent, the Negro world outside the United States, and also in the
columns and editorials on the status of the Negro people. It is a character-
istic of the Negro press that if, on the one hand, it is provincial in focusing
interest on the race angle, it, on the other hand, embraces the whole race
‘See Chapters 34 and 37.
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
