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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 42. The Negro Press - 3. Characteristics of the Negro Press - 4. The Controls of the Negro Press
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920 An American Dilemma
This personal publicity in many cases also gives the editor or, in bigger
Negro papers, his usually underpaid employees, some additional income.®
Usually it is not so much the arrived upper class persons who strive for
publicity in this Negro press as the people who are striving and aspire for
recognition. But the former group gets its share because it is the pride of
the Negro community and most often it dominates the civic organizations
like the N.A.A.C.P., even if it leaves the churches and the lodges to the
ambitious middle class. The news about all this organizational activity in
the isolated Negro community—of churches, clubs, associations—serves
primarily a purely practical purpose of giving certain information which is
not offered in the ordinary press. It also defines the Negro community as
an institutionalized society to the individual Negro, who is excluded so
much from white society, and it gives him a feeling of security and belong-
ingness. In all organizational activity there is also usually a ^^race cause”
present, and even this news serves the protest motive in some degree. And,
more or less incidentally, it supplements the society news in reporting on
personal status and accomplishments of prominent individuals.
The sports columns, likewise, have for their purpose to record and exalt
Negro performances. Even the comics usually have, in addition to their
regular purpose to distract and amuse, also a race message to tell: that the
Negro is witty, that he is clever, that he is strong, and occasionally, that the
whites are mean and inferior. When the Negro press indulges in self-
criticism of the ^^race,” there is often a prefatory repudiation of the
white stereotypes of the ^4azy” or ^^criminal” Negro and an attempt
to redefine the characteristics in Negro terms: that Negroes are too good-
hearted, too easily deceived and cannot ‘‘keep together.” The Negro press
makes an emphatic appeal to the Negroes to show in life and deed that the
whites are mistaken. The Negro newspapers do what the national press in
every country can be observed to do: they flatter the group and appeal to
group-pride even when admonishing5
they help to make it feel self-
confident and superior.
. 4. The Controls of the Negro Press
The Negro press is primarily controlled by the active members of the
upper and middle classes of the Negro community. As we have mentioned,
these classes make up a great part of its subscribers. The people who
publish and write the Negro newspapers belong to the upper class. It is the
doings and sayings of people in the upper and middle classes that are
recorded in the Negro press. They, therefore, set its tone. Indeed, the
• I have met this practice of demanding a small amount of money for taking society news
and even associational material in many Negro communities, but can, of course, neither
know about its financial importance nor if it is also a practice in the comparable white
press.
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