JOURNALISM & JIM CROW: WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE BLACK STRUGGLE FOR A NEW AMERICA: ANOTIDA CHIKUMBU’S INTERVIEW WITH PROFESSOR KATHY FORDE

Today, Professor Kathy Roberts Forde appeared on the Anotida Chikumbu- BOOK SERIES, one of the biggest online historical archives of oral histories and book reviews. It is an academic dialoguing program on the air that primarily focuses on African studies and World history. 

In a very enlightening episode, Professor Kathy Roberts Forde speaks on her recent work, Journalism & Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America. The book was published by the University of Illinois. It shows how White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War. It also shows how at the same time, a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. The book centers the press as a crucial political actor shaping the rise of the Jim Crow South. The contributors explore the leading role of the white press in constructing an anti-democratic society by promoting and supporting not only lynching and convict labor but also coordinated campaigns of violence and fraud that disenfranchised Black voters. They also examine the Black press’s parallel fight for a multiracial democracy of equality, justice, and opportunity for all—a losing battle with tragic consequences for the American experiment.

Professor Kathy is an American journalism historian with research interests in democracy and the public sphere, the Black freedom struggle and the press, the First Amendment, literary journalism, and the history of the book and print culture. She is the Associate Dean of Equity & Inclusion in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences. She served as Chair of UMass Journalism from 2014-2017; she is past chair of the AEJMC History Division and past associate editor of American Journalism.  

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