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IN THE PUBLISHED RESEARCH ON THE INTERSECTION OF RACE AND American journalism, there is valuable scholarship describing the role of the white mainstream press in stoking the fires of racial violence, particularly during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras, and using social and political influence to create a cultural ideology of suppression and discrimination. Likewise, there is scholarship dedicated to the Black press and its part, in the words of historian Carrie Teresa, in speaking "truth to power on the experience of racism" during those same time periods. In Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield skillfully bring together a collection of thoughtful, detailed essays that "[document] the struggle between two different journalisms"—white newspapers' efforts to create and maintain Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction New South and the Black press's valiant pushback to those efforts. The end result is a book that is necessary reading for any serious scholar of race and the American press, for it expands the scholarship on both topics by focusing on a time period, the late nineteenth century, and a geographic area, the American South, often overlooked by historians.
Each of the ten essays stands on its own merits, with the book divided into four parts. Part one, "The Contested New South," examines the role that white supremacist and newspaper editor Henry W. Grady played as a vocal leader of the New South—as part owner of the Atlanta Constitution, Grady was "the most prominent New South spokesperson in the nation and the most influential newspaper editor in the South" (Forde 31). As such, he helped create and sustain the myth of white superiority in the post-Reconstruction South—from the election of...