‘Black Press’ Tells of an American Revolution

“We were truly invisible unless we committed a crime,” former print journalist Vernon Jarrett says tonight about the banning of blacks from the pages of U.S. newspapers prior to the birth of the African American press in the 19th century.

The emergence of black journalism as a force in the U.S. is a fascinating story that mainstream media have all but ignored. Making up for that is “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords,” a strong PBS documentary from Stanley Nelson about the evolution and impact of African American newspapers from 1827 through the 1950s.

Driving this 90-minute film are a spate of distinctive publishing figures whose newspapers collectively raised black esteem and, says narrator Joe Morton, seeded the civil rights movement that began flowering in the middle of this century.

They range from Ida B. Wells, who moved north for her safety after her Memphis Free Speech investigated lynchings in the aftermath of the Civil War, to Charlotta A. Bass, publisher of the influential California Eagle in Los Angeles and someone whose radical politics later brought her into conflict with the white establishment.

Also profiled here is Robert S. Abbott, whose Chicago Defender fearlessly attacked whites and was widely read by blacks in the South, fomenting dissatisfaction that motivated great numbers of them to move north, thereby altering the face of the nation. Ultimatelysurpassing even the Chicago Defender in clout was the Pittsburgh Courier, which gave space to some of the nation’s best African American thinkers.

Read by black GIs serving in segregated units overseas during World War II, these papers were viewed with alarm by the U.S. military on the basis that they incited restlessness by reminding these troops they were fighting for a democracy they wouldn’t be fully sharing when returning home.

“It was a Jim Crow army of a Jim Crow country,” says Morton near the end of this worthwhile documentary about a press whose relevance narrowed after 1960, ironically, as opportunities for African Americans widened.

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* “The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV.