Part 3 of Dr. Washburn's Media & Society Lecture, Feb. 8, 2001

We're going to go to the end of the summer of 1942.

Sengstacke has gone out and told the other black publishers, "You're not going to get tried under the Espionage Act." And the other black publishers start toning down their publications, but they tone them down, very skillfully, because they feel their readers will un-subscribe, if you want to call it that, to their newspapers. So, therefore, the way they tone it down, is they start by not talking about inequalities by the federal government, but instead they talk about inequalities by state governors, by congressman, and they stop criticizing the federal government. And why did they do that? Because they didn't want to lose subscribers, and they were particularly scared of an Espionage Act indictment if they kept going, and also as businessmen, they had advertising like they had never ever seen in the black press in the history of this country.

In 1940 the U.S. Congress looked at a bunch of companies in this country which were making a lot of money off of World War II. They were selling to both sides. They were selling to the Germans, they were selling to the British, they were selling to the French, and they're making a lot of money. And so the government, Congress, decided, "We've got to do something about this." They passed and Excess Profits Tax. The Excess Profits Tax said, "We're going to set a model, from you in the past, and if you make 10 percent above that in any quarter until this war is done, whether the U.S. is in it or not. You have to take that extra money, above the 10 percent, and you have to give it back to the government in excessive taxes, or you can find a new way to spend it, and you don't have to give it back." Well, a bunch of these companies are making a lot of money, and they look around, and they look at the black press, and it occurs to them, "Maybe this is a place we want to advertise."

Now, up to this point in American history, the black press had survived by mostly selling newspapers, and if you know anything about the press, that's not the way the press survives. The press survives by selling advertisements. The black press didn't have it. White-owned companies did not want to advertise regularly in the black press. There was an article in the early 1940s, in an advertising publication, and they talked about, "Why should you advertise in the black press?" They point out, "Many more blacks, than whites, can't read. Many more blacks, than whites, don't have much money. And many more blacks, than whites, work in the homes of whites, and they're going to see that Life magazine, and that Time magazine, and that New York Times lying there on the coffee table. They're going to see these ads anyway, why should we advertise to blacks?

Well, the Excess Profits Tax did it. Bunch of the white-owned companies, rather than giving back a lot more money to the IRS, start advertising. You start to see companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Vaseline, Old Gold Cigarettes, all kinds of beers, Wrigley's Spearmint Gum, they all start advertising regularly in the black press.

Now, some of them took it kind of seriously, and some did not. Forty percent of the ads that appeared in the black press had a white actor, or a white person in the ad. In other words, they took the same ad they put in the white press, and used the exact same ad, they weren't even trying to go to black, they just put it in there so the government wouldn't get the money. And then some of the others started changing. If you look at World War II you will see Pepsi ads and there's one in particular that I remember that showed a black Boy Scout drinking a Pepsi. These were companies that really did advertise to blacks. They put black actors in these ads. So the point is that the black publishers are making a lot of money. They don't want to lose this money, and they look at all this and decide, "It's really in our interest to kind of tone down against the federal government. On the other end, if we tone down too much, we'll lose readers. So therefore let's just harp on what the state governments and congressmen are doing."

Well, once the Justice Department makes its famous decision, on whether it was going to do something under the Espionage Act, that leaves a number of other agencies in this country which had to decide what they were going to do with the black press, and the number of investigations continued.

It talks in here (Soldiers Without Swords) about how the Army investigated the black press. They took black papers away from paperboys. They burned these papers. They had paper burnings in 1943 in Army posts throughout this country. And so the Army was one of the agencies. Another agency was the Post Office. The Post Office had the power to take away second-class mailing permits. Why is that important? Because if you do not have a second-class mailing permit, you cannot mail your publication promptly. So they have the right to do this. They looked at a bunch of the black press. Went to the Justice Department and said, "Look what they're righting, I can't believe they're that critical. Can't we take away their second-class mailing permits?" The Justice Department said, "No, we don't find this violates the Espionage Act." So, finally the Post Office gives up, because the Justice Department will never agree with them. There's no sign that the Post Office ever knows about this meeting between Sengstacke and Biddle, in the summer of 1942. This appears in no newspaper, it appears in no Post Office documents, but after that the Justice Department said, "Forget it." And the Post Office is bitter about this decision, but on the other end, the Post Office, refuses to go to court against anybody if the Justice Department will not support them. Therefore, the Post Office becomes a non-threat.

You have threats by the Office of Censorship and the Post Office where they have censors, at the borders, if you try to send something written, outside the 48 states, the Post Office censors and the Office of Censorship censors can decide what to do about that. And they have the right to take your publication and not mail it, they have the right to cut things out of this publication and mail it with holes in it. You have people in the Caribbean, you have people in Alaska, writing these black newspapers say, "We got this paper and this one has a bunch of holes in it. What are you doing?" And the black newspapers would go to the Office of Censorship, the Post Office Department and say, "What was wrong with this story?" And these agencies would say, "We don't have to tell you what was wrong with it. We found that it violated what we can send outside the country. We're not going to send it out." Well, the Office of Censorship played kind of some havoc with some things leaving the country. If you want to know more about that, Mike, who introduced me here, has this book coming about the Office of Censorship in World War II.

What that basically leaves is the FBI. The Federal Bureau of Investigation. You have (J. Edgar) Hoover at the top of it. Hoover is the most feared person in America, because of the files he collects on people. He starts sending his agents out to look at these black newspapers. And I've talked to some of the reporters who worked on these, and all these papers are in black neighborhoods. Suddenly, a car would arrive outside the newspaper with two white guys in it. What you've got to realize is that there was one black FBI agents in the entire FBI at this particular time. The late '30s the nation of publications complained that there are no black FBI agents, so Hoover promptly names his chauffeur, who's black, an agent. That was the lone FBI agent, black FBI agent, at this particular time. So these white guys would arrive outside this newspaper. They park there for a while, everybody knew who they were. Then they'd walk into the paper and they'd harangue this paper, "How can you write this stuff? You're hurting the war effort." And then they'd go and say the same thing to the editor and the publisher. And then they'd leave and the reports would chuckle, "well those are Hoover's flunkie.s" I mean that was the world they'd call them, Hoover's flunkies.

And meanwhile the publishers were just worried out of their minds. And they're particularly worried because of some of the subtle things that the FBI did. The FBI frequently would write a black newspaper in World War II and they would say, "Here's a check for X amount of money. We want to subscribe to your newspaper for the next year. Send it to the Justice Department building in Washington." Every week, you're mailing your things to the FBI. That is scary.

Well, what were the kind of things that the FBI was noting in its reports? And I'll just read a couple of things here. One of the more outspoken black newspapers was the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch. The agents watched this paper very carefully and in November of 1942, one of the agents talked about what had appeared there in Sept. 19, 1942. He said that the paper, "is of a rather biased nature. It is sprinkled with such well-known communistic phrases as civil liberties, inalienable rights, and freedom of speech and of the press." Oh, yeah, they noted everything. Whatever it took to make people look bad.

Well, let me read you another one here, and this is far more striking. This is from one of the black newspapers. One of the most outspoken black newspapers was in Los Angeles. The name of it was the California Eagle. It was edited and owned by a famous woman journalist named Carlotta Bass. And in October of 1943, she was talking about race riots becoming a distinct possibility in the Los Angeles area, and you did have race riots in World War II in this country. Here are some of the things she wrote. Now remember this isn't me saying this. This is the paper saying this. "Tonight the city is tense. A riot may happen in the next breath. And somewhere tonight there is a man clearing his throat for the speech he will make after the next riot. 'These nigger's have got to be shown there place. Los Angeles is a southern town now, and we've got to let the darkies know it.' There are presses in our city tonight which will print the stories to start the next riot. Tonight Mrs. Lula Blotts, an attractive housewife, was brutally assaulted by a hulking Negro rapist. And somewhere tonight there is the tongue which will send up the first lynch cry, 'GET THAT NIGGER.' And the hate is here, like devilish blue sparks, it bristles out of eyes that remember Mississippi, and from the Dixie-accented voice of the streetcar conductor just in from Oklahoma."

That's the outspoken things that some of the press were saying. That's a particular editorial. The government noted that. The FBI noted that. The FBI tried to get the black press clear into 1945. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, tried to get the black press, himself writing letters to the Justice Department. The Justice Department said, "No way, you can do all the investigation that you want to. You cannot go to court under the Espionage Act against these papers without our approval." So the Justice Department shut down the FBI in World War II, in terms of what it could do.

Well, you go to 1944. I talked about the first black White House correspondent, three days before that, 13 editors and publishers from 10 black publications, met with Franklin Roosevelt and talked with him for 35 minutes about problems with blacks in the country, what they were expecting from the war, the inequalities they wanted to get rid of. You say, "So what." Well, that was the first time in American history that a group of blacks had every met with a U.S. president. Feb. 5, 1944. U.S. presidents had met with individual blacks up to that point. They had never, ever, met with a group of blacks.

At the end of the meeting, Roosevelt says, "Well, this is very productive. We'll have to do this again next year." And some of the blacks realized what he had just said to them. He had told them, that he would be running for a fourth term as U.S. president. And this was very much a question that was in everybody's mind in early 1944, "Will Roosevelt run for a fourth term." He had not announced it. He told the blacks, "This is off the record. I'd appreciate it if you did not print this." Well, they went back, he had taken them into his confidence. They went back, and they did not write this thing. And they did not reveal that he had told them that, until after his death. In May of 1945, a month after his death. They revealed what he had told them on this particular time.

We're going to get to the end of World War II, and one of the black columnists in World War II had written, "War may be hell, but for us, the portals of heaven will open." And he was right. If you look in any way you want to look. In World War II, blacks made enormous strides, and the black press made enormous strides in World War II. One fact, if you just want one figure. The Labor Department did a study in 1946, and they looked at black workers, in 1942, '43, and '44. And in those three years, black workers in this country made more job-related gains than the previous 75 years combined. Three years, more gains than the previous 75. If you think that Rosie the Riveter, the women who worked in the war plants in this country, was just a white blond lady, you're wrong. Black women were in those plants in humongous numbers. And they worked at a lot of other jobs. They needed black stenographers. They needed all kinds of blacks to work in government agencies that became huge in World War II.

Well, you go to the end of World War II, the black press is at its peak of influence, its potential. You go to 1948, the black press remains important, remains large. Then it started going downhill, and I'm talking about black newspapers here. They start going down hill. By the mid-1960s the black newspapers are virtually dead in this country. In the mid-1960s the Pittsburgh Courier, the largest black newspaper in American history, goes into bankruptcy and is sold to its competitor, the Chicago Defender. Why did they go downhill? It's because you had the same people writing on the black newspapers in the 1960s, who were there in the 1940s. They're saying the same things in the 1960s. We want these same things, and suddenly the black population has gone way past them. They want far more. And suddenly the radicals of the 1940s have become the conservatives of the '60s, and it kills the black newspapers.

At the same time, to conclude here, what you have to realize, is that what the black press did during World War II, was because of its complaints, and because it was there, and because it was forcing the government to look at these issues and because the blacks got all kinds of rights in World War II. As a result of that, when the Civil Rights Era came along in the 1950s, even though by now the black press is dying and black newspapers are dying and going downhill, the black newspapers have set the stage for the Civil Rights movement. They have got the Civil Rights movement to this particular point, Here's where black rights are, you take off from here, and you go a lot higher. And that's what happened, and that's the importance of the black press in World War II. It made it possible for the Civil Rights Era to start at a much higher level than it would have started had the black press not existed. OK. I'll stop there and answer questions.

Mike Sweeney: We have a little time for questions, who has one?

Q. Where was most of the black press influence?

A. You're talking about the black press? Most of your large black newspapers, and most of the important ones, were east of the Mississippi River. Pittsburgh Courier was the top black newspaper in World War II. The Chicago Defender was the second top black newspaper in World War II. The other big ones are the Cleveland Call and Post, the Norfolk, Va., paper, the Amsterdam Star News in New York. The most influential black newspapers west of the Mississippi river, were the Kansas City Call, and the California Eagle, which I read from. But all of the big black ones, the largest ones with the largest circulation, were all located east of the Mississippi River.

Q. Talk a bit about the difference between black circulation, and the black press readership.

A. Like in what regard.

Q. How many people read a paper?

A. One of the really interesting things, and this is something the government paid a lot of attention to. A study was done in the 1930s and they looked at how many people read black newspapers v. white newspapers in this country. The study showed that for each white newspaper in this country two and a half to three people read this newspaper. So, your paper would arrive at home and your wife would read it and your kid would read it. That kind of thing. Black newspapers: for every black newspaper, five and a half to six people read these newspapers.

What's the significance of that? Well, it's being passed around more, maybe they can't afford the newspaper. The real significance of that is the fact that if you know there are 13 million blacks in the country when the war starts, and if you know that the circulation of the black press when the war starts is around 2 million, if you multiply that times 5 and a half to 6, you realize that almost every black in this country is reading a black newspaper. And why did they read these newspapers? It's because the white newspapers refused to report on blacks unless A. they were a sports star. So you had Joe Louis the boxer, Jesse Owens the Olympic sprinter. You have entertainment figures, Lena Horne was a very big black actress. You have Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, these types. The white press would clearly write about them. Then the third case, if you're a criminal. If you were a criminal, they were real happy to write about you if you were a black. But other than that, they did not cover the black community. Therefore blacks were telling people things that they couldn't get from the white press. And that's why they avidly went after these newspapers. And that's why if you look in the black papers during World War II, you will know that Rosie the Riveter was just as black as she was white. Because they run these pictures. And one of the most striking things about looking at the black press, you think back in that time, women didn't have equality. They had a lot more equality among blacks than they did whites. The black press was looking for things to play up. Look what's happening to us. Look at these things we're succeeding. You look at those black newspapers in World War II, there's a ton of pictures of Rosie the Black Riveter. And women were making stride, they were happy to play that up. They were happy to play up what strides men made. These things were far more friendly to women than the white press at that time.

Q. Did the black papers get any circulation among white readers?

A. Only among high government officials. Oh yeah, this thing was being read heavily by FBI agents, and people around Roosevelt. But beyond that, the answer is NO.

Q. Was it available to them?

A. Yeah, if they wanted to buy it. I mean, it was available to you if you were probably if you were in a large city. If you were in Pittsburgh, if you were in Cleveland, if you were in Norfolk, if you were in New York City, if you were in Atlanta, yeah, it was available to you. If you sat in someplace like Logan, Utah, it probably was not available to you, unless you sent your money in and got this paper. But the Pittsburgh Courier for instance, was very visible as was the Cleveland Call and Post in Cleveland. In their communities.

Q. The reduction of black papers after the war. Did that have anything to do with integration into white papers?

A. One of the reasons why the black papers went down, is because in the early 1950s there were decisions made in the large white newspapers, white magazines, broadcasting, in this country. We think we ought to integrate and start taking some black people to work on these stations or write in these newspapers. So consequently, the white press went out there. They started looking for young blacks who had a college education, and they offered them so much money, these people didn't want to work on the black press anymore. I mean, why work on the black press when you can make twice as much on the white press. And so, as a consequence of that, the black press, it became suddenly very hard for them to higher the young talent. And that's why the old people stayed on there, and that's what you basically had. Just the old people getting older. And writing the same old things, because they didn't have the young blacks on there any more.

Q. What role does the black press play in today's society?

A. Well, you have to split it up between the black newspapers, are like suburban newspapers mostly and they very much play a role, I think they will continue to play a role, but they're like suburban newspapers around large cities. Like Columbus, Ohio, has a string of these suburban newspapers around Columbus. Basically that's the kind of role that black newspapers play today. Writing things about the black community that doesn't necessarily get covered by the white newspapers. Now, if you look at black magazines, the black magazines were the ones that profited after World War II, and became bigger and bigger today, than the black newspapers.

Q. How did you get interested in this topic of study?

A. I got on this topic because I was taking a class as a doctoral student at Indiana University on presidents and the press. I came across this book that talked about the fact that the main official of the NAACP, Walter White, had gone to the White House and told President Roosevelt in late '42 or early '43, that the government was cutting off newsprint supplies to black newspapers. Or limiting newsprint supplies, because they were so critical. And the idea was, "Let's cut off on these things, let's cut back on these things. Then we'll force them to tone down what they're writing."

So according to this book, Roosevelt supposedly ended the cutbacks. So I thought that was really interesting. I went and I asked the professor of the class, "How come I've never read anything about this. I know something about journalism history." And he said, "Well, probably because no one could find anything." And what you have to understand is that I was a newspaperman for 10 and a half years and I had this arrogance that I could find anything. You have to work on a newspaper to understand what I'm saying here, but this is the kind of natural arrogance of the industry.

So, I wrote the Roosevelt library and I said I wanted anything they had on this particular meeting between Walter White, of the NAACP, and Roosevelt on this issue. The guy writes me back, and says, "We look in the ushers' diary of the White House, we don't show, in this particular time period, that Walter White ever came in to see Franklin Roosevelt. He came in to see Eleanor Roosevelt and it's possible once he's in the White House he goes into another room and sees Franklin Roosevelt. Furthermore, we don't have any records of a meeting between these two where they discussed this topic. Of course, Franklin Roosevelt, when he discussed controversial topics, did not put this down in writing." And what that tells you is that Roosevelt was smarter than Nixon when he did the tapes and stuff. So, anyway, this archivist, that would have been the end of it, you would never had me standing here today, you'd never had me talking about this, and the archivist says, "By the way, we have a 714 page report compiled by the FBI in World War II, and this deals with blacks in the country. And 25 pages deals with the black press. We'll sell this to you."

So I paid 25 cents a page, which I thought was rather exorbitant, but I got these 25 pages. And in these 25 pages the FBI looked at seven black newspapers in this country. Six of them, they thought were going too far in what they were complaining about, and so they harped on these papers, "They're hurting the war effort". Then they used one in New York City, the Amsterdam Star News, and said this is a model black newspaper. Look what it's writing. So it was 6 vs. 1.

Well, that was the first tipoff to me, that there was an FBI investigation of the black press in World War II. So, based on this archivist being nice to me, and saying, "You ought to look at this." And he further said, "We've had this report here for three or four years at the Roosevelt Library and nobody payed any attention to it." So, based on that, I got started on this dissertation and then a book that came out, by Oxford University Press. I became, in our field at that particular time, I became the largest user in the country of the Freedom of Information Act asking for post office and FBI, Justice Department records, and I did this. So basically, it was just because an archivist made a suggestion to me that I got on this thing.

Mike Sweeney: So, in conclusion, we historians love to have a topic that no one has ever dealt with before, but more important than that, something we should leave you with is, "Be nice to your librarian, and they'll be nice to you."

MS
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