Amanda Foreman, The Wall Street Journal’s history columnist, had a timely piece last weekend about “Pioneers of America’s Black Press” (behind pay wall).
The Religion Guy is under the impression that the Mainstream Media have given little attention to how African-American newspapers are treating the coronavirus crisis, with its disproportionate impact on their communities, alongside the nationwide racial reckoning on police conduct and demonstrations blighted by rioters who have harmed black neighborhoods and livelihoods.
For GetReligion purposes, it’s of particular interest whether, how, and how much they cover the news of church bodies on these and other matters. Though black Americans on average are more devout than whites, the African-American press is presumably even more strapped on staffing and advertising than the general press is in these days. Nevertheless, here’s one COVID-19 church roundup from The Crisis, official magazine of the NAACP.
The white-majority MSM often ignore the news of black religion. Here are examples from the two largest denominations (actually the largest African-American organizations of any type).
How many reported that the year before the U.S. Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide, the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., expressed respect for individual conscience but cited the Bible (specifically Genesis 2:18-25) in stating that the denomination’s endorsed military chaplains “are not to participate in any activity that implies or condones same sex marriage or same sex union”?
Or how about this: The Church of God in Christ is allied with a national chain of crisis pregnancy centers in a Family Life Campaign aimed at “making abortion unthinkable and unavailable in America.” Presiding Bishop Charles Blake said the practice is as much a form of violence the church must fight as “terrorism, racial tension in America and escalating crime.”
Foreman’s article noted that “the longest-running African-American periodical” is not a general-interest newspaper but The Christian Recorder, the Nashville-based official voice of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, dating from 1848. That’s appropriate status since the AME itself is the oldest black denomination, with roots in a Philadelphia congregation founded by Richard Allen in 1794.
In the current issue, Hunter College historian D’Weston Haywood writes that long before COVID-19 the black community faced the “virus,” of ‘white supremacy. … It has plagued people and societies for a much longer time, and has produced an incalculable death toll through genocide, slavery, colonialism, and post-colonialism for centuries. Likewise, its symptoms remain the same today precisely because we have never developed a vaccine for it.”
There’s story potential in a Recorder article about the American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) movement, depicted as a deceptive fringe force. It was launched in 2016 to separate African Americans from black immigrants coming from Africa and Latin America. And here’s how the AME church is dealing with the coronavirus.
The Recorder is the only existing periodical that was founded in the period before the Civil War. The earliest of all was the weekly Freedom’s Journal of New York, which existed from 1827 to 1829.
Dozens of others were born and disappeared in the 19th Century. Among the oldest and most influential newspapers still publishing are the Afro-American of Baltimore and of Washington, D.C. (founded 1892), Chicago Defender (1905), and New York Amsterdam News (1909).
In that same era, W.E.B. Du Bois founded The Crisis. Other prominent black press writers over the years included Mary McLeod Bethune, Frederick Douglass, Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson. The ranks of editors included courageous former slave Ida B. Wells, who in 1892 launched an anti-lynching campaign with her Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In response, a mob set upon staff members and burned down the newspaper’s office (Wells happened to be out of town).
You can search links to black press outlets in your region via this listing of the National Newspaper Publishers Association’s 165 member publications in 30 states.
Incidentally, religion writers will note that in addition to the Christian Recorder there are two other religious periodicals listed, Muslim Journal, from the orthodox branch of Islam founded by W. D. Mohammed, and The Final Call of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.
MAIN IMAGE: Photo from Princeton University Library. First image, part of a mural at Alabama State University, Montgomery.
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