Publishing Freedom: African American Editors and the Long Civil Rights Struggle, 1900-1955

Abstract

The writings and the experience of independent African American editors in the first half of the twentieth century from 1901 to 1955 played an invaluable role in laying the ideological groundwork for the Black Freedom movement beginning with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The anti-imperialist writings of Pauline Hopkins who was literary editor of the Colored American Magazine from 1900 to 1904 celebrated revolutionary leaders, and adopted an independent course that refused partisan lines, which prompted her replacement as editor according to a letter she writes to William Monroe Trotter. The anti-imperialist writing of A. Philip Randolph as editor of The Messenger from 1917 to 1928, raised the role of labor organizing in the advancement of racial justice and helped to provide future organizers. These individuals founded the Southern Negro Youth Congress an analytical framework that would help organize thousands of Southern workers against the Jim Crow system into labor unions. Based on the letters he wrote to the American Fund For Public Service, Randolph raised funds by appealing to the values that he believed Fund chair Roger Baldwin also valued while protecting individual supporters of The Messenger from government surveillance. The anti-imperialist writing of Paul Robeson as chair of the editorial board of Freedom from 1950 to 1955 could not escape McCarthyist government surveillance which eventually caused its demise. However not before including an anti-fascist editorial ideology endorsing full equality for African Americans that inspired plays by Alice Childress and Lorraine Hansberry that imagined a world that defies the increasingly fascist rule of the American state. This thesis will argue that the Black Freedom Struggle that developed after the fifties owed a great deal to Hopkins, Randolph, and Robeson. The work that these three did as editors and writers laid a solid intellectual, ideological, and political foundation for the later and better known moment when African American would mobilize en masse to demand meaningful equality in the United States.