Category: Social History

JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

I found this list (below) of 19th-century African-American newspapers in James T. Haley’s Afro-American Encyclopaedia (Or, the Thoughts, Doings, and Sayings of the Race, Embracing Lectures, Biographical Sketches, Sermons, Poems, Names of Universities, Colleges, Seminaries, Newspapers, Books, and a History of the Denominations, Giving the Numerical Strength of Each. In Fact, it Teaches Every Subject of Interest to the Colored People, as Discussed by More Than One Hundred of Their Wisest and Best Men and Women), which was published in 1895 in Nashville (639pp,by Haley & Florida). The book  was digitized by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of their digitization project,   Documenting the American South. It is a fantastic thing absolutely filled with information and insight.  

• Full text found here: http://docsouth.unc.edu/church/haley/haley.html

The newspaper section starts with this introduction about the need for newspapers followed by a statement on the involvement, intelligence, and capacity to publish a newspaper:

Shall I Take a Paper?

“AT this season of the year, when publishers are making special offers to the reading public, we are all debating the mental fare with which we shall spread our table in 1895. We ought to have first a good church paper thoroughly representative of our denomination.”

“The Methodist ought to have the South- Western Advocate, published at New Orleans; the African Methodist ought to have the Christian Recorder, published at Philadelphia; the Congregationalist ought to have The Congregationalist, published at Boston, or the The Advance, published at Chicago, and so on for the Baptists, Episcopalians,”

“Evangelists and other denominations among us. Each home ought to have its church paper. Next to that stands some good clean helpful race journal. Get one, in the columns of which the editors are seeking to help the race up, and not working to pull it down. When you subscribe for a race journal get one in which the editors display not pessimistic, but optimistic views of the race.”

“It will be well to remember that it takes brains to edit a newspaper, and men who have not been trained to think are hardly men to be entrusted with the perilous task of giving direction to public opinion. The editorial chair requires more than that culture gotten from the reading of newspapers. The editor who is sending out week by week his paper into the world ought to be able to grapple with the problems of the day and think them through. There is too much guessing on the grave social problems of the day by editors. Riots and mobs are the result of false teaching, both on the part of the hotheaded anarchists and incompetent editors who are not anachists. In selecting your race journal for the next year find one whose editorial columns show moderation, and one which is not always squared off with a chip on its shoulder daring someone to knock it off. The paper which busies itself with fighting its contemporaries cannot be of very much help to you. When you raise the question about taking a race journal remember there are two reasons especially to be remembered why you should. The first is a duty you owe to yourself to keep up with the movements among your own people. Second, you owe it to the race to support laudable enterprises which look to the betterment of the race. Let us remember, too, that the press, the pulpit and the platform have been the great liberators of the nations In this land of ours we need the influence of all of these to plead our cause up and down the length of our land. Put some good race weekly on your list for 1895.”–Cleveland (Ohio) Gazette.

NEWSPAPERS

        The following is a list of newspapers and magazines edited and published by and for Afro-Americans. Alphabetically arranged by States:

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2406

 There was a time in 1943, in London, that there was a great call for the “immediate rescue” of the Jews and other victims of Nazi massacre–given everything, those were pretty strong words, a call to instant action in helping populations in the immediate threat of “extermination”. Nazi massacres of the Jews & others : some practical proposals for immediate rescue (1943) was written with the addresses made by the Archbishop of Canterbury (William Temple) and Lord Rochester (Ernest Henry Lamb, Baron of Rochester) in speeches made on March 23rd 1943 in the House of Lords, an addressed an issue that few cared to discus.

There are volumes of reports and newspaper articles by 1943 on the extermination and deportation of the Jews and other people, but, really, there was very little discussion about what to do about it.  There were no plans for rescue.   Even when it came down to much more simple issue of raising the levels for accepting refugees (and this by the tens of thousands) there was usually struggle and defeat. On the practicable end of the argument, ships full of refugees were often turned away.  

It is a very contentious issue as to whether the Allies could have taken pro-active measures against the concentration camps, and the issue of the discussion of whether help could have been given is contentious in itself. What makes this pamphlet noteworthy is that it showed there was a public display of concern during a time when there wasn’t much public thinking being done on that.  This is a complex issue, though I think the capacity to effect some sort of rescue of thousands, or hundreds of thousands (or millions) of people could have taken place², though it did not, for reasons of indifference more so than for ability or capacity. 

This pamphlet certainly laid the issue wide open:

“My chief protest is against procrastination of any kind. … The Jews are being slaughtered at the rate of tens of thousands a day on many days. … It is always true that the obligations of decent men are decided for them by contingencies which they did not themselves create and very largely by the action of wicked men. The priest and the Levite in the parable were not in the least responsible for the traveller’s wounds as he lay there by the roadside and no doubt they had many other pressing things to attend to, but they stand as the picture of those who are condemned for neglecting the opportunity of showing mercy. We at this moment have upon us a tremendous responsibility. We stand at the bar of history, of humanity and of God.”

I couldn’t find the full text online, so I scanned my copy and include it below:

Notes:

1. Nazi massacres of the Jews & others : some practical proposals for immediate rescue  made by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Rochester in speeches on March 23rd 1943 in the House of Lords / [William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury ; Ernest Henry Lamb, Baron of Rochester.

2.  This has been shown work by David Wyman The Abandonment of the Jews, America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 (1998) and Richard Breitman  FDR and the Jews (2014), among others.  

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2325

Here’s an unpopular opinion for 1943: close the Japanese internment camps.  

The Roosevelt administration’s Executive Order 9066 was the legal bombshell that gave the War Department the authority to authorize the removal of the Japanese (19 February 1942) and theoretically prevent those people from engaging in sub rosa and fifth column activities as wartime terrorists fighting for Imperial Japan,  and which basically authorized a 60-mile swath of the Pacific Coast as a military zone subject to national defense requirements. 100,000 men, women and children were removed to ten different relocation centers, barrack-enclosures located in remote areas, where the great majority of the “dislocated” waited out the war, some two-thirds of them American citizens. 

Mostly desolate and occasionally beautiful, with light policing, they were still prisons.  

The great majority of the American population saw this as a military and unfortunate necessity, a byproduct of war.  Citizenship did not come into play.  

So it was a popular unpopular move; the policy occasionally met with resistance in print, like this example from the April 16, 1943 issue of The Nation, which I reprint in full below.  “Jap Crow” was a response to the treatment of the Japanese in America, a version of Jim Crow, which was the de facto regulatory discriminatory and racist behavior towards African Americans and other people of color in the U.S. 

The life and location of these camps was well documented, sometimes by some of the greatest photographers of the American 20th century. Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams, in particular, made a long series of images at Manzanar.  One of the great, iconic images made by Adams comes from this period, and as it turns out, its one of those odd sorts of photos that turns in the opposite direction of what the photographer was there “for”.  Mount Williamson is just a drop-dead shot to be sure–it is also an image of what the Japanese in the  camp were looking out at.  Adams turns his camera around, around from the disgrace, and makes one of his greatest images.

The pretty image:  

[Source, Ansel Adams, from here.]

Which was basically the 180-degree view of this:

[Image source:  here.]

The Japanese at the Manzanar relocation center were from the West Coast who were bused away from their homes and lives and businesses with extremely limited notice, and who were forced to sell nearly all possessions (including lands and businesses) at what were less than fire sale prices.  They were made to board buses and trains and were shipped to locations (mainly in California) where they were processed and sent further and deeper into the trying hinterlands of the west for their final destinations until the war was won.  (One of the processing centers was the Santa Anita racetrack, where thousands of Japanese were sent to live for periods in converted, just-painted horse stalls.)  Manzanar itself is well enough out there—removed, trying, desolate, difficult.  Beautiful, too , if you weren’t in prison there.  It was a high desert plateau with the snow-capped sierras, ringing the place; no grass, barely a tree, with extreme temperatures and a tough wind that was freezing in the winter and blew hot in the summer…tough enough to make it hard to keep the tar paper on the roof and sides of the thinly constructed barracks that held these people.  While every other relocation camp had barbed wire and guard towers, Manzanar had none—its location was so remote and difficult that it made the construction of these inferior barriers unnecessary. 

As difficult was life was at Manzanar, and having being completely torn off of the American map and their way of life, the Japanese at the camp established irrigation systems and gardens, made their own furniture from bits and scraps, established a newspaper, created a government,  schools, police, and so on, making their life as orderly and hospitable as possible.  

A government film, insisting that these people are “dislocated”, “evacuees”, casualties of war, and not “internees”:

And the article: