Between respectability and modernity: Black newspapers and sexuality, 1925--1940

Concerned with countering racist images, black newspapers historically functioned as public relations managers for African Americans. When southern blacks migrated to northern cities in the early twentieth century black newspapers imagined a new audience of readers. Envisioned as aspiring but working class, black papers introduced these new readers to northern, urban life. A key component of this urbanization included modern sexual values and perceptions of sex outside of the confines of reproduction. Black newspapers, then, helped to create a "New Negro" identity situated in the context of race, class, gender and sexuality. At the same time, readers' engagement with papers through their letters to the editor aided black papers' transformation into modern publications that attempted to target a mass black public which was comprised of African Americans of different classes.;This dissertation examines sexual representations in black newspapers between 1925 and 1940. Black newspapers deployed certain journalistic, literary, and artistic genres to represent African American sexuality. Readers responded to images of sexuality with both pleasure and disgust in letters to the editor. These responses suggest that many African Americans used black papers as a public sphere to debate issues surrounding sexuality. This project, then, argues that readers and journalists often engaged in an intraracial contest in black newspapers over what image of sexuality should be representative of the "race." Together, the representations and readers' responses reveal that early twentieth century African American sexuality was somewhere between Victorian and modern. In the broadest sense, debates around newspapers' representations of sexuality indicate that modern black sexuality incorporated ideas of black progress into what on the surface seemed to be simple issues related to sexual behavior, identity and expression.;Historians' emphasis, however, on African Americans' efforts to achieve civil justice via newspapers have overshadowed these intersections. Contemporary readers, though, were quite aware that black papers provided a public space in which they could view and respond to a multiplicity of sexual representations at once. This dissertation strives to provide a forum for these readers to once again air their ideas about African American sexuality.