Volume 51, No. 4, Winter, 2025. This issue contains an editor’s note from editor Perry Parks on this issue’s theme, Race and the Early 20th Century Press. There are four essays from Edward Timke, Matthew Pressman, Kavitha Rajagopalan and Michael T. Martinez. There are three research articles by Jason McDonald, Alexia Little and Jacqueline C. Jones.
abstracts
This article examines how ostensibly neutral newspaper coverage enabled the Ku Klux Klan’s growth and legitimacy in Kirksville, Missouri, during the 1920s. Through a detailed analysis of the Kirksville Daily Express and Weekly Graphic, it argues that local journalism not only reflected community biases but also actively contributed to the normalization of Klan ideology. Rather than confronting the Klan’s racism and nativism, the Kirksville press framed its activities as patriotic spectacle, offered promotional coverage, sold advertising space, and protected members’ anonymity. Appearances of neutrality masked an underlying ideological alignment with white Protestant supremacy, mirroring patterns found in Southern Jim Crow journalism. By treating the Klan as a civic actor instead of a threat, the press reinforced the social and political status quo. The study highlights how journalistic norms of objectivity can obscure press alignment with exclusionary movements—an insight with continuing relevance for contemporary debates over media responsibility and political framing.
The Reality of a Pseudo-Event? Gone with the Wind Premiere, 1939
Answering a call for historical research inclusive of perspectives beyond journalism alone, this study explores press coverage and film studio public relations of the 1939 Gone with the Wind premiere in Atlanta, Georgia, to challenge Daniel Boorstin’s conceptualization of a pseudo-event. Textual analysis illuminates how Atlantans publicized their present and past through an entirely mediated event, one lucrative for outsiders and vitally important to the Southern city in its self-promotion and social, economic, and cultural relations. These real relations, amplified through the visibility of a highly anticipated Hollywood premiere as captured in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer publicity, reflected extant tensions of race and definitions of the South during and after the Civil War, conditions that permeated pre-World War II Atlanta as the city sought its place on the national stage. The premiere illuminated the capacity for material negotiation of social conditions, with tangible implications for life in the Jim Crow South—not unreality.
Using archival and scholarly sources, this article examines how prominent gossip and society columnists shaped, defined, and documented the Harlem Renaissance. While various forms of art and literature were essential in transforming the public image of African Americans, the Black press offered insider views of the private lives of the artists and their friends. African American newspapers are under-utilized resources for their coverage of the people and events associated with the “New Negro” movement. The Pittsburgh Courier, the Baltimore Afro-American, the New York Amsterdam News, the Inter-State Tattler, and the Chicago Defender were the leading publications that promoted successes in Harlem to a national audience. Three journalists—Geraldyn Dismond, Bessye Bearden, and Edward G. Perry—used their society and gossip columns to provide a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the people and events that define the Harlem Renaissance.
Journalism History journal 