Georgia Newspapers, Black Articles, and Tone in the 1900-1912 Era

BySergio

After compiling a sample of newspaper articles from the Dahlonega Nugget, I engaged in a data analysis of the tone and purpose of these articles. Virtually all of the articles featured some negative attention on a Black subject or African Americans in general, but the manner in which this was accomplished was interesting to view.

In the sample I gathered, most times that Black Americans were mentioned in the Dahlonega Nugget within the timeline gathered, they were featured in an article about crime. In all of these collected crime article samples, the article featured a Black perpetrator of crime. Many of these articles simultaneously featured a White, typically female, victim.

“Last week a negro was fined $50 for seizing and kissing a white girls hand in Atlanta.”1

“The lady’s clothes were torn from her body by the fiend while she was fighting for her honor.”2

The data makes more sense once it is contextualized with a lens of gender and race. Newspapers during this period frequently characterized an “image of the rapist as an African American man and the victim as a white woman.”3 These articles served to build “fears about the waning ability of [White] men to protect women” from their African American assailants.4 Here, the Dahlonega Nugget fits into this theory put forward by past gender historians examining how the press covered crime by race. Still, the newspaper is subtle in this advancement.

Sixteen (16) of the twenty (20) newspaper articles collected in this sample carried a neutral tone that positioned the biases of the editor as irrelevant, as if they were simply reporting factual news while still presenting this image of the African American assailant. It lent sanitized credence to the image. Only two (2) of the four (4) articles that carried blatantly negative tones were crime articles while the others were editorials submitted either by the editor or to the editor.

It is difficult to categorize language in this sample because no newspaper used language that would be considered safe in a modern sense. In light of this, I had to raise the standard for language analysis. I note this because there very well be other historians that may disagree with my assessment of the language of these newspaper articles. This was a problem that I encountered in my analysis, especially when it comes to engaging with the gender study theory on newspaper language. Still, I include my data here.

Notable also in my sample was the near complete absence of Black victimhood in these articles.

“In Wilson’s district, adjoining Forsyth, the negroes have been given orders to move out by the whites.”5

“A negro preacher was shoved out of a white barber shop this week at the presidents town where he called for a shave.”6

Reporting on Black victims, typically at the hands of White suspects, was useful in this period “in which news was developing ever more quickly into a commodity and sensational journalism was becoming a major force on the journalistic landscape.”7 Reporting on lynchings and other victimizations of Blacks was seen as a waste of paper because of how the audience would receive it in a society that understood such acts as necessary to maintain a racial hierarchy.

  1. Article on Assault in Atlanta, Dahlonega Nugget, Sept. 28, 1906. ↩︎
  2. Article on a Sexual Assault in Fulton County, Dahlonega Nugget, Sept. 28, 1906. ↩︎
  3. Estelle B. Freedman, “‘Crimes which Startle and Horrify:’ Gender, Age, and the Racialization of Sexual Violencec in White American Newspapers, 1870-1900,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011), 468. ↩︎
  4. Freedman, 469. ↩︎
  5. Article on Blacks Forced Out of Wilson, Dahlonega Nugget, Oct. 18, 1912. ↩︎
  6. Article on Preacher Shoved from Barber Shop, Dahlonega Nugget, July 15, 1904. ↩︎
  7. Richard M. Perloff, “The Press and Lynchings of African Americans,” Journal of Black Studies 30, no. 3 (January 2000), 318. ↩︎

Similar Posts