On Georgia Historical Newspapers Project

For this and next week, I will be using the Georgia Historical Newspapers project from the Digital Library of Georgia to investigate Black American interactions with White Americans in Georgia. Particularly, I want to investigate Lumpkin County.

Unfortunately, I’ve experienced some challenges to my work so far.

Finding newspapers of specifically Lumpkin County that speak about Black Americans being arrested, killed, or otherwise have some form of interaction with White Americans is difficult. To be fair, Lumpkin County did not have high enslaved population numbers because farming in this mountainous region is not very feasible compared to areas down in the Cotton Belt of Middle and South Georgia. To overcome this problem, I may expand my search to just Northeast Georgia. Still, this may be equally as difficult because this entire region isn’t mountainous and other places like Forsyth experienced race riots that drove Black Americans out — so finding newspapers about them in this area will be difficult. Silence in the archives does not mean that there is no story, though. I will expand my search more to the entire state if necessary.

If I cannot find enough incidents of Black American and White American interactions in public transcripts, I can expand even more by changing my search term to include women. How did women in Northeast Georgia get treated in newspaper articles? What special incidents warranted coverage by the local press involving women?

One method that I’ve used to overcome problems of finding sources is using the advanced search tool that searches distances between keywords. I’ve noticed that searching up just “Negro hung” will find me newspapers with both of those words in completely far ends of the newspaper. These are not helpful but using the advanced search tool will be much more sufficient.

One last problem that I’ve developed is the number of words that are used to describe Black Americans during this time. We discussed in class how Black women were referred to as “Negress” and were not lumped into the term “Negro,” which is interesting to me because that same difference does not exist for White Americans. Still, these different terms are going to throw a slight wrench in my work.

One pattern that I’ve noticed in the newspaper articles that I’ve read is that these articles typically use Black Americans as a literary tool or example to maintain some form of socially normative behavior. An article that describes a Black American being chased to his death by police for sleeping on the side of a road (yes, this happened in Hall County) uses the victim as a pedagogical device to other Black Americans to not sleep on the side of the road. It’s a very “women-stuffed-in-fridges” method of speaking about Black Americans.