Black American Magazine Articles Film Clips
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| Cruel Display of Racist Condescension... |
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The First Elected African-American Judge (Literary Digest, 1924)
An article about Albert B. George (1873 - ?) of Chicago, the first African-American to be elected as a municipal court judge:"An epochal scene will presently be enacted in one of the divisions of Chicago's Municipal Court, pointed out several editors, when there will ascend to its bench Albert Baily George, the Negro just elected Municipal Judge on the Republican ticket by 470,000 votes. In the past a Negro here and there has been appointed judge, notably Robert H. Terrell (1857 - 1925) of Washington, we are told, but this is the first election of one to a regular judicial office." "Judge George's ancestors were slaves in old Virginia. His success, says the Chicago 'Tribune', 'has sent a thrill of hope through the black belts - a new incentive to work and decent living.; It is considered 'a milestone in the journey of the negro race out of the wilderness of slavery, an application of the principles of democracy which may point the way to better things for both races.'"
| The Life of the Oppressed Race (Ken Magazine, 1938)
A three page article in which the journalist articulately explained for his comfortable suburban-dwelling readers the various restrictions and dangers of being an African American living in the American South East:
"You don't know the Southern cracker. Many of them are degenerate as a result of interbreeding and hookworm. Poverty-stricken and inefficient, they have only one source of pride: their white blood which makes them superior to any N*****. Any evidence of success or prosperity on the part of a Negro reflects on their racial superiority. The only way they can assert that superiority is by physical violence."Click here to read an article by Ralph Ellison concerning Black writers of the 1930s.
| The Red Caps (Ken Magazine, 1938)
The history of the African American baggage handlers called Red Caps is a sad story in American social history. The Red Caps had been around since the 1890s and they were assigned the task of carrying luggage to and from trains and taxis; this article points out that in the Thirties, one of every three of them had a college degree:"Red Caps did not go to college to learn how to be Red Caps. Their problem is a racial one. To the white, a job toting luggage is a poor way to eke out an existence. To the black, red capping is one of the 'big' fields open. The white man who works as a porter can do nothing else, as a rule; the Negro almost invariably can do something else but can't get it to do."
|  | An Interview with Dr. George Washington Carver (Ken Magazine, 1938)
A profile of Dr. George Washington Carver (1864 – 1943):"One of the greatest agricultural chemists of our day was born a slave 80 years ago. He has given the world approximately 300 new by-products from the peanut...Today Dr. Carver is the South's most distinguished scientist. He turned the peanut into a $60,000,000 industry." "I simply go to my laboratory, shut myself in and ask my Creator why He made the peanut. My Creator tells me to pull the peanut apart and examine the constituents. When this is done, I tell Him what I want to create, and He tells me I can make anything that contains the same constituents as a peanut. I go to work and keep working until I get what I want."
| Just Another Classified Ad from Dixie... (The Nation, 1927)
The attached file is a digital facsimile of a classified ad that was once posted in a Georgia newspaper long after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed into law. It seemed so terribly queer to the ink-slingers way up North at "The Nation", that they labeled it an "interesting little advertisement" when they reproduced it six months later. Yet, for the Georgians who set the type-face, applied the ink, delivered the paper and subscribed, the ad was typical of so many other classifieds that had appeared during the past one hundred and fifty years, and it was not, as the Yankees put it:
"...the request of someone who never heard of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the United States."
| Negroes Still Departing (Atlanta Georgian, 1917)
This short notice from a 1917 Georgia newspaper documented the heavy numbers involved in what has come to be known as the 'Great migration' as more and more African-Americans abandoned their homes in the Southern states preferring life in the North. It is believed that between the years 1910 through 1940, some 1.6 million African Americans participated in this exodus. The Southern journalist who penned these three paragraphs clearly felt a sense of personal rejection:"The worthless ones are remaining here to be cared for... The departure of these Negroes is not spasmodic. It is a steady drain of the best class of laborers that the South now has. Just what remedy is to prevent it we do not know."
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