Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-q99xh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:10:26.509Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Ben Burns and the Boundaries of Black Print in Chicago, 1942–1954

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 July 2018

E. JAMES WEST
E. JAMES WEST*
Affiliation:
History Department, Northumbria University. Email: ejwestuk@gmail.com.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article focusses on the career of Ben Burns, a white Jewish radical who came to play a central role in Chicago's black press during the mid-twentieth century. As an editor for periodicals such as the Chicago Defender, Negro Digest and Ebony, Burns helped to edit and develop some of the nation's most influential black publications. However, many of his readers remained oblivious to his racial identity – something which was both implicitly and explicitly obscured by his employers, and which was influenced by and manifested itself through the spatial politics of the workplace and the Chicago South Side. Drawing on a range of archival and biographical material, personal correspondence, and newspaper and magazine articles, this paper reconsiders Burns's literal movement through the terrain of Chicago's black press to assess his broader influence as a white editor in black journalism. Complicating depictions of Burns as a racial interloper, this article situates his contributions within a broader history of white participation in black print production. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the parameters of his role were heavily framed by the complex racial and spatial politics of the editorial room and Chicago's urban politics at mid-century.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 703 - 724
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Tuck, Stephen, “You Can Sing and Punch … but You Can't Be a Soldier or a Man: African American Struggles for a New Place in Popular Culture,” in Kruse, Kevin and Tuck, Stephen, eds., Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 103–25, 109CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 “Maneuvers Show 93rd Is Ready,” The Crisis, June 1943, 170; “93rd Division ‘Ready to Fight’,” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 May 1943, 1.

3 Gibson, Truman with Huntley, Steve, Knocking Down Barriers: My Fight for Black America (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2005), 108–9Google Scholar.

4 Green, Adam, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 96Google Scholar.

5 Greenberg, Cheryl, Troubling the Waters: Black–Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 105–6Google Scholar; Green, 161; Mullen, Bill, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African American Cultural Politics, 1935–1946 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

6 Burns, Ben, Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 40, 55Google Scholar.

7 Wolseley, Roland, The Black Press, U.S.A. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1971), 17–18Google Scholar.

8 Stovall, James, “Roland Wolseley,” in Sloan, David, ed., Makers of the Media Mind: Journalism Educators and Their Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1990), 47–52, 52Google Scholar; Moody, Mia, Black and Mainstream Press’ Framing of Racial Profiling (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2008), 16Google Scholar; Seigal, Micol, Uneven Encounters: Making Race and Nation in Brazil and the United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Squires, Catherine, African Americans and the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 7–8Google Scholar; Denton Watson, “Book Corner,” The Crisis, Nov. 1971, 306.

9 Bacon, Jacqueline, Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007)Google Scholar; Washburn, Patrick, The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Freedom's Journal, 16 March 1827, 1; Fagan, Benjamin, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016), 23Google Scholar; McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, “Black Print Culture and the Origins of American Abolitionism,” in McCarthy, Timothy Patrick and Stauffer, John, eds., Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York: The New Press, 2006), 114–44, 130Google Scholar.

10 Carby, Hazel, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 193Google Scholar; Proceedings of the Nation Convention of Colored People (Troy, NY: Steam Press of J. C. Kneeland and Co., 1847), 19–20Google Scholar.

11 Fagan, 52–54.

12 Gardner, Eric, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4, 67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, John, Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), 4Google Scholar.

13 For more on this issue see Johnson, E. Patrick, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Tamara and Kopano, Baruti, eds., Soul Thieves: The Appropriation and Misrepresentation of African American Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Long, Lisa, White Scholars/African American Texts (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

14 “Soul on Ink,” Texas Monthly, Oct. 1983, 114.

15 Morris, James McGrath, Eyes on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (New York: Amistad, 2015)Google Scholar; Booker, Carol McGabe, ed., Alone atop the Hill: the Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

16 Gallon, Kim, “Silences Kept: the Absence of Gender and Sexuality in Black Press Historiography,” History Compass, 10 (2012), 207–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rhodes, Jane, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

17 Pochmara, Anna, The Making of the New Negro: Black Authorship, Masculinity, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 60Google Scholar.

18 Fagan, 54; Kaplan, Carla, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance (New York: HarperCollins, 2013)Google Scholar, preface; Nishikawa, Kinohi, “Race, Respectability and the Short Life of Duke Magazine,” Book History, 15 (2012), 152–82, 155CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 38.

20 Baldwin, Davarian, Chicago's New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Cutler, Irving, Chicago's Jewish West Side (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2009); 7Google Scholar; Phillips, Bruce, “Not Quite White: The Emergence of Jewish ‘Ethnoburbs’ in Los Angeles, 1920–2010,” American Jewish History, 100 (2016), 73–104, 73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Goldstein, Eric, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 42, 68Google Scholar; McWhirter, Cameron, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America (New York: Griffin, 2012)Google Scholar; Krugler, David, 1919: The Year of Racial Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

22 Gurock, Jeffrey, Jews in Gotham (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 35–36Google Scholar.

23 Burns, 55.

24 “Family Materials,” Box 1, Folder 3, Ben Burns Papers, Chicago Public Library.

25 Burns, 55.

26 Nishikawa makes no reference to Burns's Jewishness in his 2012 article “Race, Respectability and the Short Life of Duke Magazine.”

27 Burns, 63.

28 Rosenbaum, Robert, Walking into Danger: Americans and Nazi Germany, 1933–1941 (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010), 78–79Google Scholar.

29 Wright, Richard, Native Son (London: Vintage, 2000)Google Scholar.

30 Rowley, Hazel, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001), 127–28Google Scholar.

31 Smethurst, James, The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930–1946 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33Google Scholar.

32 McDuffie, Erik, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mullen, Popular Fronts, 14.

33 Storch, Randi, Red Chicago: American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928–1935 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 55, 96Google Scholar; Makalani, Minkah, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 85Google Scholar.

34 Berman, Lila, Speaking of Jews: Rabbis, Intellectuals, and the Creation of an American Public Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 38–39Google Scholar.

35 Hersch, Charles, Jews and Jazz: Improvising Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 2017), 46–47Google Scholar; Wald, Alan, “Jewish American Writers on the Left,” in Kramer, Michael and Wirth-Nesher, Hana, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170–89, 182CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Horne, Gerald, Black Revolutionary: William Patterson and the Globalization of the African American Freedom Struggle (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 9.

38 “Backstage,” Ebony, Nov. 1945, 2.

39 Negro Digest’s circulation had breached 100,000 by 1949, whilst Ebony’s circulation had topped 500,000. Langston Hughes, “The EBONY Years,” Ebony, Nov. 1965, 42; “Employee Contract,” Sept. 1947, Box 2, Folder 4, Ben Burns Papers.

40 Burns, 6.

41 Mullen, 54.

42 Burns, 6; James Janega, “Ben Burns, 86, White Editor Who Made Mark in Black Journalism,” Chicago Tribune, 2 Feb. 2000, at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-02-02/news/0002020243_1_mr-burns-ebony-magazine.

43 Michaeli, Ethan, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), 100Google Scholar; Rice, Myiti Sengstacke, Chicago Defender (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2012), 45, 55Google Scholar.

44 Reed, Christopher, The Rise of Chicago's Black Metropolis, 1920–1929 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 40Google Scholar.

45 “Defender and Skeleton,” Time, 24 March 1941, 64.

46 “Robert S. Abbott,” Phylon, Box 1, Folder 1, Robert Abbott Papers, Chicago Public Library.

47 Correspondence between author and Ethan Michaeli, 15 Dec. 2016.

48 Bachin, Robin, Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890–1919 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004), 302Google Scholar; Boyle, Sheila Tully and Bunie, Andrew, Paul Robeson: The Years of Promise and Achievement (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 109–10Google Scholar.

49 Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 67; Ottley, Roi, The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott (Chicago: H. Regnery Co., 1955), 191–92Google Scholar.

50 Michaeli, The Defender, 205–6.

51 Cohen, Sarah and Koch, Joanne, “Introduction,” in Cohen and Koch, eds., Shared Stages: Ten American Dramas of Blacks and Jews (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 1–40, 12Google Scholar.

52 Ross, Barbara, J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911–1939 (New York: Atheneum, 1972)Google Scholar; Wright, Native Son, 388.

53 Michaeli, The Defender, 256–57.

54 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 4–6.

55 Among the relatively few editorials to carry Ben Burns's byline during his early years at the Defender were “Let My People Work,” Chicago Defender, 26 Sept. 1942, B10; “Willkie Pilot Finds African Negroes ‘Wonderful’ People,” Chicago Defender, 22 May 1943, 3; “No Color Line in Merchant Marine,” Chicago Defender, 1 April 1944, 11; “Off the Book Shelf,” Chicago Defender, 15 Dec. 1945, 12.

56 Michaeli, The Defender, xii; “The Press: White on Black,” Time, 12 March 1945, at http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,797273,00.html.

57 “Backstage,” Ebony, Feb. 1946, 2.

58 “At Long Last …,” Chicago Tribune, 16 Oct. 1950, B5.

59 “Backstage,” Ebony, Jan. 1947, 2; Green, Selling the Race, 162.

60 Johnson, John H. and Bennett, Lerone Jr., Succeeding against the Odds (New York: Amistad, 1992), 134Google Scholar; “W. F. Hall Printing Contract,” Box 2 Folder 9, Ben Burns Papers.

61 Frank Litsky, “Mark Harris, Author of ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’, Is Dead at 84,” New York Times, 2 June 2007, at https://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/02/sports/baseball/02harris.html; Kay Cremin, “They Fast for Freedom,” Negro Digest, Dec. 1946, 48–51; “Music Editors,” Billboard, 24 April 1948, 44.

62 Johnson and Bennett, 201.

63 “Backstage,” Ebony, Jan. 1947, 2.

64 “Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, April 1947, 4.

65 “Masthead,” Negro Digest, Aug. 1944, 2.

66 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 5; Burns, “Let My People Work.”

67 Finley, Keith, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938–1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 94Google Scholar.

68 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 137; “Time to Count Our Blessings,” Ebony, Nov. 1947, 44–45.

69 “Should the President's Civil Rights Program Be Adopted?”, America's Town Hall Meeting of the Air, 23 March 1948.

70 Davis, F. James, “Black Identity in the United States,” in Kivisto, Peter and Rundblad, Georganne, eds., Multiculturalism in the United States (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 101–12, 103Google Scholar.

71 Green, Selling the Race, 162.

72 Johnson and Bennett, Succeeding against the Odds, 193.

73 “America's Black Press Lord,” Box 22, Folder 9, Robert Abbott Papers.

74 Lubin, Alex, Romance and Rights: The Politics of Interracial Intimacy, 1945–1954 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 81Google Scholar.

75 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 114; “Case History of an Ex-white Man,” Ebony, Dec. 1946, 11; “Five Million U.S. White Negroes,” Ebony, March 1948, 22–28; “White by Day, Negro by Night,” Ebony, April 1952, 31–36. “Subseries B: Interracial Marriage and Multiracial Identity,” Boxes 20-21, Ben Burns Papers.

76 Lubin, 67.

77 “Letters to the Editor,” Ebony, May 1948, 4.

78 Gardner, Black Print Unbound, 61–62.

79 “The Defender's New Home,” Chicago Defender, 15 April 1922, 12; “Opportunity, 1929,” Box 18, Folder 23, Robert Abbott Papers.

80 “5,000 Inspect Defender's New Plant,” Chicago Defender, 14 May 1921, 4; “Announcement,” Box 18, Folder 27, Robert Abbott Papers; “Interesting Facts about a Great Newspaper,” Box 11, Folder 7, Robert Abbott Papers.

81 Schlabach, Elizabeth, Along the Streets of Bronzeville: Black Chicago's Literary Landscapes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), xCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

82 Drake, St. Clair and Cayton, Horace, Black Metropolis (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)Google Scholar; Gregory, James, “The Second Great Migration: A Historical Overview,” in Kusmer, Kenneth and Trotter, Joe, eds., African American Urban History since World War II (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 19–38, 30Google Scholar.

83 Schlabach, 1; Baldwin, Chicago's New Negroes, 240–41; Hirsch, Arnold, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago 1940–1960 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

84 De Santis, Christopher, ed., Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 13Google Scholar.

85 “Interesting Facts about a Great Newspaper.”

86 Michaeli, The Defender, 134–35.

87 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 4.

88 Ibid., 6, 23.

89 Carl Murphy, “30,000 Troops Maneuver in Louisiana Bad Land,” Afro-American, 15 May 1943, 1–11; Robert Ratcliffe, “Newsmen Thank War Department for Trip to Louisiana,” Atlanta Daily World, 11 May 1943, 1; William Nunn, “General Lauds Troops for Skills in Maneuvers Test,” Pittsburgh Courier, 15 May 1943, 1.

90 Ben Burns, “Lack of Race Officers in 93rd,” Chicago Defender, 22 May 1943, 2.

91 Burns, “No Color Line in Merchant Marine”; Ben Burns, “No Color Line on Ships,” Chicago Defender, 13 May 1944, 7.

92 Ben Burns, “CIO's Hillman Hedges on Color at Paris Meet,” Chicago Defender, 29 Sept. 1945, 1; Burns, “Hillman's Anti-Negro Stand in Paris Blasted,” Chicago Defender, 6 Oct. 1945, 1; Burns, “2,000,000 Demand Labor Drop Jim Crow,” Chicago Defender, 20 Oct. 1945, 1–2; “Defender Sends Burns to Paris,” Box 1, Folder 3, Ben Burns Papers.

93 Ben Burns, “South Africa's Racist Unions Flayed at Meet,” Chicago Defender, 20 Oct. 1945, 8; Burns, “Negro Nations Well Represented at Paris Meet,” Chicago Defender, 27 Oct. 1945, 5.

94 Bone, Robert and Courage, Richard, The Muse in Bronzeville: African American Creative Expression in Chicago, 1932–1950 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 4Google Scholar; Puth, Robert, “Supreme Life: The History of a Negro Insurance Company, 1919–1962,” Business History Review, 43 (1969), 1–20, 12–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 Smith, Preston, Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Johnson and Bennett, Succeeding against the Odds, 96.

97 “Interview with John H. Johnson,” Ebony, Nov. 1985, 48.

98 Cutler, Chicago's Jewish West Side, 9–10.

99 Cutler, , The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 122Google Scholar.

100 Johnson and Bennett, 97.

101 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 96; “The EBONY Story,” Ebony, Nov. 1995, 82.

102 “Backstage,” Ebony, June 1949, 10.

103 Johnson and Bennett, 198.

104 Ibid., 199.

105 “EBONY opens its new building,” Ebony, Oct. 1949, 37.

106 Dreher, Kwakiuti, Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing Autobiography (Albany: State University of New York, 2008), 37Google Scholar.

107 Petty, Mariam, Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 151Google Scholar.

108 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 136.

109 Green, Selling the Race, 162.

110 “Mau Mau,” 1953, Box 1, Folder 3, Ben Burns Papers.

111 “The Week's Census,” Jet, 6 Nov. 1952, 56.

112 “Eviction of Two Negro Photographers,” undated, Box 1, Folder 7, Ben Burns Papers.

113 Rudolph Dunbar, “Larry Winters a Favorite in a Small Café in Paris,” New York Amsterdam News, 24 June 1950, 7.

114 Images 34–50, Box 32, and Images 51–100, Box 33, Ben Burns Papers.

115 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 189.

116 Johnson and Bennett, Succeeding Against the Odds, 236.

117 Grant Pick, “A Plant Dies in Cragin,” Chicago Reader, 7 Jan. 1988, at www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/a-plant-dies-in-cragin/Content?oid=871617; Charles Storch, “W. F. Hall Printing to Close Plant Here,” Chicago Tribune, 19 May 1987, at http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1987-05-19/business/8702070040_1_plant-commercial-printing-ringier-ag.

118 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 189.

119 Mia Long, “Seeking a Place in the Sun: Sepia Magazine's Endeavour for Quality Journalism and Place in the Negro Market, 1951–1982,” PhD thesis, University of Alabama, 2011.

120 Nishikawa, “Race, Respectability and the Short Life of Duke Magazine,” 158.

121 “Name Ben Burns Daily Defender Editor-in-Chief,” Jet, 2 Aug. 1962, 28; “Ben Burns New Editor-in-Chief of The Defender,” Chicago Defender, 28 July 1962, 1.

122 Burns, Nitty Gritty, 211–14.

123 Mullen, Popular Fronts, 54.

124 Fagan, The Black Newspaper, 54; Green, Selling the Race, 96.

125 “Chicago Defender Staff Integrated Long Time,” Philadelphia Tribune, 20 July 1965, 4.