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Let Us Make Men: the Twentieth- Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement'

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Let Us Make Men: the Twentieth- Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement' JHistory Walls on Haywood, 'Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth- Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement' Review published on Tuesday, January 5, 2021 D'Weston Haywood. Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 352 pp. $34.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4696-4339-7; $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-4338-0. Reviewed by Eric Walls (Johnston Community College)Published on Jhistory (January, 2021) Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=55896 Race and gender are currently two of the more popular lenses of historical and historiographical inquiry among historians, and much ink has been spilled over questions of the influence of racial and gendered discourse in the discipline of history during recent decades. With the current sociopolitical trends surrounding these issues in modern American society and the growing popularity of intersectionality as an interpretive tool within the humanities in general, such lines of investigation display no signs of abating any time soon. D’Weston Haywood, Hunter College at City University of New York associate professor of history, enters this fray withLet Us Make Men: The Twentieth- Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement. Haywood, however, takes a slightly different tack than most scholars currently mining this field. Where most scholars examine issues of gender through a distinctly feminine lens, Haywood focuses on manhood and masculinity. This approach is not unprecedented, but it is certainly underutilized as an interpretive tool. His application of the gendered lens of masculinity as a framework through which to study the influence of African American journalism on American society, and the African American community in particular, is also a fairly novel approach that yields some interesting insights. The central argument of Let Us Make Men is that a distinct theme of black masculinity, particularly the promotion of models of defiant yet socially and personally responsible images of black manhood, can be traced in the pages of the black press throughout the twentieth century. Haywood makes this argument through detailed investigations of the lives and work of six of the leading and most provocative and controversial black journalists and publishers of the twentieth century: W. E. B. DuBois and his publication Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races; Robert S. Abbott and his nephew and protégé John Sengstacke and their paper, theChicago Defender; Marcus Garvey and Negro World; Robert F. Williams and the Crusader; and Malcom X and Muhammad Speaks. Through this investigation, Haywood traces a trajectory of increasingly militant and often combative gendered discourse that simultaneously united and divided the black press and the black community while providing similar yet competing models of black advocacy and black manhood. According to Haywood, “black people’s ideas, rhetoric, and strategies for black protest and racial advancement during the twentieth-century black freedom struggle grew out of a quest for proper black manhood led by black newspapers” (p. 3). This focus on black manhood and masculinity was a Citation: H-Net Reviews. Walls on Haywood, 'Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement'. JHistory. 01-05-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14542/reviews/7080730/walls-haywood-let-us-make-men-twentieth-century-black-press-and-manly Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 JHistory key component of the black freedom struggle precisely because white society consistently used gendered discourse to emasculate black men and justify a dominant position in American society. The black press in the age of segregation “represented one of the few spaces with a public function that black men could shape, if not control, at this time” (p. 5). As a result, the black press became the locus of the twentieth-century black freedom struggle as it was the one public space through which the black community in general, and black men in particular, could safely articulate their grievances and establish a set of mores and values in conscious and concerted efforts to redeem and elevate the black community to a more respectable and equitable place in American society. It was precisely the “embrace of a proper black manhood for the benefit of the race” that, Haywood argues, guided the rhetoric of the black press, “making the fight for racial justice a fight for manhood as well” (pp. 6, 7). Haywood begins with an examination of the lives and work of DuBois and his publicationCrisis , backed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Abbott and the Chicago Defender, one of the longest running, most widely distributed, and most influential black publications of the twentieth century. The Defender began in 1905 and Crisis in 1910, a period that witnessed the solidification of Jim Crow laws in the South and the dawn of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to urban centers in the North, a profound legal, social, and demographic change that undergirded both the inauguration of the modern black press, as exemplified by Crisis and the Defender, and the nascent civil rights movement itself. Indeed, both publications openly encouraged black migration and couched it in terms of the redemption of black manhood from the emasculating effects of the Jim Crow South. Haywood identifies Abbott’s efforts in particular as critical to this phenomenon. He notes that it was Abbott, more so than DuBois, that laid the foundation for the trajectory of the black press, its use of gendered discourse, and its influence throughout the twentieth century. “Abbott’s particular approach to covering the migration,” he asserts, “helped fuel the movement and ultimately turned the black press into a leading force in the urban struggle for racial advancement” (p. 22). This approach was steeped in appeals to black masculinity as Abbott and the Defender framed black migration “as the first step any black man could take to begin restoring his manhood” (p. 23). By framing black migration in such gendered terms, early twentieth-century black publications like Crisis and the Defender established a foundation for black racial advancement and intimately tied civil rights into notions of black masculinity and manhood, a model that the black press in general quickly assimilated and consistently used thereafter. The second chapter focuses on the highly polarizing and controversial figure of Garvey and his publication Negro World. Garvey’s entrance into the early twentieth-century black press milieu marked a more militant turn in the rhetoric surrounding African American civil rights. He particularly caught the attention of black soldiers returning from World War I who found “they remained second- class citizens despite their service to the country” (p. 60). The reaction of the established black press, like Abbott’s Defender, to Garvey’s militant and separatist message initiated an internecine war of words that, Haywood demonstrates, was steeped in appeals to black masculinity. Black publishers fought among one another not only for the hearts and minds of the African American population in the United States but also over the very essence and meaning of black manhood itself. Established black publications like the Defender viewed Garvey’s separatist message as an affront and threat to their more integrationist position on black civil rights and made it their mission to delegitimize Garvey and his work through scathing editorial diatribes that sought to undermine the Citation: H-Net Reviews. Walls on Haywood, 'Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement'. JHistory. 01-05-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/14542/reviews/7080730/walls-haywood-let-us-make-men-twentieth-century-black-press-and-manly Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 JHistory public perception of Garvey’s own masculinity. Garvey responded in kind in his own publication, turning his ideological opponents’ tactics against them, defending his own masculinity and offering emasculating rhetoric, and initiating a tit for tat smear campaign on both sides that used ideas of black manhood and masculinity as ammunition in a high stakes struggle for readership and influence within the African American community. Having established black masculinity as intimately correlated and even interdependent with black racial advancement and civil rights, the black press came to use the rhetoric of masculinity, or the perceived lack thereof, as the very core of its strategy to not only uplift the black race in general in American society but also simultaneously denigrate those within that same community who offered competing visions of black advancement in efforts to strengthen their own position and influence. This internecine conflict “transformed the black press into both a tool for the promotion of black male leadership and a tool for its destruction” as newspapermen like Abbott and Garvey attempted to cement their own ideas of black manhood and racial advancement as the best way forward for the African American community. As Haywood points out, this internal conflict directly “counters the traditional historical narrative of the black press coming together to rail against racial oppression and promote racial unity” (p. 60). Chapter 3 returns to the world of the Chicago Defender as the reins of the paper, and with them claims to black male leadership within the African American community, were transferred from Abbott to his nephew and protégé, Sengstacke. By the end of the 1920s, Garvey’s opponents had successfully managed to discredit him, signaling a victory for the more moderate and integrationist approach to black civil rights. Abbott and the Defender emerged from this fray stronger than ever, having “outstripped much of his competition and achieved levels of commercial success unseen by many black publishers” (p.
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