The historic Black press and the attempt to criminalize journalists

I've long thought about the potential for U.S. journalists to be jailed in America for doing our jobs. We should remember how the government came after Black journalists in the not-so-distant past.

W.EB. Dubois and staff in the Crisis magazine office (created appx. 1900). The magazine’s editorials about discrimination and inequality came under attack by the U.S. government during World War I. NYPL Public Library Digital Collection

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FORTIFY

March 16, 2025 (aka Black Press Day)- Two years after his 1941 Pulitzer win for busting unions and organized crimes, and years before his public alignment with White nationalists,² Westbrook Pegler targeted the Negro press. The World War I veteran- turned- syndicated newspaper columnist blamed Black journalists for the racial prejudice problem in the United States. He wrote that their race agitating—essentially reporting the truth about the treatment of the Negro in Jim Crow America- was a part of a plot to destroy the American government.

“Their objective is violence in the streets, then the breakdown of government through the weakness or hesitation of mayors and governors, then anarchy and finally dictatorship,” Pegler wrote of the Black press.³

What seemed to bother Pegler the most, was how widely circulated the Black press was in this era. During this time, the New Pittsburgh Courier alone boasted a 200,000-paper circulation and thanks to the Associated Negro Press (the Black version of today’s Associated Press), the Black columnists’ and reporters’ reach was just as powerful as Pegler’s. Readers stood by for all their news, especially to hear from World War II correspondents and Black investigative journalists who revealed the extent of discrimination Black troops faced within the military ranks.

In the case of stories written by Charles Loeb, the atomic bomb investigations appearing in the Black press debunked government propaganda downplaying the impacts of the weapons on people in Hiroshima.⁴ The government’s take was often reprinted in white newspapers like The New York Times without any proper examination, while the Black press-through Loeb’s reporting-had the best accounting of harm, truth and discrimination against Black troops.

“There is no element comparable to the Negro press in the promotion of race consciousness among the Negros and racial distrust of the white population,” Pegler continued in one column that was printed across Scripps Howard newspapers in 1943. “These publications have large circulation and they constantly remind the Negro that he is a Negro while calling on the white press to forgo such distinctions.”

Header for Pegler’s syndicated column published on page 16 of the Argus-Leader on November 18, 1943. The Argus-Leader was on of many white Scripps-Howard-owned newspapers in which Pegler’s columns appeared.

No Black person in America needed the Negro press’s reminder that they were being mistreated in this nation. And the Negro press itself had already been blamed for protests and skirted sedition charges by the Department of Justice.

Earlier that year, Michigan governor Harry F. Kelly released a roughly 300-page commissioned report that concluded a Detroit riot resulted from the criminality the of “Negro Hoodlum" and Black leaders who endorsed militancy in a quest for racial equity. This, Kelly’s commission concluded, included the Black press’ coverage of the attacks.

“Apparently the riot pictures showing Negroes being beaten to death by white mobs, were “framed” by the Negro press in order, further, to incite the Negro mob!” staff correspondent John B. Williams wrote sarcastically in an August 1943 edition of the New Pittsburgh Courier.⁵

“Apparently, too, the Negro leaders advised over 30 Negroes to get themselves killed and over 500 to get themselves arrested just to make things look as badly as possible!”

Screenshot of November 18, 1943 Argus Leader article entitled Negro Press to Blame for Much of Race Prejudice in U.S.

While these accusations were a part of laughable local fact-finding mission, perhaps the most chilling of accusations against the Black press had already come from Hoover’s FBI. J. Edgar Hoover was convinced he could round up Black publishers in a threat to hang them on wartime sedition charges.

And there was a blueprint for this.

Many Black publishers had already caved to similar threats during the first World War, either shutting down completely or softening the tone of their coverage criticizing the government for codifying Jim Crow rule while claiming to be in an universal fight for democracy overseas.

The Black press itself was under constant surveillance by the Postmaster General, which scoured through its mailings and reported back to the DOJ. Army Intelligence swooped in to ban publications like the NAACP’s The Crisis magazine, led by W.E.B. DuBois. The U.S. military made sure to keep robust field reporting and fiery editorials about the hypocrisy of the U.S. on matters of race and democracy out of Black soldiers’ reach. It did that by ensuring copies did not make it into their reading rooms. The Crisis was under surveillance by Military Intelligence, with DuBois accused by federal agents of having “two German girls” working for him.⁶ Once government officials visited the NAACP headquarters during the war, its board ordered DuBois to stick to “constructive criticism.” That could be read as constructive criticism of war efforts. It was also the beginning of the edict that each edition of the Crisis be lawyered. And DuBois, who worked with NAACP board member and Jewish military intelligence officer Joel Spingarn to promote Black military officer camps, had a change of tone in the immediate aftermath of the government’s visit and NAACP board meeting. Call it a softened approach to the analysis of war, with The Crisis editorial entitled “Close Ranks.”

“We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome. That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy,” DuBois wrote in the July 1918 editorial. “Let us not hesitate. Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and willingly with our eyes lifted to the hills.”⁷

(Note: Of course, DuBois’ tone would entirely change the following year as he witnessed the lynchings of Black men by white mobs across the country, the violators and victims often both returning from the war. I write about this in an upcoming book that, in part, describes the racial terror the troops endured abroad and here at home during Red Summer of 1919).

Meanwhile members of the Black press that refused to back down from the reporting and criticism of a Jim Crow America and military rule found themselves facing federal charges.

“No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it presently exists,” the Messenger magazine declared in their July 1918 publication, an immediate response to DuBois’ “Close Ranks” plea.

The co-editors, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen would soon be in jail following a mid-night FBI raid that destroyed their Lenox Avenue office in Harlem and August arrests at a public speaking event in the Midwest. Their magazine was being sold during that event.

The pair, charged under the Espionage Act, faced a judge that same month.

"Don't you know that you are opposing your own government and that you are subject to imprisonment for treason?" Randoph later recalled the judge asking. “We told him we believed in the principle of human justice and that our right to express our conscience was above the law.”

The judge, Randolph wrote, thought he and Owen could not have been intelligent enough write these columns, so white socialists had to be behind it all. He ultimately ordered them out of town. Then the men were drafted for the war. Armistice Day saved them from being shipped out.⁸

Despite the Randolph/Owen situation, Hoover’s efforts to charge the Black press on scale fell short in 1919 when the House Rules Committee bucked against then- Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The pair had sought peacetime sedition charges against Black publishers that didn’t fly in the face of Congress.

But there were so many publishers that had already complied with quelling their criticism of the government for fear of being shut down or jailed. This laid the groundwork for Hoover to go after the Black press again.

Screen grab of a 1987 Philadelphia Inquirer review of Patrick S. Washburn’s book, “A Question of Sedition The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press During World War II.

During the second World War and amid race consciousness incitement accusations like Pegler’s and the Michigan governor’s later claims, the Pittsburgh Courier, launched its Double V campaign. This was an effort by the Black press to jumpstart a movement advocating for a “double victory,” meaning victories against fascism overseas and racism in the United States.

The patriotism and truth-telling weren’t viewed as such within the DOJ. Hoover-who had already summoned Black journalist Frank Bolden to Washington from the warfront- went to then-attorney general Francis Biddle and asked him to indict Black publishers for treason because of their reporting, criticisms and influence.

Hoover, Biddle and Sengstacke

John Sengstacke, the heir to the Chicago Defender, enlisted the help of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and requested a meeting with Biddle. Biddle laid out the papers, their stories that championed Negro rights and the threat to take the Black press to court under the Espionage Act. It happened during a June 1942 meeting at the Justice Department.

''I asked what are we supposed to do about it? These are facts and that’s what it’s all about,” Sengstacke later recalled of his argument with Biddle in the 1999 PBS documentary entitled, Soldiers Without Swords.

By the end of the meeting, Biddle had declined to prosecute.

“Without Biddle being there, Roosevelt would have probably succumbed to Hoover’s request to ban the Black press and charge them with sedition,” Bolden recalled in the same documentary.

John Sengstacke in the 1999 documentary, Soldiers Without Swords, a recollection of the historic Black Press.

What Biddle and Roosevelt ultimately knew was that Sengstacke was right and the Black press had already influenced Roosevelt and the nation in a major way.

Executive Order 8802 dated June 25, 1941, in which President Franklin D. Roosevelt prohibits discrimination in the defense program; 6/25/1941; Executive Orders, 1862 - 2011; General Records of the United States Government, Record Group 11; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.

The U.S. government recognizes that it was the Black press, with its propensity for truth-telling under the threat of federal charges and arrests, mind you-that gets us to President’s Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802⁹ The Double V campaign had already influenced the ban on racial discrimination in the defense industry the year prior to the showdown in the Justice Department meeting.

This idea of criminalizing journalists for doing their jobs is one that’s been on my mind since Trump’s emergence in the White House a decade ago, and more recently this weekend.

Sometime early Friday afternoon, I spoke with several journalist friends about urgent issues facing the industry. I expressed frustration about our priorities in discussions about various orgs’ programming, lack of public statements about these pressing issues and overall leadership.

“We need to be worried about the day a U.S. journalist is jailed for doing their job,” I quipped more than once, wondering if any organization—including the ones for which I serve as a board and/or active member-is up for the challenge of meeting this perilous moment. It’s an effort that requires us to not just hold titles, but use our influence and power to speak up often and unabashedly about the state of democracy and press freedoms.

Then later that day, the president called it “illegal” to report critical facts about him. Standing in the shadows of the same Justice Department that Hoover tried-and sometimes succeeded in threatening and jailing Black journalists- was a president essentially calling journalists criminals.

If there’s one thing you’ve heard me say repeatedly, it’s that mainstream media has done an absolute horrible job over the past decade in normalizing Trump’s rhetoric. This happens in a number of ways, including softening language to the point of total misrepresentation (i.e. not calling a lie a lie). We laugh off his very clear words off, saying “that can’t happen,” when it’s actually happening in real time. We often frame matters of race, inequality and basic tenets of democracy as simple partisan politics- “Democrats vs. Republicans.” Instead, we should understand extremism and clear-cut differences between a shot at holding a democracy together versus falling into the fiery pits of a fascist hellscape.

Screengrab of February 28, 2025 The New York Times article headline d Voice of America Journalists Face Investigations for Trump comments.

When Trump launched his “fake news” propaganda the language took off as propaganda does-with repetition, both in common speak and media. When he attacked Black and Brown journalists during his first term, often by calling their names while simultaneously inciting crowds of rally attendees to sneer and attack them based on their professional affiliation, “we” as an industry barely flinched.

Now we’re watching his administration fill the ranks of the White House press briefing room with “pro-Trump,” media, cut access to the journalists at the Associated Press and allow human resources investigations into journalists at the federally funded broadcaster, Voice of America. The investigations were launched because the journalists were accused of reporting criticism of Trump or expressing critical views of the president themselves.¹⁰ As I wrote this newsletter, that attack morphed into a complete gutting of the US Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent company. VOA has been silenced through a Trump Executive Order defunding the broadcaster.¹¹

This isn’t just about what’s happening inside the Beltway. I remember working on an investigation into a Georgia farmer who had improperly housed migrant workers, while telling the government he was adhering to federal law.

The story never aired because our lawyers pointed out that I’d stepped on private property to gather footage of the migrants’ real living conditions. When the farmer refused an interview in 2021, he added: “I look at you like Trump does.”

My photographer and I took that to mean irrelevant. Fake. An enemy. It was during the same time period that some of us had been assigned private security because of Trump’s attacks on the media amid the stolen election lie.

Truly dangerous times….

In the wake of Trump’s attempt to deport Columbia graduate and pro-Palestinian protestor Mahmoud Khalil, the university’s journalism faculty released a statement Friday. In it, they reminded the public that their own university-affiliated journalists had faced threats over their coverage of the Gaza protests that Khalil participated before his detainment by Trump’s Homeland Security.

“These actions represent threats against political speech and the ability of the American press to do its essential job and are part of a larger design to silence voices that are out of favor with the current administration,” the statement read in part.¹²

“We have also seen reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is trying to deport the Palestinian poet and journalist Mosab Abu Toha, who has written extensively in the New Yorker about the condition of the residents of Gaza and warned of the mortal danger to Palestinian journalists.”

Columbia as an institution has already lost $400 million in funding as the Trump administration claims its failing to protect Jewish students from antisemitism. It’s also crippling the Middle Eastern, African and South Asian studies departments by demanding they be placed under academic receivership. ¹³ This is claiming a failure of program administration -and a very likely end to programs that study Black and Brown people around the globe. All of this comes from an administration that is routinely wiping digital references of the contributions made to this nation by women, Black and Brown people from federal websites in the name of so-called anti-DEI measures.¹⁴

I could go on and on about the warnings, the current condition and the danger before us. But I most often feel the need to study and teach lessons gleaned from the historic Black press.

You may recall a post-election essay I wrote for The Emancipator entitled “The Black press democratized America.” Among my various arguments to support such a claim was that the historic Black press gives us a model for how to combat fascism, around the world and abroad.

Perhaps you’ll recall this newsletter or share the lessons that I teach my Morehouse, Spelman and Clark Atlanta journalism students in my History of the Black Press course. They’re most certainly essential to understand as we navigate the dangers of today’s attacks against the free press. The difference is there are no Sengstackes, Roosevelts, Biddles or congressional committees to buck against the Hoovers of our time. Or do they exist somewhere?

If we were covering America like we've covered foreign nations in the midst of anti-democratic, authoritative, fascist rule, journalists would be on our high horses with panels examining the nations’ plights. We’d be writing think pieces about the need to support the U.S. military parachuting into said nations in order to save democracy. There would be at least a bit of boasting about how we keep the Fourth Estate intact.

But here we are looking at ourselves in the mirror and continuing a decade-long cycle of normalizing damage I believe may take half a century or longer to repair.

How will we fortify?

1. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. (1900 - 1930). W.E.B. Du Bois and staff in the Crisis magazine office Retrieved from https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8e0981a2-4aea-a10a-e040-e00a18063089

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McWhorter, D. (2004, March 4). Revisiting the controversial career of Westbrook Pegler. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/culture/2004/03/revisiting-the-controversial-career-of-westbrook-pegler.html

3. (1943, November 18). Negro Press to Blame for Much of Race Prejudice in U.S., Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakokta), 16

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Broad, W. J. (2021, August 9). The black reporter who exposed a lie about the atom bomb. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/science/charles-loeb-atomic-bomb.html

5. (1943, August 21). Negro Press, Leaders Blamed for Rioting., New Pittsburgh Courier (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), 1 & 6

6

Lewis, D. L. (1993). W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race 1868-1919. Henry Hold and Company, Inc.

7. W.E.B. Du Bois, The Crisis, vol. 16, no. 3 (July 1918), p. 111.

8

Anderson, J. (1972, November 25). Early voice I-A. philip randolph’s Radical Harlem. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1972/12/02/a-philip-randolph-profile-early-voice-i

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U.S. Department of the Interior. (n.d.). The double V campaign. National Parks Service. https://home.nps.gov/poch/learn/historyculture/the-double-v-campaign.html

10

Enrich, D., & Kim, M. (2025, February 28). Voice of America Journalists Face Investigations for Trump comments. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/business/media/voice-of-america-trump.html

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Stelter, B. (2025, March 15). Voice of America channels fall silent as Trump Administration Guts Agency and cancels contracts | CNN business. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/15/media/voice-of-america-trump-cuts/index.html

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A statement from Columbia Journalism School Faculty Defending Press Freedom | Columbia Journalism School. (n.d.-a). https://journalism.columbia.edu/news/cjs-faculty-press-freedom-statement-2025

Diaz, J. (2025, March 15). Turmoil Rocks Columbia University as trump administration demands changes - or else. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2025/03/14/nx-s1-5328589/columbia-university-trump-letter-funding

13.

Balk, T. (2025, March 15). Arlington Cemetery website loses pages on black veterans, women and Civil War. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/14/us/politics/arlington-cemetery-website-dei.html

14.