COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN JOURNALISM AND JOURNALISTS
Claude Albert Barnett (1889-1967) and the Associated Negro Press (1919-1967)
by Chitown Kev
Claude Albert Barnett, entrepreneur and founder of the Associated Negro Press (1919-1967), was born in Sanford, Florida to William Barnett and Celena Anderson. At nine months he was brought to Mattoon, Illinois to live with his maternal grandmother. Barnett grew up in Illinois, attending schools in Oak Park and Chicago. In 1904 he entered Tuskegee Institute. Two years later in 1906 he received a diploma and was granted the Institute’s highest award.
Following graduation Barnett returned to Chicago and became a postal worker. Through his new employment he read numerous magazines and newspapers. Fascinated by the advertisements, in 1913 Barnett began reproducing photographs of notable black luminaries, which he sold through advertising in African American newspapers. By 1917 Barnett had transformed this endeavor into a thriving mail-order enterprise.
After this initial success, Barnett and several partners started the Kashmir Chemical Company, a cosmetics business where he served as advertising manager. Shortly thereafter he resigned his post office position and traveled the country, promoting both his photographs and beauty products to mostly black customers. As he placed his ads in various black newspapers across the country he noticed a common trend, these newspapers were in dire need of substantive news to report.
Consequently, in 1919 Barnett created the Associated Negro Press (ANP), a service designed to provide news outlets with a reliable stream of news stories. At first he bartered news stories from varied sources to the black newspapers in return for advertising space. Eventually he built a reliable team of black news reporters known as “stringers” who provided stories of interest to African Americans. Barnett then charged newspaper publishers $25 per week for access to the latest stories.
At its zenith in the early 1950s, the ANP simultaneously serviced 200 newspapers across the United States and the world. Barnett expanded his network of stringers beyond the United States into the West Indies and Africa...Read More
Of special note is the role of Barnett and other black journalists in the fight against racial segregation in the military and in the nation’s blood supply during World War II as detailed in this post at America Comes Alive
The Fight Against Military Segregation and Segregation of the Blood Supply
During World War II, Barnett and other black journalists pressured the U. S. government to accredit black journalists as war correspondents. Barnett traveled widely and wrote many accounts on the adverse effects of segregation in the armed forces. (For an example of segregation in the Navy, read “Dorie Miller, Pearl Harbor Hero.”) Using the ANP to reach black Americans all over the country, he also spearheaded a campaign to desegregate blood donations.
Another story that hooked Barnett’s interest was the story of the terrible living conditions of black tenant farmers. This caught the attention of the government during World War II, when food production was vital for feeding troops, and in 1942, Claude Barnett was named as a consultant to the Secretary of the Agriculture in an effort to improve their conditions. (He served in this capacity until 1953.)
For many years he was a trustee of the Tuskegee Institute and Barnett became involved with the Booker Washington Institute in Liberia. Through this involvement and his friendship with President Tubman of Liberia, Barnett became an advocate for greater understanding between Africans and African-Americans. This also brought him to the attention of the Phelps-Stokes Fund and on to its board. Phelps-Stokes was started in 1911 upon the instructions of an early female philanthropist, Caroline Phelps-Stokes who wanted to fund educational opportunities for the underprivileged both here and abroad.
Barnett was also a governor of the American Red Cross, and on the board of director of the Supreme Life Insurance Company and Chicago’s Provident Hospital.
I am aware of the great number of archives on Barnett and the ANP’s work located in the Chicago area at places like the Chicago Historical Society and I will be delving deep into these archives in future posts for this series on African American journalism.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Over the course of the presidential campaign, Donald Trump has repeatedly used “inner city” as a synonym for black Americans — most recently during Sunday night's presidential town-hall debate. When James Carter, an undecided black voter, asked the Republican nominee and his opponent, Hillary Clinton, whether as president they could be devoted to all people in the United States, Trump immediately evoked the nation's urban centers.
“I would be a president for all of the people — African Americans, the inner cities,” he said. “You go into the inner cities and you see it's 45 percent poverty, African Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities.”
Trump's response is troubling for a couple of reasons. First, it contradicts federal data, which puts the poverty rate among black residents of metropolitan areas at 26 percent. Though that data includes suburban neighborhoods, Trump's number exceeds the black poverty rate in even the poorest big city in the country. Fewer than 40 percent of black residents in Detroit live below the poverty line, according to census data.
Further, poverty is generally higher in rural areas, and that's true for black Americans, too. About 37 percent of rural black residents live below the poverty line, according to the federal Economic Research Service.
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In her new documentary, the filmmaker explores how the Thirteenth Amendment led to an epidemic of mass incarceration in the United States. The Atlantic: Ava DuVernay's 13th Reframes American History
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Ava DuVernay’s 13th is a documentary about how the Thirteenth Amendment led to mass incarceration in the United States, but it’s also a gorgeous, evocative, and maddening exploration of words: of their power, their roots, their permanence. It’s about those who wield those words and those made to kneel by them. Many Americans by now are familiar with the coded language of the country’s racial hegemony. Some shun certain words while others make anthems out of them.
The film opens with an analysis of the eponymous amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” 13th then spends over an hour and a half tracing the path from the clause between those two commas to the 2.2 million prisoners in the American justice system.
13th, out Friday on Netflix, compels viewers to sit upright, pay attention, and interrogate words in their most naked form as they’re analyzed and unpacked by DuVernay’s subjects, who include Angela Davis, Charles Rangel, and Henry Louis Gates. Sometimes the film confronts words in seemingly contradictory pairs: person/property, slave/freed person, labor force/prison workers. At other times it wrestles with oxymorons that target black Americans: truth in sentencing, war on drugs, tough on crime, law and order, minor crimes.
Premised as a historical survey that maps the genetic link between slavery andtoday’s prison-industrial complex, 13th explodes the “mythology of black criminality” as The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb at one point in the film refers to the successive and successful measures undertaken by political authorities to disempower African Americans over the last three centuries. The academic and civil-rights advocate Michelle Alexander unpacks how the rhetorical war started by Richard Nixon and continued by Ronald Reagan escalated into a literal war, a “nearly genocidal” one. The Southern Strategy is unmasked as a political calculation that decimated black neighborhoods but won the southern white vote.
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Hurricane Matthew’s toll in Haiti reached at least 271 people Friday, with 143 confirmed dead in the Grand’ Anse region to the south, the director of the Office of Civil Protection told the Miami Herald.
“It’s almost 300, and it will surely rise,” Marie-Alta Jean-Baptiste said.
As President Barack Obama on Friday called for Americans to remember Haiti — “hit and battered by a lot of natural disasters,” he said — the number of storm-related deaths in the Caribbean country continued to fluctuate.
Jean-Baptiste said an earlier report of 283 deaths reported by The Associated Press was incorrect. She said extra workers from the Office of Civil Protection flew into Jérémie, a badly damaged city on the southern peninsula, on Thursday to help compile information about deaths and damages.
She said many people died in the mountains while trying to escape the storm’s sea surge, others after their homes and roofs collapsed on them because of Matthew’s strong winds.
And the death toll will undoubtedly go up, especially in the hard-hit Grand’ Anse area. Even as the Office of Civil Protection confirmed the 143 deaths there, Fresnel Kedner, a representative of the department, told the radio station Vision 2000 on Friday that the area has registered 232 deaths so far.
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According to a post on her Facebook page, architect Trish Cole Doolin relocated to Seattle in September to work at Nelson Connections as a Job Captain in architecture. Earlier this week, Doolin sought to deposit her paycheck into her account at Key Bank. But according to Doolin, 15 minutes after she deposited her funds, she got a call from someone from the bank asking her to come back to the bank because there was “a problem.”
Doolin recounted her experience in a Facebook post that was shared by friends on social media.
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