DIVORCE TRIALS AND SEX SCANDALS

Abstract

This chapter covers the coverage of sex scandals and divorce trials, which dominated black papers’ front pages in the mid-1920s. Many of these stories involved the black elite and the middle class. Black papers believed that the status of individuals involved in the scandals generated interest among a new and expanding reading audience. Newspapers, however, depicted different images of elite and middle-class black heterosexual relationships from the ones they carefully constructed. This chapter also argues that the Black Press revealed and spoke about what readers could not discuss in other public forums as it related to African American sexuality. Overall, the second chapter reveals how the coverage of divorce trials and sex scandals exposed class tensions among African Americans and, perhaps most importantly, made private sexual matters public.