Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press by Kim Gallon (review)

Abstract

During the late 1920s and early 1930s, a period characterized by loosening sexual mores, one could find images of markedly attractive Black women in bathing suits (“bathing beauties,” as they were called) throughout the pages of Black American newspapers—the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, and New York Amsterdam News, among others. These images were part of the Black press’s coverage of beauty pageants and were representative of what the press imagined readers wanted to see. In Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press, Kim Gallon draws on an archive of Black newspaper content published between the World Wars to situate the Black press as a public sphere of sexuality that fostered transformative discourses on sexual agency, pleasure, and respectability. The mass migration of Southern Blacks to Northern metropolitan areas diversified the Black press’s readership, encouraging a level of ambivalence toward issues of sexuality and racial uplift. With the ultimate goal of selling newspapers, the Black press featured sensationalist content that appealed to (and fed on) the conflicting values of newly arrived working-class migrants, middle-class African Americans, and the locally established urban elite. Such content brought into question fundamental issues around the nature of sexual agency and its relationship to racial progress. For example, its coverage of high-profile divorce and sex scandals created an opportunity for the masses to pass moral judgment on the more “respectable” classes. As Gallon writes, Black newspapers and their readers “upset elite black and middle-class morality and respectability by exposing and consuming news about their private sexual lives” (73). In addition, readers achieved a level of sexual agency by voicing their opinions in letters to editors as well as a more fundamental “sensual pleasure that is imbricated in the act of reading and viewing” (7). Not only did migration bring a diverse new readership to Northern cities, but it also facilitated the movement of newspapers throughout the country, thus expanding the parameters of this Black public sexual sphere. Cities like Pittsburgh were temporary stopping-points for young migrants moving between the South and the larger cities of the North. Migrants moving through Pittsburgh purchased copies of the Courier and after reading, shared them with others along their journey, extending the Courier’s reach. “I read it with care and then send it between 200 and 300 miles for others to read,” said one reader in a letter to the editor (22). The Courier also sent columnists on tours of the South so that it could learn to speak adequately to the cultures and concerns of its expanding readership. The circulation of Black newspapers throughout the country also exposed Southern readers to the North’s changing attitude toward sexuality. Coverage of homosexuality and female impersonation in Northeastern newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News and Baltimore’s Afro-American revealed to men with same-sex desires in the South the potential for sexual refuge in cities like New York.