Stanley Nelson began with a sense of history and a search for a legacy that seemed largely lost in yellowed newspaper clippings and fading memories.
But after seven years raising money, putting together a production team, researching archives, interviewing people, and blending an exhausting mix of writing, filming and editing, Nelson completed his professional obsession.
The result — a documentary, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, which airs on public television on Feb. 14. And the fallout for Nelson has been sweetness and satisfaction.
Only last month, the filmmaker-turned-historian found himself sharing a stage in New York with other winners of a prestigious Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award for overall excellence in broadcast journalism.
Other winners included well-known journalists Diane Sawyer and Bill Moyers, but among the others receiving a distinctive silver baton was Nelson whose 90-minute documentary was praised by the DuPont jury for “covering the remarkable and little-known history of black-owned newspapers in the United States.” In his documentary, Nelson weaves together archival film, photographs, and interviews with editors, reporters, cartoonists, and photographers to trace the impact of the black press over the last 150 years.
“In the process, Nelson demonstrates that the black press laid the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s,” the nine-member DuPont jury points out in awarding the prize.
For Nelson, who also was the producer of the film, the prestigious journalism prize only acknowledges a media movement that he says has often been overlooked and a tribute to the black press that is long overdue.
“I just found it a fascinating story,” says Nelson who has over 20 years’ experience as a producer, director, and writer of documentary films and videos. “I had done African-American history and would constantly use papers as source materials. I became fascinated with the papers themselves and the thought of the people behind those papers.”
Taking those behind-the-scenes journalists and placing their faces and newspapers in front of his camera, Nelson chronicles the history of the black press and its pivotal role in shaping modern African-American identity. In his film, he gives voice to a medium that offered a distinctly black perspective on central events in the African-American community, from antebellum America to the Civil Rights Movement.
“They were the pioneers,” Nelson says of early black journalists, “and they became journalists when they had no other outlets. These were persons who had the ‘bug’ to be journalists.”
Nelson adds that the influence of the black press went beyond the pages of their publications.
“The one case that we make in the film is the black press’ role in jump-starting the Civil Rights Movement. The black press was constantly pushing for equality, and that was taken on later by the Civil Rights Movement, largely by the churches. But early on, it was the black press that championed this constantly and continually.”
It was in the black press where Ida B. Wells, one of the first women to own a newspaper in America, led the fight against lynching and Jim Crow laws. It was also where the writings of W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey could be read, and where sports pages publicized the accomplishments of black baseball players and helped pave the way for what eventually would be the integration of the major leagues. As the film shows, there was even a unique system to distribute papers nationwide with train porters and other black railroad employees making sure the papers went from city to city, with news pages and editorials and features that offered a different perspective than one given by white newspapers.
“This was journalism for African Americans,” Nelson says. “This wasn’t a black person writing in New Yorker magazine, interpreting the black community for the white community. This was written for and by black people. You can’t overstress the importance of that.”
Nelson’s other films include documentaries on the methadone treatment program for heroin addicts and the challenges minority faculty face in higher education. Nelson also has produced a documentary Duke Ellington’s Washington — a look at the Capitol City when a black community flourished before the Harlem renaissance — which aired on Feb. 8. He also is working on another documentary about a towering black figure, Marcus Garvey.
But in Black Press, Nelson takes on an entity that has both flourished and struggled through the years, largely out of the public eye of mainstream, white America, and how that often has meant a different perspective on news for readers.
The filmmaker, for example, demonstrates the difference in how white and black media depicted events in World War II by showing the contrasting coverage on the domestic front. The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black newspaper, spearheaded the now mostly-forgotten “Double V” campaign, which called for victory abroad over fascism to coincide with victory at home over racism and inequality. Despite the patriotic theme of the campaign, Nelson reports how federal government officials were so terrified of the implications of a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement that they sought to indict the campaign leaders for sedition.
That experience and the details of the dispute between the government and the Courier were unknown to many including some black journalists.
Ylish Carter, managing editor of the New Pittsburgh Courier, says he learned much from watching the film about the newspaper. which preceded his own. The Courier was a journalistic landmark, he says, and not enough people — black and white — realize the storied history of that and other black publications.
“These were really crusading papers, and they took on the establishment with no holds barred,” says Carter who adds that black newspapers today are still trying to combine their roles as an important information source and an effective advocate for the community.
Carter says his paper still has a national readership with circulation hovering around 40,000 that includes both black and non-black readers. And when he saw Nelson’s film, the veteran journalist says he saw both a history lesson and an inspiration for the future.
At the Chicago Defender, another of the storied black newspapers, managing editor Leroy Thomas describes watching the documentary at a special screening as “a catharsis” for his largely black audience. But he says that white audiences, in particular, should see the documentary, which would give them the historical perspective needed to better understand the underpinnings and the philosophy of the black press.
“We are an advocacy press because we have to be,” says Thomas who recalls his days as a reporter at police headquarters in Chicago as one reminder of how stories in his community often went unreported in the mainstream media.
Years ago, Thomas says he was in the press room along with a half-dozen other reporters from white newspapers or news services when a mother came in with her teenage daughter who had been raped and beaten. Although police were skeptical of the girl’s claims of rape and belittled the crime, Thomas and the other reporters phoned in the story to their desks. But only the Defender was interested, he says. The editors at the other media turned down what their reporters knew was a story, according to Thomas.
“They saw blood and saw misery, and they phoned it in,” he recalls, “and all got rejected.”
Today, Thomas says the media — not just black newspapers — would jump at that story and recognize its importance. But that does not mean the significance and role of the black press is undercut. Even with a circulation of 20,000 and a staff far smaller than the major metropolitan dailies, the Defender still churns out news and features and other stories about its community. It also must compete with mainstream publications to recruit and keep talented African-American journalists who may be lured by the higher pay and larger readership of mainstream media.
The heydey of the black press, in fact, may have eclipsed, Nelson says. And with the advent of new black media on the Internet, their impact may be diluted. But he insists that their mission and their legacy have not.
“In large part, many things that the black press was pushing for has not been realized and as long as you have a need for that, you will still have a need for the black press.”
