90 Second Narratives
Season 6: “Books”
Episode 6: “African American Periodicals and Print History”
Sky Michael Johnston:
Hello and welcome to 90 Second Narratives. I’m your host, Sky Michael Johnston, and today our storyteller is Dr. Brenna Wynn Greer, an Associate Professor of History at Wellesley College. Listen now as she shares her story, “African American Periodicals and Print History.”
Brenna Wynn Greer:
In 1942, John H. Johnson launched Negro Digest, which quickly became a bestselling periodical among African Americans AND building off its success, Johnson launched the black photo-magazine EBONY in 1945 and a slew of other titles subsequently. My work examines how black mediamakers like Johnson produced print media that popularized images of black citizenship useful to contemporary civil rights campaigns.
When doing research, I quickly realized that microfilmed and digitized replications of these mid-twentieth century black magazines were inadequate for understanding how people produced and experienced them. I needed to get my hands on the actual magazines. Because Johnson’s publications as material objects proved necessary to my recognizing the business decisions – among other things – behind his success as a publisher of commercial black magazines, when all those before him had failed. For example, formulating EBONY magazine, Johnson copied LIFE magazine in practically every way, but when comparing the magazines physically it becomes clear that he made his magazine a ¼ inch smaller in length and height, which made it perceptibly the same as the wildly popular white magazine, but less expensive to produce.
People tend to think of “rare books” as manuscripts printed centuries ago and housed in museums or special collections or locked away in private collections. By these standards, post-World War II commercial black magazines appear too modern and too plentiful to qualify and consumers and libraries alike have been jettisoning them for decades. But, as I learned in my research, as print objects, the actual magazines are essential to historians’ ability to reconstruct histories of Black culture, capitalism, and citizenship, not to mention histories of 20th century printing and publishing. It’s imperative, then, that scholars, archivists, and collectors recognize these magazines as the antiquities that they are – no less worthy of preservation and serious study than those books conventionally considered “rare.”
Sky Michael Johnston:
To learn more about this story, read Dr. Greer’s award-winning book, Represented: The Black Imagemakers Who Reimagined African American Citizenship. It was published in 2019 by the University of Pennsylvania Press, and is coming out in paperback later this year.
Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to 90 Second Narratives for your weekly, “little story with BIG historical significance.”