U.S. democracy owes much to fearless Black journalists like Ida B. Wells and Walter White. At a time when white newspaper leaders in the U.S. South helped plan and build the violent political, economic, and social systems of white supremacy that hardened into Jim Crow, Black journalists used their newspapers to document the fight for a multiracial, inclusive democracy.
Their work reminds us that the press has long been a powerful actor in struggles for democracy.
For instance, in the fall of 1919 a rumor spread through the white community of Elaine, Ark.: Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers were plotting an insurrection. According to whispers, Black sharecroppers were planning to murder the “best citizens” of the small Delta town and confiscate their land, plantations, and stores.
It had been a bumper cotton season and prices were high. Black men, it was said, intended to take the profits and the means of cotton production and sale for themselves. They were amassing arms. They had set the date. But white leaders thwarted their plans at the last second. This, at least, was the story the New York Times reported on its front page.
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But it was an entirely false report, the result of a disinformation campaign strategically crafted under Governor Charles Hillman Brough’s direction and spread nationwide by powerful newspapers. This fake news gave white authorities the pretense to quash Black organizing and control Black labor. White mobs also used the rumors to justify hunting Black citizens in the area for days, murdering men, women, and children and pillaging and burning their property.
The misleading story from the The New York Times story echoed local reporting in Little Rock’s competing newspapers of record, the Arkansas Gazette and the Arkansas Democrat, whose correspondents were on the scene in Elaine and Phillips County. These reporters at the Gazette and the Democrat witnessed first-hand how white…
