Abstract
The survival and growth of the African and Afro-Caribbean community’s own newspapers and periodicals (outside of their countries of origin and during the immediate aftermaths of the Great War) is inextricably linked to collective activism. This chapter examines the relationship between black publishing and the organisational attitudes of authorities. Evidence ranges from lobbying correspondence to the British government by African and Afro-Caribbean organisations themselves, through to mainstream newspaper comment, discussions within and between British government departments and reports from police security departments, tracking the activities and transnational movements of editor/activists.
The way that the relationship between ideology, journalism, activism, and publishing played out in practice is well illuminated in this chapter by the perambulations of Hercules and Taylor. There was a direct connection between the institutional and official environment within which black newspapers were able to publish, operate, survive, and/or flourish, and the struggles of their editors to communicate and disseminate ‘alternative’ journalistic voices to their international readers. Discontent fuelled writing, and newspaper publishing, grounded in social and political organisations, was the main beneficiary.
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Notes
- 1.
The black press in Britain has a venerable history that can be traced pre-1918 (Benjamin 1995, pp. 11–16). Black publications that existed (somewhat sporadically in many cases) before 1918 included the Pan-African Association’s Pan African, African Standard (for the West African Youth League), the African Journal of Commerce (which became the African Telegraph in 1914), and the African Times and Orient Review , as well as a news agency, the International African Service Bureau, that launched Africa and the World (later entitled the African Sentinel). These latter two publications were started in London and financed by the Sierra Leonean businessman and journalist John Eldred Taylor. As Chap. 3 demonstrates, during the Great War these newspapers remained loyal to Britain, but after the war, became more critical. Equally, Pan-Africanism’s international networks were well established by the end of the nineteenth century, although institutional contact took longer, with the first Pan-African Congress being hosted by London in 1900 (Gilroy 1993, p. 29).
- 2.
The National Archives (henceforth TNA): Colonial Office (CO) 318/349/41–44, 3rd July, 1919.
- 3.
Mr D.T. Aleifasakure Toummanah, secretary of the Ethiopian Hall in Liverpool reminded readers of the Liverpool Daily Post (11 June 1919) that during the war, when the Mauritania was due to sail, the white crew ‘failed to put in an appearance. She was manned by ‘niggers’. We ask for British justice, to be treated as true and loyal sons of Great Britain’. For this reason, he added, ‘the African merchants in the city decided to spend £10,000 to erect a memorial to the coloured people for the part they took in the war’.
- 4.
TNA: CO 318/349/87.
- 5.
TNA, CO 318/349/85.
- 6.
TNA: CO 318/352/14.
- 7.
TNA: CO 318/352/244.
- 8.
TNA: CO 318/352/979.
- 9.
Records list the following names (in alphabetic order here, but no order of priority and sometimes without first names): Daughetry, Farmer, William Ferris, John Karma, (Bishop) George Alexander McGuire, Francis Weber, H.W. Wilson, among others (UNIA: MG442 catalogue listing).
- 10.
The literature on Garvey is extensive. For relevance to this study, see Teeclucksingh (2016), Martin (1983, 1976). See pp. 378–379 of the latter for a list of Garvey’s published works. As an example of the range and scope of scholarship, see, inter alia, Rolinson, M.G. (1994) ‘The Universal Negro Improvement Association in Georgia: Southern Strongholds of Garveyism’, in Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865–1950, ed. J.C. Inscoe. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 202–224; Matthews, M.D. (1983) ‘Booker T. Washington and His Relationship to Garveyism: An Assessment’. The Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 103–111; Franklin, V.P. (1992), 2nd ed. Black Self-Determination. Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill Books.
- 11.
In fact, Tovalou, when speaking as a guest of Garvey’s UNIA in 1924, suggested that Paris should replace New York as the symbolic capital for black people’s activism (Les Continents, 1 October 1924).
- 12.
He later published an evening newspaper entitled the New Jamaican, as well as launching the Black Man in Jamaica during 1929, and subsequently in London.
- 13.
- 14.
For more on Harrison, see Perry, J.B. (2008) Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918. New York: Columbia University Press.
- 15.
The opposition of J. Edgar Hoover proved, in the longer term, to be more of a threat to Garvey than rivalry with W.E.B. DuBois. Finally, the Justice Department, animated by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, indicted Garvey for mail fraud. Garvey’s supporters contended that the prosecution was a politically motivated miscarriage of justice and said the trial was fraudulent. Garvey spent nearly three years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary after conviction (Rolinson, M.G. (1994) ‘The Universal Negro Improvement Association in Georgia: Southern Strongholds of Garveyism’, in Georgia in Black and White: Explorations in the Race Relations of a Southern State, 1865–1950, ed. J. C. Inscoe. Athens: University of Georgia Press, pp. 202–224). In 1927 President Calvin Coolidge commuted the five-year sentence and Garvey was deported to Jamaica. Garvey moved to London in 1935, dying there in 1940. He is buried in the National Heroes Park in Kingston, Jamaica.
- 16.
The African Progress Union was established in 1918 in London, by journalist/black newspaper editor Dusé Mohammed Ali, inter alia. The APU funded the defence counsel for the Liverpool trial of 15 black men following the racially motivated community violence.
- 17.
See African Telegraph 1/13 (July–August 1919), 269–71 ‘Inauguration dinner of the Society of African Peoples’.
- 18.
In his newspaper Negro World, Garvey denounced Diagne, the black American boxer Siki and also McKay as traitors for preferring white women (van Galan Last and Futselaar, p. 128).
- 19.
Diagne took Maran to court in Paris for slander, and won, although in the process Maran emerged as a hero (van Galan Last and Futselaar, pp. 118–120).
- 20.
W.E.B. DuBois (1903) The Souls of Black Folk. Essays and Sketches. Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co.
- 21.
The Crisis was subtitled on the masthead ‘A Record of the Darker Races’.
- 22.
Journalist and black activist leader F.E.M. Hercules was born in Venezuela in 1888, but grew up in Trinidad where his father was a civil servant. While he was still at school, he started the first ‘Young Men’s Coloured Association’ on the island and went on to take a B.A. degree at London University (Elkins 1972).
- 23.
Journalist and pan-Africanist, he was born in 1888 into a respectable Krio family in Sierra Leone, Eldred Taylor was the son of an assistant colonial chaplain and his grandfather had been active in the Church Missionary Society. Such English-speaking people ‘often took leading roles in West African commerce and culture, forging links with the British’. Green, J. (2019) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-94969 (Accessed 1 March 2019).
- 24.
TNA: CO 318/351, 4 August 1919.
- 25.
Founded in the City of London in 1735, the West India Committee is the oldest body representative of the Commonwealth. This venerable Caribbean institution was ‘at the heart of the British Caribbean’s war’ (Century News). In 1915 it established its own Contingent Committee to coordinate efforts to get men from the region to the front.
- 26.
West Africa (1917–2005) was a weekly news magazine that was published in London for over 80 years and closed in 2005, it was funded initially by two British shipping companies, and intended to stimulate discussion on the benefits of trade through the British Empire. See Whiteman, K (1993), ed., West Africa over 75 Years: Selections from the Raw Material of History, London: West Africa Publishing.
- 27.
TNA: CO/318/352/798.
- 28.
TNA: CO/318/352/90.
- 29.
TNA: CO/318/352/89.
- 30.
TNA: CO/318/352/107.
- 31.
Elkins (1972, p. 47).
- 32.
TNA: CO/3.18/352/107, 108.
- 33.
CO/318/352/107, 109.
- 34.
In 1918 about 60 NCOs of the BWIR met to form the Caribbean League, calling for equal rights, self-determination and closer union in the West Indies. See Smith, R. (2004) Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
- 35.
CO/318/352/107, 108.
- 36.
TNA: CO/318/352/637.
- 37.
TNA: CO/318/352/739, 740.
- 38.
The African Telegraph had carried a report in December 1918 of a public flogging of two naked women in Nigeria, sanctioned by Fitzpatrick, who sued Taylor. Although Taylor was able to draw attention during the court hearing to faults within the legal system in Nigeria, he lost the libel case in November 1919, and incurred such heavy financial losses that he was forced to close the newspaper in December. Previously he had made Hercules editor. See ed. Dabydeen, D., Gilmore, J. and Jones, C. (2007) Oxford Companion to Black British History, p. 18.
- 39.
TNA: CO 318/349/192,193.
- 40.
TNA: CO 318/349/114.
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Chapman, J.L. (2019). Organisational Outlooks and Barriers to Publishing. In: Early Black Media, 1918–1924. Palgrave Studies in the History of the Media. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69477-1_2
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