In the Eye of the Beholder: Definitions of Beauty in Popular Black Magazines

Abstract

Mass communication has long functioned as a forceful and effectual device in the African American quest for dominion over themselves, their ideas, and their future existence in the United States. Particularly, blacks associated with the media as writers and journalists of all sorts worked to further these ideals and triggered a great deal of progress in this very respect. David Walker called for the immediate end of slavery and the use of necessary violence in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Frederick Douglass openly challenged racist federal and local laws and, as a survivor, exposed the ugly nature of involuntary drudgery in his North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Ida B. Wells fiercely called attention to the common horrors of lynching throughout the United States and even suggested in her Memphis Free Speech and other papers for which she wrote that white women were the instigators in romantic liaisons with black men rather than the victims of such, as was often used erroneously as justification for the brutal murders of countless men of color throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Surely these and other publications profoundly and positively affected the cause of black liberation.