Circulating Jim Crow: the Saturday Evening Post and the war against Black modernity

Abstract

"For much of the first half of the twentieth century, The Saturday Evening Post was one of the most influential magazines in the United States read in millions of homes. In the popular imagination, the Post is probably best remembered for its cheery, often nostalgic Norman Rockwell covers portraying American culture as quaint, wholesome, and idyllic, but between those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, a liberal but also a lifelong advocate for white superiority and racial purity, The Saturday Evening Post, was filled with poetry, fiction, and essays that deployed paternalistic condescension and demeaning humor against Blacks. Writers in the Post used humor and Black dialect fiction to normalize White supremacy and to make the dehumanization of Blacks seem like nothing more than common sense and just good fun. In describing the creation and promulgation of the soft power of Jim Crow ideology in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, Adam McKible also discusses the efforts of Black writers to counteract these characterizations. Langston Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and other Harlem Renaissance writers criticized The Saturday Evening Post and fought back against commodified racial caricature popularized by Lorimer. In examining how Black writers responded to The Saturday Evening Post's assault on the idea of Black modernity, McKible provides a new understanding of the Harlem Renaissance and the fight against Jim Crow ideology"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents

George Horace Lorimer and rising Jim Crow -- Literary aspiration and intimate minstrelsy -- Irvin S. Cobb : making the new Negro old again -- Hugh Wiley, Edward Christopher Williams, and Black doughboys -- Octavus Roy Cohen, the Midnight Motion Picture Company, and the shadows of Jim Crow -- The end of the Lorimer era.