The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery's Early Life (2019)

“What a Man Sees in Life He Sees in the Newspaper.” The subtitle of the introduction to this book is sourced from a 1927 Pittsburgh Courier editorial by Cato Anderson, a teacher and civic leader from Baltimore. In the piece, Anderson urged editors of African American newspapers to take a more activist role when it came to race relations. Facing entrenched inequality even in the teeming cities of the industrial North (i.e., nominally outside the orbit of Jim Crow), black people were in need of a wide-reaching organ that could shore up support on their behalf. Given newspapers' ability to shape public opinion, Anderson argued that the black press had a duty to further the cause of racial uplift, not simply report on the news. He summed up his case with the aforementioned statement, connecting readers' sense of themselves as men with editors' advocacy of their civil rights.Anderson's editorial sets the stage for D'Weston Haywood's illuminating study of how the black press laid the groundwork for the modern African American freedom struggle. In particular, he explores how newspaper editors conceived advancement in gendered terms, such that the “quest to redeem black manhood” became synonymous with the “quest for racial justice during the twentieth-century” (10). This linkage held true for commercial, organizational, and underground papers alike. And even though there were notable differences in the political strategies they supported, newspaper editors agreed that racial advancement was best measured by the degree to which black men could “stand up and be ‘men’” (2). This ideology of self-possession was itself highly variable, capable of taking different forms across time. But “what remained constant,” Haywood argues, was the effort to “promote black men's access to the things to which [all] men were believed to be entitled as ‘men’” (8). Thus, the modern African American freedom struggle cannot be understood apart from the gender ideologies that informed its chief mobilizing medium.The general framing of this study may be off-putting to scholars wary of “representative men” versions of social and cultural history. For one, Haywood's core examples are male editors and their papers: Robert S. Abbott and John Sengstacke's Chicago Defender, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Crisis (though its status as a magazine is elided), Marcus Garvey's Negro World, Robert F. Williams's Crusader, and Malcolm X's Muhammad Speaks. Moreover, Haywood's characterization of each paper as the product of a single man's editorial vision tends to enforce a patriarchal reading of its daily operation and racial politics (Sengstacke was Abbott's nephew; he moved the Defender toward his vision after inheriting it). With the study set up in this way, it is perhaps inevitable that Haywood should conclude that black editors conflated uplifting the race with claiming masculine authority. After all, the editors only had to look at themselves for models of a dignified, self-sufficient manhood.Though not insignificant, these methodological concerns are outweighed by what Haywood's approach affords. Specifically, he shows how securing black men's place in society became a focal point for mobilization precisely because it resonated with ordinary readers. In an acknowledgment of how reception theory informs his interpretive method, Haywood writes, Readers brought their own life experiences and corresponding set of values, including gendered ideologies, to black newspapers. Yet, at the same time, reading black newspapers helped reinforce, refine, and/or expand their ideas, values, and subjectivities in what reader-response theorists have called a “transaction” of ideas with the text. Here, both the text and the reader worked together in shaping the reading experience. (17) Reception, in other words, allows Haywood to make the case that the “maleness” of civil rights discourse was a function of how readers related political movement to their daily lives. For black men, and even for many black women, manhood became a recognized shorthand for the stakes of what activists were fighting for. At the same time, reception allows Haywood to nuance his discussion of the papers themselves. Rather than propagate a static masculine ideal, the black press proved surprisingly malleable when it came to engaging readers' local circumstances.The book proceeds chronologically, tracking the arc of African American newspapers' “golden age,” from the turn of the twentieth-century to the waning days of the civil rights movement. Its eye toward reception permits Haywood to highlight public contestations over the construction of modern black male identity. Thus Let Us Make Men begins with Abbott's decision, in 1916, the year after the death of agrarian race leader Booker T. Washington, to commit the Defender to “an all-out crusade to bring black southerners to Chicago in particular, and the North in general” (33). Haywood contends that a key facet of the paper's pro-migration editorial line was relocating the promise of self-possessed manhood from the rural South to the urban North. To make his case, Abbott promoted a new and exciting way for readers to embody black masculinity: fashioning themselves through the “leisure, consumerism, and material consumption” that defined the modern metropolis (42). The campaign was a hit and constituted one of the major “pull” factors in the migration phenomenon. Ironically, though, this “New Negro” masculinity was at odds with how Abbott conducted his own life, which hewed to the restrained patriarchalism of Du Bois and Washington's generation. The contrast, Haywood suggests, only goes to show how much readers' desires combined with editorial influence to remake black male identity.The next two chapters outline the gradual development of a mainstream black press editorial policy. Although the Defender, in its effort to attract migrants to the North, had been willing to promote a more flexible embodiment of urban masculinity, the realization of that embodiment in a single charismatic leader was construed by Abbott as a threat. Haywood's analysis of Negro World, the official organ of Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), follows a pitched debate within the press about the “proper” means of racial uplift. A war of words between Du Bois and mainstream journalists, on one hand, and Garvey and UNIA reporters, on the other, involved libel suits, allegations of corruption, and countless instances of belittling, emasculating rhetoric. For Garvey's critics, the Jamaica-born race leader embodied “a perversion of New Negro masculinity—a flamboyant and dangerous machismo that would mislead the race” (75). His eventual downfall (via imprisonment for mail fraud) seemed to vindicate that judgment, but Haywood intuits Garvey's fate was equally the product of black editors' turning the tide of public opinion against him. Chapter 3, on the passing of the torch from Abbott to Sengstacke, isn't cogently related to the Garvey debacle. Yet in the details Haywood provides of Sengstacke's negotiation of labor politics during the 1930s, as well as his founding of the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association in 1940, one can clearly see that this was a period when the mainstream black press (of which the Defender was the standard bearer) consolidated its status as both mouthpiece and gatekeeper of civil rights discourse.Pivoting on that achievement, the book's final two chapters address the reemergence of tensions in the black press at midcentury. A decade of war mobilization and incremental progress on race relations had oriented African American newspapers toward the cause of integration. The liberal strategy of seeking inclusion in the American national project was ascendant. But as Haywood demonstrates, that strategy was rejected by dissident editors within the civil rights movement itself. He examines the career of Williams, president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the 1950s. Bucking public opinion, Williams emerged as a vocal proponent of armed self-defense against racial terror, insisting that the black man “must meet violence with violence, lynching with lynching” (qtd. 147). Such statements got Williams suspended from the NAACP, but that didn't stop him from producing a mimeographed paper, the Crusader, which promoted his views to a small but loyal band of followers. Haywood deftly shows how “the vision of masculinity that Williams embodied and promoted had become a political liability and a danger for movement leaders and activists” (179). As a result, the mainstream black press advocated the integrationist strategy of nonviolent resistance, popularized by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while dismissing radical alternatives like Williams's militant manhood.The final chapter of the book reveals what happened when the gap between mainstream editorial policy and subversive readerly interests became a chasm. With “upward of 217 radical black publications” appearing in the 1960s, and Muhammad Speaks, the organ of the separatist Nation of Islam (NOI), commanding a readership that “eclips[ed]” that of “many longtime major black publications” (184), the African American freedom struggle culminated in readers' divided loyalties and divergent conceptions of modern black male identity. The austere yet outspoken masculinity embodied by the paper's founder, NOI leader Malcolm X, gave black readers an alternative to Dr. King's accommodating yet principled masculinity. If reports that a 1962 issue of the paper sold a remarkable 400,000 copies are true (211), then Malcolm's appeal among ordinary African Americans cannot be overstated. The way Muhammad Speaks reflected the confrontational style of its charismatic editor spelled the end of integrationist discourse as a popular black readerly phenomenonUltimately, despite the limitations of a “representative men” approach to history, Haywood's focus on black manhood in print opens up the African American freedom struggle to more fine-grained analysis. Let Us Make Men shows how newspaper editors' conceptions of uplift and masculinity, race and resistance, changed depending on calculations of strategy, audience, and historical context. It further highlights the interplay between mainstream and dissident voices in the black press itself—a dynamic informed not only by gender ideology but also by the politics of class, social movement, and generational cohort. These complexities indicate the centrality of reception to Haywood's study. Whether a paper was commercial, organizational, or underground, its investment in redeeming black manhood was ultimately its primary means of forging a bond with black readers.