in Lumbee Indian Newspapers 

                                                             Lorraine Ahearn

                                                            University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill                          

 Abstract: The Lumbee Tribe of Robeson County, NC, is a minority among minorities: It is the ninth largest Indian tribe in the US, but lacks full federal recognition, reservation land and a language of its own. This paper integrates communication theory and memory studies in an incorporative approach to journalism texts, examining how an ethnic community newspaper used public memory in the form of constitutive rhetoric and legible symbolism to compose a counter-narrative of contested history. The findings challenge notions of how racial identity is constructed, and demonstrate the role alternative media play in this process. 

 The Conflict over Jim Crow Censorship of Movie Scenes

 in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1937-38

                                             Lorraine Ahearn

                                                                                       University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Abstract: In the Jim Crow South on December 7, 1937, an association of white North and South Carolina movie theater exhibitors met for a convention in Pinehurst, N.C., and made an announcement: They resolved that they would henceforth censor Hollywood movie scenes that violated racial taboos by showing black performers on an equal social footing with whites. The resolution, reported as front-page news in the white-owned Greensboro Daily News, prompted female students from a historically black private campus, Bennett College, to call for a community boycott of white downtown theaters in Greensboro to protest racial stereotypes in movies. Through the prism of a little-known community controversy, this paper examines conflicting pressures mass media in the 1930s placed on segregation and the construction of race, resulting dissonance between the white and black press and implications in a city that was a civil rights flashpoint.

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Ahearn was a longtime state political reporter in North Carolina for the News & Record, was four times selected the state’s top metro columnist among large dailies and worked as a radio commentator on the NPR affiliate at Wake Forest University.

She is a recipient of the UNC Impact Award for her work with the Digital Innovation Lab, the Joseph L. Morrison Award for Excellence in Journalism History, the national Casey Medal for Distinguished Commentary on Children and Families, the Associated Press Mark Twain Award for Investigative Reporting and the Gavel Award from the Maryland Bar Association for her coverage of the judicial system.

A native of New York, she has taught writing on the faculty at Guilford College and taught journalism at UNC-Greensboro, where she is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate with degrees in English, French and Liberal Studies. In 2009, she founded Cold Type Press publishing company in Greensboro, NC, where she lives with her husband and two children.