in Lumbee Indian Newspapers 

                                                             Lorraine Ahearn

                                                            University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill                          

 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. 

Keywords: Constitutive rhetoric, Native American newspapers, counter-narrative, public memory, resistance discourse, alternative media, Lumbee tribal identity.

Introduction

On January 3, 1977, as part of an ongoing adopt-a-child series titled “A Child Is Waiting,” the Detroit News bluntly summed up the problem of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Under the headline, “Indian Boy, 10, Needs Catching Up” with an accompanying photograph, reporter Ruth Carlton described the ethnic background of a transplanted Indian boy, “Tom,” who was in need of a home.

Lumbee Indians exist in one small area of the South. They are not a tribe and

do not have a language. Seemingly a mixture of black, white and Indian, they are

so intermarried that no one can define the racial mix.[1]

The story, and a companion piece on the TV station the Detroit News owned, stirred a brief outcry in the transplanted Lumbee community in Michigan. However, in Pembroke, N.C., cultural center to the tribe which claims more than 40,000 members, the ninth largest US tribe and most populous east of the Mississippi, reaction to the Detroit News piece was more sustained. After the story and photo were reprinted in the weekly community newspaper Carolina Indian Voice with an editor’s note and deconstruction of the article by founding editor Bruce Barton, subscribers to the Voice in subsequent weeks wrote in with their own critiques of Carlton’s summary of Lumbee identity. The letter writers cited Lumbee history, arguments as to why the tribe deserved but had not been granted federal recognition and explanations of why eastern Indians differed from western Plains Indians in language, culture and lack of reservation land status.

In the pages of the Carolina Indian Voice, by then a 6,000-circulation independently owned newspaper beginning its fifth year of publication out of a cinderblock building that had formerly housed a chicken hatchery, this was no isolated instance, but the weekly staple. The newspaper, the longest-running independent Indian newspaper in the state until it closed in 2004,[2] had become a discourse on all things Indian, and more specifically, all things Lumbee. Doing regular battle with the white political power structure in tri-racial Robeson County, N.C., and the century-old white-run newspaper of record, The Robesonian, the Pembroke-based Voice had in the process woven a counter-narrative of the contested Lumbee story, present and past, during a particularly turbulent, activist decade in Native American history nationwide.

The Robeson County experience of the Lumbee in some respects ran parallel and was influenced by the “Red Power” rhetoric of the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the Western Plains.[3] But even among Native Americans, the Lumbee, lacking traditional language and culture, treaties or federal status, found themselves a minority among minorities.[4] Challenged and politically abandoned by such reservation tribes as the Eastern Band of the Cherokee in North Carolina, the Lumbee were a people without an official past, their history a disputed chapter within the contested volume that is the expansionist ideology of manifest destiny.

This study therefore seeks to examine how one ethnic newspaper, during a period of political upheaval, attempted to claim the rights to this story and use collective memory  to constitute group identity. Beyond the performative function of memory in instilling community pride, the question is how the Voice used collective memory to constitute Lumbee identity and to interpret the present through the lens of the past. This paper argues that the Voice, by repetitively juxtaposing contemporary perceived injustices suffered by the Lumbee with past tales of Lumbee heroism in the face of injustice and violent subjugation a century earlier, collapsed time  into a continuous past as a means of uniting Lumbee people in a  common struggle against myth and invisibility. In attempting to shape a collective past into public memory that was a part of everyday reality, the Voice sought not only to constitute a group with a shared heritage of suffering, but a group now walking together in its ancestors’ footsteps in a new field of action. A new cast of dominant characters with new means of power was, in effect, portrayed as revisiting old grievances, and old heroics and tribal solidarity were, in turn, being invoked, this time for the purpose of political mobilization.

Theoretical framework and concepts defined

Native American journalism, which dates back 181 years to the Cherokee Phoenix,[5]  receives scant mention in either discussions of Native history or journalism history.[6]  Although there has been no scholarship devoted specifically to Lumbee journalism, and only an occasional feature article in the popular press,[7] key works lay contextual groundwork for understanding, in general, the tension between how Native American journalists have tended to constitute group identity rhetorically and how the mainstream white US press has constructed Native Americans from the media’s seventeenth-century inception forward. As John Coward observes in The Newspaper Indian: Native American Identity in the Press, this die was cast before the ink dried on the first newspaper edition to go to press in colonial America. In 1690, Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, contained references illustrating two white conceptions of the Other, the first as bloodthirsty savage, the second as noble exotic: In one paragraph, Harris speculated that two missing colonists’ children had fallen into the hands of Indians;  in another, he wrote approvingly of Indians observing Thanksgiving.[8] Newspapers inaccurately reported the battle of Little Big Horn as an Indian “massacre” rather than an unprovoked attack by Custer, and did not quote a surviving witness account to the contrary, despite its availability at press time.[9] As Mary Stuckey and John Murphy note, the language of colonialism is often the pretext for violence,[10] which many times followed in the case of Native Americans[11] or serves as a justification for policies such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Journalism historians James Murphy and Sharon Murphy describe mainstream media coverage of American Indians as a pattern of “neglect and stereotype,”[12] a construct which Patty Loew and Kelly Mella argue is perpetuated in, for example, a present-day preoccupation with gambling and casino coverage of reservation tribes since the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act.[13] Echoing this complaint of framing[14] by news media and the employment of hegemonic racial ideology by outsiders,[15] Joe Allen, publisher of The Circle, a Native American newspaper in Minneapolis, described the four tropes of Indian stories in mainstream white media as “Indians on the Warpath,” “Pretty Pow-Wow Pictures,” “Reservation Rags to Riches” and “The Little Indian Who Could.” [16]

On the theoretical level, what drives the mainstream media’s impulse alternately to categorize or assimilate Native Americans by imposing the values of the dominant culture is the exercise of authority. James Carey attributes this communicative power not to the transmission of new information, but to the portrayal and affirmation of a worldview.[17] As Carey argues in “The Problem of Journalism History,” journalism affords a view of changes over time in how people perceive reality, providing a text construed from shared cultural meanings and symbols between writer and audience.[18] In one respect, the mediated subjugation of Native Americans by the mainstream press can be viewed as one thread in a larger narrative weave that relegated women and African-Americans to the margins[19] of US culture, and more globally, has continued to assign subordinate social status to ethnic minorities such as Muslims in Sweden,[20] for example, or Montagnards in Vietnam.[21]

Yet to locate and decode the specific symbolism that comprises the Native American narrative promulgated by the white mainstream media in America, and the emergent counter-narrative constructed by the Native American press, it is necessary to define how it resembles and how it differs from other patterns of media stereotyping, and resultant diaspora and identity crisis. As political journalist Walter Lippmann’s first use of the term metaphorically suggests, “stereotypes” were a media invention.[22] In the “hot type” era, stereotypes, literally, were the molds into which printers poured molten lead, which cooled into impressions on a plate, were attached to the press, and formed numerous impressions from a single original. Lippmann defined stereotypes as the cognitive equivalent: shortcuts used to categorize groups, rather than see individuals “freshly and in detail.” [23] This drew on educational theorist John Dewey’s cognitive analogy of how outsiders perceive other groups as monolithic, using the example of a flock of sheep. To a stranger, the sheep all look the same, but the shepherd familiar with the flock recognizes individual differences distinguishing the sheep.^[24] Lippmann’s concept of media stereotypes invokes the Freudian notion of the pseudo-environment: That is, what we accept as reality is, in fact, a repertoire of mental pictures we carry constructed from what others report to us. ^[25] On an institutional basis, the mainstream media tend to normalize and legitimize “preferred” social values, and in this way, construct reality.[26] As these dominant values are given preference, minorities and disenfranchised groups become marginalized, and the mainstream media become ideological by default.[27]

Yet in construction of counter-narrative, mass media can likewise connect individuals with pasts they have not directly experienced and form connections to larger pasts using constitutive rhetoric.[28] The forging of group identity is accomplished when masses of people begin to ratify the new myth being communicated, and begin acting as “a people”[29] first through recollection, then through commemoration[30] via what  Pierre Nora, in his historiography of French memory, termed “le lieu de memoire,” something, whether material or not, which “by dint of human will or the work or time, has become symbolic of memorial heritage.”[31] Although there is much semantic variation in the use of the term public memory, this paper approaches “public” and “collective” memory, as distinguished from history, as characterized by the common attributes delineated by Dickinson, Blair and Ott. Apart from public memory taking place in a group, it 1) is activated by current concerns; 2) narrates shared identities/communities; 3) is animated by affect; 4) is partial, partisan and often contested; 5) relies on material or symbolic supports; and 6) has a history.[32] The effective power of constitutive rhetoric, Maurice Charland argues, occurs when a) individuals are positioned as members of a group in a historical narrative; b) they are capable of acting freely; c) they can reconstitute the material world to maintain consistency with the historical narrative.[33] To marginalized people, Randall Lake writes, the past is relevant to the present in the hope of ultimate vindication, and functions as an ongoing conflict that fulfills ancient prophecies.[34] The rhetorical trick is that the audience being constituted has, in effect, existed all along. In the case of the Carolina Indian Voice, the newspaper used collective memory to create a mise-en-scene, turning contemporary politics into a perpetual historical reenactment, a passion play that merged past and present, alpha and omega.         

            Situating Lumbee Media

In the scholarship of discourse, as in the field of journalism history, the study of what Kent Ono and John Sloop term “vernacular communities,” those cultures that have been historically oppressed and neglected,[35] is notable by its absence. This is not to suggest that deconstructing the texts of the powerful does not provide compelling critique, for example, Kenneth Burke’s analysis of Hitler’s rhetoric on the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto[36] or Dickinson, Ott and Aoki’s analysis of collective memory and myth at the Buffalo Bill Museum.[37]  Yet these are only one half of the picture of how power is exercised through mediated discourse, because there is no accompanying reflection of how contested memory is in turn re-appropriated as counter-hegemonic narrative. As Jason Edward Black for instance demonstrates, the notion of “the vanishing Indian,” the idea that Native Americans simply “disappeared” without a discourse of resistance is a misconception: A study of five tribes in the nineteenth century revealed a history of activism and agency in challenging white domination.[38] The example of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina adds to understanding of such a discourse of resistance because the contested memory of the Lumbee goes to the very core of the tribe’s Indian identity. As Lumbee historian Adolph Dial writes, Lumbee “Indianness” flows from a refusal to accept narrow definitions of Native American identity, but instead a shared sense of place and worldview forged “from their unique past.”[39]

Who, the question remains, are the Lumbee, traditionally agrarian, outwardly assimilated Indians who speak an Elizabethan-inflected English, and how did they come to inhabit Robeson County, a vast, rough, dismal patch of North Carolina’s Great Swamp approaching the South Carolina border? The answer, with as many bends as the Lumber (“black”) River from which the tribe derives its name, is an enigma. One line of thought, now a popular oral tradition, is that Lumbee descend from the Tuscarora, and trace their origins to Roanoke’s Lost Colony, a scenario partly supported by linguistic comparisons and the tracing of deeds and land grants. Other theories link the Lumbee to Cheraw, the result of the 1711 Tuscarora War to the north, or propose that Lumbee were Cherokee who escaped federal removal to the west and took refuge in the swamps. Other studies cite documentary and anthropological field evidence connecting the Lumbee to what is now Robeson County as early as the 1700s, when the Indians already spoke English.[40]

The point here is not to weigh the merits of specific theories but rather to consider what this inconclusiveness of historical documentation, combined with local, state and federal policy, has wrought on the Lumbee as a tribe. For three centuries, the Lumbee have suffered a crisis of identity that has had legal, economic, political, social, cultural and psychological ramifications. Classified variously by the white hegemonic culture as “free negroes,” “free persons of color,” “free whites,”  “poor whites” and “mulattoes,” the Lumbee and others deemed to be of “mixed blood” after 1835 were severely restricted by a series of increasingly rigid laws termed the “Free Negro Code,” revoking their rights to vote, possess weapons, be sold alcohol, or serve on juries or in local militias.[41]

In twentieth-century Robeson County, an economically depressed, tri-racial county, [42] two key legacies of this disenfranchisement of the Lumbee have been educational and political. The Indians built a “normal school” in 1889, but it was 1924 before the first seven high school degrees were awarded, and 1940 before the school became a four-year college and graduated its first class. Prior to the dismantling of Jim Crow, Robeson County and the city of Lumberton had, between them, a total of five, and at times, six  separate school systems in order to keep the races apart. In Pembroke, the cultural capital and center of life for Indians, tradition was for the governor to appoint town officials. Until the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, there had been only two Lumbees elected, a county commissioner and a judge who held the equivalent of a magistrate’s seat. Interests of Lumbee and African-Americans alike were not represented.

Such were the pent-up aspirations for the Lumbee as the 1970s began and the Carolina Indian Voice weekly newspaper appeared on the scene. Just as the Civil Rights Movement awakened a shared sense of traditional African heritage and collective memory among African-Americans, who had been left out of white history books and depicted by mainstream mass media in images of shuffling, childish subservience, a parallel movement took place for Native Americans. Portrayed in white media as the  savage foil against which western conquest triumphed. Native Americans sought to take control of their own political destiny and retake historical ground. Sometimes, this was physically the case: In 1973, members of AIM protesting conditions at Pine Ridge Reservation held federal marshals at bay in a three-month siege at Wounded Knee. In part because of the symbolism of the setting, a historic Indian massacre, the story gained national play and considerable support for AIM.

In Robeson County, the Lumbee had similar aspirations, but lacked such symbolism to bind them together. Nevertheless, as Karen Blu observed in The Lumbee Problem, the fact that the Lumbee were able to assert their ethnicity socially and legally, despite the loss of language and outward “Indian” customs challenges sociological and anthropological assumptions about how people maintain group identity. With racial differences difficult to discern, the importance of history (and one could argue, the expropriation of history that is contested, in the form of collective memory) becomes key as an ethnic identifier. As Blu writes, “History is not a frill, it is at the heart of a symbolic structure of ethnicity in the United States.” [43]

What has not been considered, thus far, has been the role of rhetoric and collective memory, particularly via Lumbee mass media texts, in constituting this tribal identity. As of the 1970s when the Voice debuted, followed by Locklear’s Native Visions, in 2011 the only Lumbee publication still in print, it had been only a century since the Lumbee had been declared “free persons of color” in North Carolina, and later “free negroes.”

Thus, the study of this chapter in Lumbee media affords a view of a tri-racial community during two pivotal periods in the South, as well as unrecorded media history. More universally, in Lumbee journalism we find clues as to how alternative media use collective memory, legible symbolism and a shared standpoint of injustice to constitute identity. This analysis, then, seeks to integrate theory from the history of journalism, communication studies and memory work.

             Methodology

This qualitative study will consist primarily of a close reading of primary sources, specifically the archives of the Carolina Indian Voice, supported by background from in-depth interviews with founding editor Bruce Barton, sister and associate editor Conee Barton Brayboy and Native Visions publisher James Locklear.

Because the Voice published for 32 years over a changing span of issues, the focus will primarily be on the years 1975-77, seeking a representative but in-depth sample, rather than picking and choosing disconnected articles from an extended time span that “fit” the premise. Although comparing and contrasting material from before and after this period will serve to test the merits and flaws of the argument, focusing the initial sample in this fashion may provide the following advantages:

• An accurate reflection, from the perspective of the subscriber’s experience, of how the newspaper followed issues in the news week to week;
• A closer analysis within the universe of a given time frame of the role of the newspaper;
• A deeper sense of the cumulative use of historic symbolism in a concentrated time span, the effect of repetition, and of articles played in combination.

The years 1975-77 are appropriate because, as distinguished from previous Lumbee publications, the Voice was able to survive economically into a fifth year, and also withstood an IRS audit. In the meantime, the newspaper in this period launched a subscription campaign using the serialized story of Reconstruction-era Lumbee hero Henry Berry Lowry, took on a relatively ambitious reporting projects on segregation and on education and agitated, at least with the appearance of success, on a number of local issues: “double voting” on the part of white city school board members in county school board votes; Lumbee representation on the county commission and school board (after the defeat of double-voting);[44] the firing of a white school board attorney; the hiring of the first Lumbee school superintendent; the opening of the first Lumbee-run tobacco warehouse; a dispute over a white bank’s attempt to compete with a new Lumbee-owned bank; the symbolic debate over saving the “Old Main” building that was the original structure at UNC-Pembroke; promotion of Strike at the Wind!, a historical drama about the life of Henry Berry Lowry; an ongoing furor over alleged police brutality against a Lumbee man by two state patrolmen.

In 1980, Bruce Barton learned that he had not been invited to join the “recently organized Coastal Carolinas Society of Professional Journalists” based in Lumberton. He editorialized that he could not speak well of an organization that would exclude him.

“But it will have little meaning without my participation,” Barton wrote in the Voice.  “I AM THE FIRST AMENDMENT!”[45]

The constituting of a “voice” for the Lumbee assumed a body politic to follow.

Newspaper as ‘Manifesto’: Heroes, History and Symbolism

                  For the Lumbee in Robeson County, the major source of local news in the 1970s was the white-owned daily newspaper in Lumberton, the Robesonian, owned by the same company which published the weekly Red Springs Citizen and Robeson Journal. Dissatisfied with coverage of the Native Americans, which appeared to focus on crime allegedly perpetrated by Indians but did not include social, business, school or sports accomplishments,[46] Lumbees made sporadic attempts to start their own newspapers in the first half of the twentieth century, but none of these efforts lasted to the five-year mark.[47] This changed in 1973, when a 31-year-old ex-convict and recovering alcoholic borrowed $500, hired his sister, brother and father, converted a squat cinder block building into a newsroom and put a sign in the window that read, “Yes, We’re OPEN.”

On October 7, 1976, one month before an interim municipal election for the Lumbee, Bruce Barton, founding editor of the weekly Carolina Indian Voice, used his weekly page 2 column, “As I See It,” to sound off. Under the headline, “An Indian Manifesto,” Barton delivered a long, blistering, call to Lumbee voters, reminding them of white “massacres” and “betrayals,” and rallying them to turn out: “We want our share of the dollar. We want our share of everything!”[48] In case readers missed it, Barton returned a week later with a column titled, “An Editorial Viewpoint: Pembroke Vs. Lumberton,” which described the political turmoil in the county and what Barton  termed “INDIAN POWER” in confronting the white establishment. This time, the message was brief, ending with the endorsement: “We fully intend to VOTE INDIAN. We fully intend to VOTE FOR EVERY LOCKLEAR ON THE BALLOT.”[49] To the extent that he had gained approximately 6,000 subscribers at that time, a 25 percent penetration rate, it is clear that Barton, the son of a Lumbee intellectual who had briefly run a newspaper in Pembroke in the 1940s, had constituted his audience as those Lumbee who chose to identify as members of the tribe, both as readers and advertisers, many of whom were Lumbee business owners and operators. What the following interpretation seeks to show is that the Voice attempted to accomplish this objective with constitutive rhetoric in three basic threads of contested history, shared standpoint and symbolism.

“It’s not even past”    

In the pages of the Voice, by 1975 an eight-page broadsheet that was published every Thursday in Pembroke (its life span, from 1973 to 2004 made it the longest-running independent Indian newspaper in North Carolina, and one of the longest-running in the country) the signature theme was the story of Henry Berry Lowry, the Lumbee folk hero. Lowry was a Reconstruction-era patriarch who over a period of ten years led a band of men to extract revenge for the killing of his father and brother. He later disappeared in an incident shrouded in mystery, much like the Lumbee story itself. Of key significance here is the oral tradition that grew up around the Lowry legend, and the way the Voice promoted it. Beginning in 1974, Barton’s brother, Garry Barton, began serializing the Lowry story weekly in the Voice.  The series, “The Life and Times of Henry Berry Lowry,” told the tale in short, dramatic segments which ended in cliff-hangers foreshadowing the next segment (“Next week: More crimes and depredations charged to the Lowry gang.”)[50] At times, transcripts of court testimony from Lowry’s trial, for instance recounting the execution of Lowry’s father “in cold blood,” would carry eerie referents from the week’s news. A story dominating coverage in the Voice in 1977, for example, was the severe beating of an Indian motorist pulled over for DWI, in an incident witnessed by the town manager of Pembroke, who swore out a complaint. [51]

The Lowry series, which lasted four years and became an omnipresent standing feature, was promoted in full-page ads, and. importantly, invited readers to contact Barton with “tidbits concerning Lowry.”[52] In introducing the series, Bruce Barton recalled his youthful reverence for Lowry: “We (Indian youth in Robeson) always put him in the best possible light. We talked about his badness….The height of our ambition was to be as bad as Henry Berry Lowry.” Barton, speaking now as a college-educated newspaper columnist who is writing a book of his own on Lowry, addresses the adult Indian reader of his column:

“I see him as a man who felt things deeply. A man of honor. A man who would knock a noggin’ if he had to… Henry Berry Lowry deserves our adulation, our worshipful stare. Long live Henry Berry Lowry, the best hero a people ever had.” [53]

The use of Lowry here is constitutive in the sense that it unites the Lumbee audience around a common hero, and also encourages a valorizing of the past, asking Lumbee to cast Lowry in “the best possible light.” In spite of a lack of documentation, or perhaps enabled by such a dearth of hard information, Lumbees together are being asked to construct a heroic past that will  serve such narrative needs as honor, bravery, strength and survival.

Underlining this taking-back of the story of Lowry from white history books, in which the Lumbee was cast as an “outlaw,” Barton in 1977 wrote about a local doctor, and great-nephew of Lowry, who had written a biography of the Lumbee hero after having “lived with the legend all his life:”

He has been researching and writing the book for fifty years. I know his book on Henry Berry Lowry will be factual and sympathetic. I am tired of reading what the wild-eyed anthropologists and thesis writers have said.[54]

At the same time that the Bartons were promoting their own Lowry series, they also used the Voice to endorse the outdoor drama Strike at the Wind! which would bring the Lumbee hero’s story to life. Beginning in 1975, the newspaper urged readers to sign pledge cards to help raise money for the project, but put one condition on its support: that an Indian play the role of Henry Berry Lowry: “Andy Griffith is not suited for the role of Henry Berry Lowry, an Indian’s Indian. A real Indian must play the role of Henry Berry Lowry.”[55] Barton’s reference to Andy Griffith, who as a young actor played Sir Walter Raleigh in the outdoor drama The Lost Colony in Manteo, N.C., is partly sarcastic, but as the repetition of his point suggests, is also serious in intent. The purpose is to constitute an exclusive audience, the “real Indians,” revealing an awareness of how mass media in the past had appropriated the Native American, both in construction of identity and in the casting of non-Indian actors in “ethnic” roles. If this were to be a reenactment, a walking in Lowry’s footsteps, it would be a walk for Lowry’s descendants who had earned the right to walk this path. No imposters or pretenders would be welcome.

The hijacking of Indian identity in Hollywood or on stage was not the only concern about protecting native culture. There had long been non-Indians who were at best “hobbyists” appropriating selected New Age elements of native culture such as sweat lodges or pow-wows, or at worst, con-artists attempting to cash in. In 1977, Barton ran a half-page article warning his readers that a white German-American named Chief Thunderbird Webber and his wife, Princess Sunflower Morningstar, were fraudulently collecting tribal “registration fees” on behalf of the “United Lumbee Nation of N.C. and America Inc.”[56]

The production of Strike at the Wind! gave Pembroke a living, breathing manifestation of memory the community could produce locally and call its own. Carnell Locklear, a well-liked Lumbee actor who played the colorful Boss Strong, opened a café in Pembroke that advertised and was also featured editorially in the Voice as “Boss Strong’s.” In a further blurring of the subjunctive performance and the continuous past, Locklear the same year challenged an unpopular white school board member for her seat. In a front-page feature on another actor who played Lowy, Melton Lowry (yet another descendant) in the second season of Strike, the actor recalled his grandfather living in a cabin that once belonged to the Lowry gang, and the actor as a child would find coins beneath the house that the outlaws had dropped while counting their loot. Meanwhile, a standalone photo featured yet another supposed descendant of Lowry holding a Civil War-era revolver he claimed once belonged to Lowry, which “still fires.” Like the expectation of eating at “Boss Strong’s,” the authenticity of the anecdotes mattered little; what connected them was the sense that the past was taking up physical space in the present via collective memory. Barton’s father, Lew Barton, a former newspaperman blinded in a car accident, wrote this about the Lumbee past in a 1977 Voice column.

Robeson’s history is steeped in pathos and mystery. But above all, it is the story of ourselves. Here people live and love, struggle and die. It is the collective story of their triumphs and their failures, of their striving and accomplishing, of their hopes, fears, dreams and aspirations. But these are not people a thousand miles away. It is a story of you and your neighbor down the street.[57]

But as the Voice began to invoke that physical presence, it would be on the basis of something more substantial than nostalgia, tourism, an educational appeal to historic preservation of local lore, or even pride in the community and the tribe. Bruce Barton’s appeal was political and ideological. He was reaching toward a constitution of core identity. He was preaching rebellion.

Robeson County is lopsided, off base, afraid of her shadow, shamed by her past.

The winds of Civil War madness still sweeps through her ranks. And her nights

are pitch black, eerie, unsettling. Everyone is on edge, paranoid, schizophrenic,

looney-mad. The days of reckoning are here – right now! The spirit of Henry

Berry Lowry moves in the land. [58]

The “Luck” of the Lumbees

One of the most oft-evoked themes in the pages of the Voice is the historic suffering that binds the Lumbee in a shared identity, and this is echoed back by the readers. For example, one letter writer in early 1977 argued that “one of the reasons Indians of Robeson County are so tough and resilient is because they have had hard times. Hard times can either make you stronger or destroy you.”[59] Another letter writer cited a litany of injustice, broken treaties and suffering at the hands of whites, and expressed wonder at “those who cannot understand” the Wounded Knee occupation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs Building takeover and several other events that were taking place on the national pan-Indian stage.[60] Making the case for the self-sufficiency that comes from hardship, another letter writer identified as a Pembroke elder who has lived among the Navajo in Utah summons tribal members under the headline “Lucky Lumbees,” arguing that the tribe is fortunate not to have been “forced onto a reservation” and to have “had your freedom from government rules.”[61]

During this period, Barton used a satirical persona, “Reasonable Locklear” in the convention of Ben Franklin’s “Silence Dogwood,” to ridicule white society, or Indians with whom he disagreed. An example concerns a lengthy editorial written by the wife of the Robesonian editor criticizing a Native American play at UNC-Pembroke for seeming to suggest that white people should feel guilty about the sins of the past: The editorial writer argued that the contemporary white community in truth bore no responsibility.[62] In a lengthy “alternative” view, Barton disputed that argument, citing, for example the fact that Indians had not invited segregated facilities and educational discrimination upon themselves in the twentieth century.[63] Barton then deferred to “Reasonable,” who had earlier reminded readers that the sins of the “past” were not long past, but were in some ways, still manifested. He humorously recalled a kind of literacy test for using the bathroom, because there were three sets of public accommodations under Jim Crow – white, red and black. “God help the one that went in the wrong bathroom. Ignorance weren’t no defense back then.”[64] For a self-deprecating, country bumpkin feigning illiteracy, “Reasonable” betrays an almost Faulknerian allusion: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”[65]

It was also during this timeframe that the Lakota (at the time, Standing Rock Sioux) author and native activist, Vine DeLoria Jr., visited Pembroke and received front-page coverage. His topic was the problem of Indian identity, which he defined as a white problem because “Indians did not write their own histories and learn about themselves so that history and culture could be presented to the rest of the world.” [66]

It could have been an editorial guideline of Voice: Between 1975-77, every edition contained at least two articles devoted to Lumbee history, particularly oral tradition. Not that the Voice was any less a newspaper for its focus on heritage and the past; in Lumbee media, the cultural referents simply run parallel (or counter) to the white narratives found in mainstream media.[67] In between the Voice’s crusade seeking the firing of the white school board attorney or to end the practice of “double-voting” by Lumberton whites which artificially outnumbered non-Lumberton black and Indian voters,[68] Barton filled his paper with the typical news that sustained a smalltown weekly: homecomings and festivals, senior citizen birthdays, small business boosterism, Girl Scout troop news, high school sports, births and deaths. Woven throughout, however, were constant features, standalone photographs and community announcements commemorating Lumbee history and memory: “Storytelling a Popular Feature at LRDA  Lumbee Longhouse Learning Center Kindergarten;”[69] Tellingly, the release of the first major Lumbee-written history, by Dr. Adolph Dial,  received a front-page, above-the-fold  headline: “The Only Land I Know off press,” and not due to a slow news day. The story appeared between hard-news items on a federal double-voting appeal hearing in Richmond and a story on an Indian rights hearing and a local speech by a jurist in the Wounded Knee trials,[70] a story also covered in the next week’s paper. Also inside the January 16 edition, a standalone photograph showed Dr. James N. Lowery laying a wreath at a grave, as his four children stood with their heads bowed: The headline reads, “Great grandson of Henry Berry Lowry places wreath on father’s grave,” and the caption identified Lowry as great-grandson of “the great Indian warrior for Indian justice from 1864 to 1874.”[71] The past, in a real sense, was “news,” and reversing Winston Churchill’s epigram, history was no longer written by the “victors.”

Or perhaps the field of engagement, and the implements of war, had simply changed. Now that Barton had a printing press, and Dial a publisher, was it possible that the victors and the vanquished might trade places?

Constituting an Audience via Symbolism

The final feature of the Voice to be considered is the use of legible and mutually understood symbolism as constitutive rhetoric. In addition to visual graphics of Indian braves, warriors, chiefs in ceremonial headdresses and the drawing of the tom-tom drum next to the Voice flag, all 1970s available paste-up clip-art, Barton deliberately used “Indian” motifs as shorthand for political discourse. For example, a column blasting the county school board for “19^th century” conditions resulting in “stinking toilets,” muddy playgrounds and classrooms so cramped that teachers were forced to teach “in closets,” used the headline, “ROBESON COUNTY SCHOOLS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE EDUCATION TOTEM POLE.”[72] In a more complex column two years later, just a week after the newly-elected school board with Lumbee members took office, Barton used this typical language in an “As I See It” subhead: “THE NEW ROBESON SCHOOL BOARD DOES NOT WEAR FEATHERS!”

He explained the idea in the body of the column: “It takes more than the color of one’s skin to make an Indian or a black man. It is the intent of one’s heart, his compassion for his fellow man, his straight and narrow approach…”[73] Barton, allowing that he  “impatient” with the new board, was at other times less circumspect and statesmanlike in his approach, using the pejorative term “apple” (red on the outside, white on the inside, though he did not explain this to the Voice reader) for Indians who do not represent the interests of the race. The argument is that it is not enough to elect Indian politicians; these politicians must then serve their constituents, as the Voice endeavored to serve its audience. In essence, it was not enough to talk as a Lumbee. One needed to walk as a Lumbee.

The effect of the symbolic insider language is both constitutive and ironic. In fact, Lumbee are only figuratively “red” and in general have light brown skin; other than performing ceremonial dances for the sake of recently adopted pow-wows, Lumbee have not worn feathers or beads in the manner of western Plains Indians, and according to historical accounts, have since the 1700s dressed, lived, farmed and adopted the language and religion of Anglo-Saxon immigrants. The Voice, then, becomes a text imparting a consistent closed-circuit message, week after week, to a relatively high proportion of households in the Lumbee cultural capital on matters of life, death, economics, politics and history, in the construction of collective memory and tribal identity.

One indication of the audience the producers of the Voice believed they had constituted by their second full year of publication is suggested by a front-page headline, “Digging ‘Indian Bones’ Discovered in Robeson County.” In the article, the unidentified writer travels to an archeological dig near Red Springs where the Indian Museum of the Carolinas field staff is in the process of sifting dirt, digging up Indian remains and putting them on display, according to the story and display photo. A similar dig at Towne Creek the previous year had raised an outcry in the Voice. What is significant about this second story is that the writer promises the reader to “share further information as we receive it,” but feels no need to provide context as to why the digging up or displaying of Indian remains poses a problem. This appears to be understood, if not immediately by the state archivists the Voice contacted, then certainly by the Voice audience.[74]

Implications and Further Study

History has shown the oppressive power of dominant media to deprive vernacular communities of visibility, of narrative, of self. The career of the Carolina Indian Voice is a bell jar demonstration of the reverse phenomenon. Here is the creative, constitutive power of media, rooted first in a sleight of hand as old as the Declaration of Independence, with its peculiar rhetorical trick: “that these united Colonies are and of Right ought to be Free and independent states…” In other words, we declare this group exists. And very well ought to exist. And in fact, has existed all along. The Voice, in its by repeatedly overlaying  an oral tradition of Lumbee collective memory onto the present, and providing a public space to invoke and commemorate a shared legacy of suffering and the Lumbee’s own version of King George III, rhetorically constituted tribal identity in the 1970s for the purpose of social and civic action. This coincided with a rapid series of political victories for the Lumbee after a century of repression and defeat. It would be difficult to separate the effect of the Voice from the effect of the systems in the developments enumerated below. But it is reasonable to conclude that the Voice, by attracting 6,000 subscribers and enough advertisers to stay afloat, played a role in alerting the Lumbee community to the possibility of the following changes: the firing of a white school board attorney; the end of “double voting” by city school board members, directly leading to the election of Lumbee (and African-American) county school board members who could be pressured to represent minority children;  integration of the local Highway Patrol barrack; the running of a Lumbee candidate for Sheriff; the running of Julian Pierce, a Lumbee candidate for District Court judge, who was expected to win the seat when he was shot to death on the eve of the election in an unsolved homicide which the sheriff termed an assassination.[75]

Of broader significance, this study implies an incorporative conceptual position toward journalism history, in respect to rhetoric and memory studies. Just as scholarship on the black press has reintegrated standpoint, counter-narrative and resistance discourse toward a more accurate understanding of media history, native journalism holds a critical key to a contested past. This concerns how and under what conditions alternative media, shedding the ill-fitting cloak of objectivity, use public memory, standpoint and visual and linguistic symbolism to constitute group identity in the service of an idea.

In 1986, writing that he was “spiritually depleted,” Bruce Barton turned the editorship of the Voice over to his sister, Connee Barton Brayboy, who continued publication of the Voice until 2005 , making it by far the longest-running independent Native American publication in North Carolina. Within two years of Bruce Barton’s departure, a traumatic incident in Lumberton made Barton’s standing invitation for letters, as being preferable to the threat of a “shotgun” appear prescient.  On February 1, 1988, two Tuscarora Indians staged an armed takeover of the Lumberton newspaper office of the Robesonian, taking the newspaper staff hostage for ten hours and demanding to speak to the governor. Their stated intent was to call attention to police brutality, official corruption, unsolved murders of minorities and inequities in the judicial system in Robeson County.

In the tumultuous days that followed in hostage-taking, thrusting Robeson County into the international limelight, in some ways as activists Eddie Hatcher and Tim Jacobs had planned, the Voice ran an item that caused a major division between editor Brayboy and her brother, former editor Barton. A fund had been set up to pay for Hatcher’s defense, and readers were encouraged to send contributions. The address was the Voice, the contact person was Connee Barton Brayboy. The next logical step in this inquiry would be to examine, through oral history interviews collected in spring 2011, how the role of an alternative newspaper evolved to this constituted audience in a time of community crisis, and to place this in the historical and geographic context of the white mainstream media landscape of Robeson County.

 The Conflict over Jim Crow Censorship of Movie Scenes

 in Greensboro, North Carolina, 1937-38

                                                                                                                                                                                  Lorraine Ahearn

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

In the Jim Crow South on December 7, 1937, an association of white North and South Carolina movie theater exhibitors met for a silver jubilee 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.

Introduction

On the night of January 21, 1938, a group of college students at the historically black Bennett College for Women in Greensboro, N.C., convened a mass meeting asking the African-American community to join an economic boycott of the two white-owned movie theaters in the downtown business district. The students had a single demand, and the precipitating circumstances were unusual enough for the meeting to receive front-page advance coverage two hours away in a Durham newspaper, the Carolina Times, and to bring a reporter from the Chicago Defender, who described the meeting in the Trinity A.M.E. Church on campus as “militant.” The Bennett women wanted to force theater managers to stop censoring Hollywood movie scenes that represented black performers in non-subservient roles alongside whites, a Jim Crow taboo. Not only did the students have evidence that censorship took place locally; they now had proof that theater exhibitors deliberated on the policy and put it to a vote.

This proof had come six weeks earlier, on December 8, 1937 under a banner headline on page one of the white community’s newspaper of record, the morning Greensboro Daily News: “RESOLUTION ADOPTED BY THEATER OWNERS,” followed by the sub-head, “Object to Negroes’ Purported Appearance Out of Character in Movies.” Datelined from the two-state Theatre Owners of North and South Carolina convention in Pinehurst, N.C., the article reported that the members held a “spirited” discussion about “recent pictures” that had portrayed the “negro out of character.” In order to pre-empt a more “harsh” form of censorship that might result from the resentment by white audiences, officers for the exhibitors association said, they had voted to censor the “offending” scenes when the movies showed locally and avert more serious consequences.

So as the lights burned late in the church chapel of the Methodist campus, what had started as a small effort led by a Bennett basketball player before Christmas break in 1937 grew with the presence of students from nearby N.C. A&T State University campus, the support of citizens from the black community at large and, for a time, the activism of several black newspapers. At first glance, a forgotten movie theater boycott in the late 1930s over images projected on a screen, and likely over a single musical production number in one film, is dwarfed in significance by the headlines that meanwhile crowded the pages of the black press with regard to race. In January 1938, national anti-lynching legislation was defeated after a withering 29-day filibuster. Still  dominating the pages of the black press was the saga of the Scottsboro Boys, caught in an anguished, drawn-out fight for clemency in an Alabama gang-rape trial that had become a searing symbol of Southern injustice. Across America and particularly in the impoverished South, the Great Depression took a severe toll on black Americans, already denied equal employment, medical access and educational opportunity.

But in another sense, it will be argued, psychological oppression via all-encompassing media images,[1] served to undergird all of the above conditions, and not only in the South.[2] The imagery helped make the subjugation of black people possible, even justifiable to majority culture, and as such, mass media imagery is a logical and important text in the historiography of the Long Civil Rights Movement. The Greensboro events of 1937-38 occurred in a city that later became a national civil rights flashpoint not once, but twice, with the Woolworth lunch counter sit-ins beginning February 1, 1960, involving the majority of the Bennett student body, and with the Nazi-Klan shootings of five anti-Klan protesters of November 3, 1979, one of the dead a former Bennett College student body president.[3] Thus, the 1937-38 movie censorship boycott lends context to the history of student activism in Greensboro,[4] revealing an appetite for change on the part of the nation’s first generation of black college-educated students, a culture of direct action and the creation of models of black resistance[5] in a historically significant civil rights junction. Yet in a more universal sense, this episode provides a window on the historic role mass media played in the racial dualism of a Southern city. One side of the community, it will be demonstrated, saw mass media as a catapult to scale the fortress of segregation.[6] Another segment of the community used mass media as a means to surround itself with racial constructs in the form of film, newspaper, advertising and comics, a mass media moat to protect the Jim Crow system from foreign incursions.

Among the combatants on this field, the de-centering role of the black press in the early twentieth century is a fertile area of inquiry. Mixed-methods content and textual analysis reveals stark differences in coverage between white and black-owned newspapers on stories of civil rights import, and these discrepancies are more pronounced in the South but not confined to the region.[7] This paper proposes to examine two areas that are somewhat less familiar on both sides of that fractured paradigm of public opinion.

First, in reviewing newspaper coverage, advertisements and film content, what were the opposing mass media forces at play in the 1930s in the construction of African-Americans? Second, how does the 1937-38 boycott and the surrounding press coverage, (or lack thereof) reflect this tension? Finally, what were the implications for the future?

Stereotypes as media invention

This study is concerned with censorship of movie scenes, a resultant theater boycott and surrounding newspaper coverage that stemmed from at least one Hollywood movie that crossed what was known in American discourse as the “color line.”[8]  To begin to make sense of this incident and to explore fully its significance and potential impact, it is necessary first to locate where that “line” was drawn in 1930s media culture. Such chronological placement, to avoid the fallacy of presentism,[9] is critical to an accurate analysis of how racial stereotypes functioned in 1937 Greensboro society, how white and black audiences interpreted this imagery, and a map of the media landscape. The first task is to trace the origins and meanings of symbols and tropes that made up period imagery of black Americans in minstrel shows, nineteenth century postcard advertising, mail order catalog artwork and black-face vaudeville acts, which used white actors in burnt-cork makeup.[10] The use of racial humor, in particular, on the part of a dominant group serves as entertainment, but also reinforces the social hierarchy[11] and justifies the position of privilege of the majority over the minority.[12]  Moreover, there is a historical correlation in the nineteenth century between racial tension and the popularity of negative racial portrayals of black people as entertainment: During the two points at which black people encountered the most harsh treatment, the 1840s and the 1880s, disparaging caricatures such as minstrel shows reached their peak popularity, suggesting that such ridicule was an attempt to render a serious social problem comical, and thereby relieve tension.[13]

There is an echo of slavery in the imagery of advertising, popular culture and literature in its shared nostalgia for Dixie. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation broke the physical bonds of enslavement, the racial stereotypes that were used as psychological underpinnings persisted.[14] The tradition of clownish, grotesque-featured black caricatures stretches through lyrics of vaudevillian hit songs such as All Coons Look Alike to Me and If the Man in the Moon Were a Coon, and children’s book titles such as Little Black Sambo and Ten Little Niggers. This convention carries forward into the earliest recorded American commercial movie depicting a black person: the 1905 silent title, The Wooing and Wedding of a Coon, soon to be followed by a comic genre crowded with such titles as How Rastus Got His Turkey and Coon-town Suffragettes.[15]

This perpetuation of disparaging depictions of black people amid the growing power of media imagery reveals the salience stereotypes gained as the images began to reach mass audiences in the twentieth century. Further, the closely entwined relationship between racial imagery[16] and the new medium of cinema[17] demonstrates the reason stereotypes became a topic of concern and discussion with the emergence of full-length features.[18] This was particularly the case because the issue coincided with the unveiling of the film that introduced the narrative technique. This 1915 movie made more than cinematic history: The Birth of a Nation, based on Klan apologist Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, was so raw in its stereotypical depiction of drunken, licentious black freedmen raping and pillaging defenseless whites in the Reconstruction-era South that the premiere triggered riots by blacks and sympathetic whites.[19]

Further localizing this study, the pages of the Greensboro Daily News provide a  slice of Greensboro society. During this period, the city was 35 percent African-American and 65 percent white as of 1937,[20] but like most white newspapers of the era, the Daily News carried virtually no news of the black community except for crimes in which blacks were accused, including frequent out-of-town crimes against white women. Occasionally, the newspaper featured comical standalone photographs of black people, for example a wire photo of a black Texas child, whom the caption identifies as a “little pickaninny” holding a giant watermelon and supposedly telling the photographer, “Yas, suh. Ah think Ah’m up to the job.”[21] Another frequent device was the colorful feature story depicting an elderly black person from the pastoral South, reminiscing about slavery. An example of this genre, which continued well into the late 1940s, was the story of “Mammy Net.” The headline read, “Mammy Net, Faithful Servant, Just Never Had Use for Money.” The sub-head read, “Born in Slavery, She Clung to Her Young Mistress, and Her Long Life’s History Is Written In the Hearts of Her ‘White Chillun’ – Lives With Family Who Owned Her.’”[22]

Print advertising meanwhile visually reinforced the servile aspect of black imagey. An ad campaign for Pabst Blue Ribbon beer that ran repeatedly in the Daily News in 1937 employed a smiling black bellhop exclaiming, “These sho’ quality folks!” On the comics page, Aunt Jemima counseled a worried white housewife on how to entertain her husband’s boss by making “buckwheats,” and in the “Tarzan” strip based on the Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure, only the white man can bring order to the chaos of the dark continent: “’When Tarzan our King, we safe,’ snarled Chakto,” in a 1937 installment in the Daily News. “Then Tarzan go away; Beasts and black man kill us. Tarzan does not help us!”[23]

Lest these media stereotypes be laid strictly at the feet of the South, it is key to bear in mind the ominous and daily political context of the 1937-38 boycott. The floor debate in the U.S. Senate over anti-lynching, the longest filibuster in history, dominated the front page of newspapers black and white for most of the boycott, the speeches steeped in racial animosity, and emblematic of a gathering North-South racialism and a growing coalition.[24] The point here is that politics, economics and media imagery worked together. The more the white community felt circumstances threatening its hegemony, the more likely it was to hold close the totems of superiority. In this way, mass media endorsed a gauzy antebellum nostalgia for black subservience to whites,[25] and no coincidence that the Hollywood types of the shuffling black servant and the grotesque  minstrel singer  reached their zenith at the depth of the Great Depression.[26]

Conceptual framework

Consistent with the historical frame, it is therefore appropriate to reference communication concepts in circulation at the time. This includes Walter Lippmann’s seminal view of stereotypes as media constructions.[27] True to the hand-in-glove relationship between media and the history of race in America that will be the starting assumption of this study, it should be noted that Lippmann, a political journalist, in 1922 coined the term “stereotype” from newspaper printer’s jargon.[28] Literally, stereotypes were molds filled with molten lead that formed impressions on plates used to replicate numerous copies from single originals. Figuratively, then, Lippmann defines a stereotype as the cognitive equivalent: shortcuts people use to categorize groups according to a common shared characteristic and thereby make broad generalizations.[29]

To summarize, this paper defines stereotypes as negative portrayals based on preconceived generalizations of a visually identifiable racial minority by an outside group. Though the stereotypes, in this case, stock characters in commercial Hollywood movies of the 1930s, often appear comic, their psychological purpose is the opposite. They are intended, consciously or subconsciously, to marginalize the minority, in order to elevate the transmitters and the receivers of the stereotypical imagery to a position of social hegemony, as well as justify that position of superiority by demonstrating the minority’s inferior status.

A contemporary backdrop for Lippmann’s groundbreaking linkage of media and race was the nativism enveloping a major news story of the 1920s, the trial of immigrant anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti, executed for murder in an armed robbery based on evidence critics alleged was trumped up. [30] But when Lippmann contemplated his new concept of stereotypes, his prime example was the new and over-sized mental pictures projected for mass consumption, and his case in point was Griffith:

The shadowy idea becomes vivid, your hazy notion, let us say, of the Ku Klux Klan, thanks to Mr. Griffiths (sic), takes vivid shape when you see “The Birth of a Nation.” Historically, it may be the wrong shape, morally it may be a pernicious shape, but it is a shape and I doubt whether anyone who has seen the film and does not know more about the Ku Klux Klan than Mr. Griffiths, will ever hear the name again without seeing those white horsemen.[31]

As the following discussion reveals, the Bennett students’ vocal objection to stereotypes in Hollywood films was neither an isolated nor a new concern on the national scene. Although Griffith’s 1915 film was widely blamed for a rise in lynchings and a surge in KKK membership, its premiere and repeated rerelease also corresponded to a period of rapid growth in membership of the fledgling NAACP, founded in 1909.[32] The Chicago Defender, after one such revival of the film, said the movie portrayed an entire race as “rapists and murderers,”[33] and termed it “a vicious and harmful piece of propaganda.” By 1938, the NAACP and the Washington, D.C.-based Neighborhood Congress were locked in a losing battle with Hollywood prior to release of a major feature that black educators warned showed no remorse “for the selling of human beings as cattle.” Despite the protests, Gone with the Wind was another high watermark for Hollywood, with its first blockbuster. The movie won the first Academy Award for a black performer, Hattie McDaniel, who won best supporting actress for her role as Mammy, but McDaniel ironically could not attend her own premiere: It was at the segregated Leow’s Grand Theatre on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street.[34]

As with the absurdly exaggerated character of the ex-slave Prissy, played by Butterfly McQueen, in real life a poised, well-spoken actress trained for the Shakespearean stage,[35] McDaniel and other performers rendered the role of the comic black servant a staple of 1930s movies. Cinema historian Edward Mapp, in a sweeping content analysis of black in Hollywood films of the period, describes the type as “essentially the same, happy Negro,” “the black buffoon” or the “devoted slave who knew his place.”[36] To cultural critic and African-American educator L.D. Reddick, writing in 1944, the films, many featuring Stepin Fetchit and Bill Robinson, amounted to being “anti-Negro” in the aspect of way that they connected negative attributes to black people in the American mind. Among those attributes, Reddick listed:

“ignorance, superstition, fear, servility, laziness, clumsiness, petty thievery, untruthfulness, credulity, immorality or irresponsibility, with a predilection for eating fried chicken and a slice of watermelon.”[37]

The same year, 1944, the Writers’ War Board commissioned the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University to conduct a large-scale study of short stories, plays, movies and comic books. The researchers concluded that the vast majority of portrayals of minorities, including black people, were negative. This study is important for two reasons: It shows that negative stereotypes were rampant, and it also demonstrates that there was awareness within Hollywood’s screenwriting ranks, against the backdrop of World War II, that racial stereotypes had harmful effects. In a report published in 1945, The Writers’ War Board concluded:

“(T)he writers of the United States because of their habitual employment of ‘stock characters’ were unconsciously fostering and encouraging group prejudice….(T)he constant repetition of racial stereotypes was exaggerating and perpetuating the false and mischievous notion that ours is a white, Protestant Anglo-Saxon country in which all other racial stocks and religious faiths are of lesser dignity.”[38]

The ‘Vassar of the South’ 

Dignity, if the academic identity of Bennett College had to be reduced to a  word, was the mission. Six blocks due east from the downtown Carolina Theatre the campus was a tranquil island to itself, where young women known as “Bennett Belles” trained to become teachers but also attended a homemaking institute, played sports and learned to preside over a tea. Founded by white Methodists in 1873 to educate emancipated slaves, it was the first school for black people in the city; by the time it evolved into a private four-year college for black women in 1926, it had gained the nickname “the Vassar of the South.” With about 160 students by 1937,[39] the professors were sophisticated and traveled, including Dr. R. Nathaniel Dett, a nationally-known black composer, and Willa Player, a Latin and French professor who two decades later  at Bennett became the first black woman in the U.S. to lead a four-year college. Both were advisors to a young basketball player, Frances Jones, who would be central to the imminent boycott, and who was the daughter of the college president and of the admissions director, Susie Jones.[40]

Founding president Dr. David Jones, as if wearing blinders to the rigid segregation surrounding the campus, instilled in the young women poise, dignity and strict discipline: A 6 a.m. bell began the day, breakfast was at 7; there was an evening curfew, and a 10 p.m. lights-out rule. Students were required to attend vespers at the chapel, wear white capes for choir and to be prepared to be called upon by the president; white gloves and pocketbooks were the dress code for shopping trips downtown, and they were required to walk rather than ride segregated transport. It was an atmosphere of well-bred refinement and high expectations: Jones’ students did not see themselves as future chambermaids or housekeepers.[41] Bennett faculty member James T. Morton, echoing the philosophy of other black institutions of higher learning of the early twentieth century in their relationship to the community, wrote in the December 1937 Bennett Bulletin that “leadership should come from the trained and aggressive.”[42]

That message appeared to manifest itself when word spread of the Daily News front-page the day after the December 7, 1937 Theatre Owners of North and South Carolina held their silver jubilee convention at the swank golf resort, Pinehurst, to celebrate their 25^th anniversary. The newspaper quoted at length from the movie censorship resolution passed in the business meeting:

“The organization is entirely sympathetic with the negro and his problem and certainly has no objection to the appearance of negroes in white films when and where their characterization fits properly in the story. But it is our belief that the liberties that have been taken by the producers in recent pictures will not only cause unnecessary resentment on the part of our patrons, but will undoubtedly create harsh censorship in many of our towns.”[43]

“So far as I know, our people do not resent negroes in character roles,” Carolina Theater manager Montgomery S. Hill was quoted as saying, in explaining the exhibitors’ vote to delete the offending content. “It is solely the negro out of character which causes resentment.”[44]

In the story, the theater exhibitors did not specify which “recent pictures” gave offense, but based on a clue in the story, boycott participants concluded that the culprit was a film shown briefly at Hill’s theater, The Carolina, in late October 1937, two weeks after its national premiere. Vance Chavis, a Dudley High School teacher who was decades later elected Greensboro’s first black city councilman, said patrons were surprised when the big-budget Twentieth Century Fox musical starring Eddie Cantor, Ali Baba Goes to Town, opened at the Carolina with a show-stopping scene tap-dance scene mysteriously excised.[45] The scene, featuring Chicago tap dance sensation Jeni LeGon, along with scantily-clad black male dancers and musicians, potentially fit Hill’s reference to “mixed chorus lines,” a violation of the taboo against race-mixing in the South 1937.

“The negro in the southern theaters as a character will always be accepted,” Hill is quoted as saying, but adds: “People will always resent a mixed chorus or any chorus where a negro and a white person appear, as it were, on the same plane.” According to advertisements in the Greensboro Daily News from one month before the theater owners’ convention, Hill’s Carolina Theatre, a 2,220-seat facility, at the time the largest, best-equipped movie theater between New York and Atlanta,[46] exhibited the musical starring Cantor, a radio star. A satire of FDR’s New Deal, the move contained an example of a 1930s scene crossing the color line in four key respects. The scene, “Swing is Here to Sway,” [47] contains these elements:

• Cantor, albeit incognito, dances with a black woman, a strict social taboo, and dances on an equal plane with black male dancers in loin cloths, who are portrayed in a non-degraded fashion;
• Cantor touches the male dancers;
• Dancer LeGon, an African-American, upstages Cantor in a non-degraded fashion, as does the black singing trio, The Peters Sisters;
• Cantor, in burnt-cork makeup and Arab garb, follows LeGon around the stage in a wide-eyed, suggestive manner, distractedly chewing on a carrot, which takes on a burlesque dimension.

Chavis, the high school teacher, felt the scene offended whites by placing the races not only in physical proximity, but also on an equal psychological footing in its characterization.

Eddie Cantor and some black girl named [Jeni] LeGon…were dancing together, and she did not have the usual handkerchief-head role of grinning and dancing along, and they cut this from the movie. This gives you an idea of how people felt then.[48]

The theater owners, at least in the Greensboro Daily News version, conspicuously steered clear of naming titles, which would have conceivably created added interest in the forbidden material. Instead, much of the focus of the story was is on what could have happened if the theater owners failed to take responsible action. Ed Kuykendall, identified as president of the National Theater Owners Association, is quoted as saying that “he had told Hollywood producers and directors that indiscriminate mingling of races in films might bring censorship in the south.”[49]

Spoken with the voice of authority, not subject to question, this is a report dictated by a white organization to a white newspaper to be disseminated to the white community, defined as “our” community, as distinguished “the negro” and “his problem,” an entirely other community. The message, though politely paternalistic, is clear. If these sorts of encroachments are allowed, the theater exhibitors seem to be saying, there will be consequences, and it will be out of the theater owners’ control. In a pointed message, the theater owners warned that the situation could lead to “harsh censorship,” something more severe than cutting out individual scenes. Possibly, this referred to an outright ban on the pictures, or the establishment of Boards of Censors. In Virginia, for example, such boards not only screened movies for moral objections, but guarded against racial impropriety.[50]

Banning the pictures outright, however, would have been problematic for theater owners as the studio system existed in 1937. There was an ongoing dispute between producers and theater exhibitors over distribution practice known as “block booking” and “blind bidding.” Essentially, exhibitors could not pick and choose among titles, but had to accept a package of films together from the production companies or bid on movies without having seen them. The practice, which theater exhibitors as a group opposed,[51] may help explain why theater managers would edit films rather than simply decline to show them: They had no films to substitute in their place.

Hence, there are two logical audiences the front-page newspaper “Resolution” would have been intended to reach: first, the movie distributors and producers with whom the theater managers were in dispute; second, white theater patrons and civic leaders who might have taken offense at the onscreen interracial “liberties” the theater owners now condemned. But the front-page story with a photo which ran across five columns below the masthead of the Greensboro Daily News on December 8, 1937 reached a third, unintended audience the theater owners had not considered: Namely, black movie patrons who paid their admission at the Carolina, then climbed a fire escape and sat unseen in a segregated balcony.

When the Bennett women learned of the white theater owners’ censorship via the front-page Daily News story on December 8, 1937, it was President Jones’ daughter, student Frances Jones, who called for a meeting between a group of students, Dett and  Player.[52] It is unclear whether the students took action before they left for the winter break or after they returned to campus in January: In keeping with the lack of black community news, the actions that the Bennett students took beginning in the winter of 1938 received no mention in the pages of the white-owned Daily News, but were instead first mentioned in the African-American Carolina Times of Durham on January 15, 1938. The unsigned editorial said student committees at both A&T and Bennett had by then come out in favor of the boycott, and were asking black moviegoers not to patronize the Carolina and the National, whose owners belonged to the exhibitors’ organization. The editorial called for solidarity with the students:

“The step taken by the students in the two Negro schools in Greensboro shows more courage on the part of Negro youth than we have any record of anywhere in the south. The action…bespeaks a new day and will doubtless be followed by students of other schools in the state, if not the entire south.”[53]

Although Carolina Times editor L.E. Austin followed up by leading his front page with coverage in his next Saturday edition, promoting the community meeting at Bennett, there is no evidence reflected in his publication that Durham-area students heeded the call to take  part. The story predicted that 1,000 Greensboro students would participate and said that the N.C. Inter-Racial Commission had sent protests to the theaters. The story was then picked up by the Baltimore Afro-American[54], and then got wider circulation when Henry Cross of the Chicago Defender published a story January 29, 1938 under the headline “‘No More Equal Parts’ Says Theatre Ass’n” and the sub-head, “Race Citizens Plan State-Wide Boycott of Prejudiced Houses.” [55]

Cross described the Trinity A.M.E. Church meeting at Bennett as “a militant public gathering,” and made clear that the meeting had been triggered by the Theater Owners of North and South Carolina resolution. Featured as a two-column lead story on the “Amusements” page next to assorted nightclub and Hollywood news, the article chided the theater owners for denying black actors opportunities, while at the same time, seeking the patronage of black audiences in segregated theaters. After making the argument that other ethnic groups are realistically portrayed in film instead of “faking” them – a possible allusion to the still-popular convention of blackface – Cross wrote:

Now comes the eminent theatre owners, white, of “North and South Carolina, Inc.,” raising in their might and short-sighted prejudices and declaring in a resolution passed at their silver anniversary meeting that henceforth no pictures will be used in which white and black characters are given “equal parts” in the same picture. Then, these high and mighties go forth in their segregated money grabbing selfishness and proceed to seek black business with totally white pictures. “That day is gone forever,” say the sepia theatergoers. “You can have your white pictures,” they say, “and you can likewise have your segregated theatres. We will not attend. How do you get that way.”[56]

The choice of words is derisive; the tone intended to shatter the brittle façade of white superiority. Cross, in a sense, seeks to be the voice of the black community or (in 1937 Defender parlance, “Race Citizens”) in answering the white theater owners’ resolution, again juxtaposing the “we” and the “you:”

Citizens and students from A. and T. and Bennett college… declared in an open  meeting  that  “you can’t ram that narrowness down our throats.”[57]

Cross began to make the economic argument: Just as white consumers could refuse to buy products advertised on radio shows featuring black performers – though Cross described these consumers as “a few narrow whites from the South” who “write letters” – so could black theater patrons withhold their business from theaters which did not, as Cross put it, “tote fair.” Cross reported that black patrons were willing to get their entertainment instead from the radio, and that if the boycott were to spread, the losses in southern markets would cost the film industry “an annual loss in cash that will run into several millions of dollars.” What the Defender story does not recognize is that the black community would have had an alternative to patronizing white-owner theaters in Greensboro. The black uptown, which ran between the Bennett and A&T campus along old East Market Street, operated two movie theaters at the time of the boycott. One of these black-owned theaters, the Criterion, announced a change of program February 14 and advertised showings of Ali Baba Goes to Town, at the height of the boycott,[58] several months after its brief, and apparently censored showing at the downtown Carolina. In its second run and the black-operated theater, the movie showed for weeks and was heavily advertised with what may have been winking references: “Never Before a Fun Hit Like This!”[59] According to Vance Chavis and Frances Jones,[60] the National Theater attempted to win back African-American patrons by booking two live performances by the popular black entertainer Fats Waller, on the Saturday after the Trinity A.M.E. meeting. An ad in the Greensboro Record, the white-owned afternoon newspaper, announcing that the “the King of Piano Swing” was “Skeetin’ and Skattin’ my way to town!” with his 16-piece band, offered discounted prices to black patrons: 25 cents for the “Colored Matinee” and 35 cents for “Balcony Night.”[61] The show drew black patrons from Danville, Va., and other surrounding areas into town to see Waller, and in Chavis’ view, was a clever tactic on the part of the white theater owners’ to lure black patrons through the turnstiles. In a sense, black patrons were not violating the movie boycott per se, but the Waller show seemed to break the back of the direct action.[62]

It is unclear whether the Greensboro students intended to take the boycott beyond their community, but by February 12, 1938, editor Austin, who had been an invited speaker at the Trinity church meeting, ran an editorial partly chiding students in other North Carolina cities for not doing their “duty” by supporting their Greensboro counterparts.

The prospect of the boycott spreading to multiple cities would have been an unwelcome prospect to the managers of major theaters and the studios that owned these theaters in the 1930s, at a time when the industry was just beginning to recover from losing half its ticket sales in the four years after the 1929 crash.[63] More significantly, the piece lends insight into the economic pressure exhibitors may have felt, but also black newspaper publishers, remembering the severe challenges to businesses in the 1930s. The editorial, referring to a front-page news item in the same edition, noted an “unsual” campaign by the two theaters being boycotted to circulated handbills in Greensboro’s black community promising upcoming movies featuring black actors. This news came as the Bennett and A&T student committees announced a second community meeting at “one of the local churches,” without giving the date, time or location. What is interesting about this news story is that the story begins with an activist tone, encouraging the building participation by all but a few “Uncle Toms and Aunt D’Nabs,” but ends on a note of conciliation. The unidentified writer, whose tagline is “Special to the Carolina Times,” refers to unidentified theater managers who say they are expecting to hold a meeting in a “few days” with “a committee of colored citizens and two students”

“…at which time it is hoped by the managers that the difficulties

confronting them on the part of their Negro patrons will be ironed   out.”[64]

One possible explanation for the shift in tone is that officials at state-funded N.C. A&T were being pressured to end the boycott. From the Bennett point of view, Jones many years later said that unbeknownst to her, the FBI had visited her father during the boycott and asked him to call the action off, but that he refused.[65] Another scenario is hinted at in editorial which ran in Austin’s paper, referring to a Winston-Salem and Greensboro African-American newspaper contemporary, the archives of which have not been located. Austin’s editorial stated that The Post publisher, Clarence Avery Irvin

“…has made made a tremendous sacrifice by refusing to run weekly advertisements. We know something about how much courage it takes to cut off advertising in defense of a race cause. The Post will not have the space and income it sacrificed in this worthy cause made good by Negro advertisers And supporters – think this over Mr. reader – Mr. Negro reader.” [66]

Two weeks later, the Chicago Defender followed on February 26, 1938 under the bold headline, “Movies ‘About Face’ After Boycott” that theater owners were seeking a meeting with the boycotting students. “Overtures Made to Call off Box-Office ‘Spanking,’” the story is short on specifics. Running on page 3 in the news section, instead of the “Amusements” page, where the initial report appeared, the four-paragraph story by Slab Singleton declared victory for the students:

GREENSBORO – Feb. 25 — In every community where the Race people reside in this city hundreds of bill distributors are working day and night announcing the return of films to neighborhood theatres with colored actors “on an equal social basis with whites.” This primarily ends the big fight that has been waged against the Southern Theatre Incorporation (sic), which controls cinema houses in both North and South Carolina.[67]

The reference to the Southern Theatre Incorporation is erroneous; the subsequent paragraph makes clear that the reporter is referring to the Theater Owners of North and South Carolina, the group which passed the resolution in Pinehurst. The story concludes that the boycott has prevailed, although neither the student organizers nor theater managers are named nor quoted directly:

The boycott must have been felt keenly by theatres throughout the two states for the Race neighborhood campaigns are making a strong plea for the return of bronze patrons. The theater managers are trying to schedule a conference between the leaders of the boycott and themselves in which it is hoped that all difficulties will be ironed out once and for always.[68]

Compared to the previous report, the tone is conciliatory to the point of being unrealistic, that “all difficulties” be ironed out “once and for always.” Whether economic pressure was brought to bear on exhibitors, as Cross predicted in January, would be difficult to prove. At least two possibilities emerge. At the local level, a black newspaper publisher such as Austin, who had initially gloated over the economic pain the boycott was causing white theater owners, took a more circumspect view when the students’ action hurt the  newspaper’s bottom line, particularly when the action was not attracting statewide support. The effect boycott had on local exhibitors, regional distributors and finally studios is less clear. In general terms, there is evidence that studio executives, including those insulated as star system creator Louis B. Mayer, recognized that black moviegoers were a stronger than expected demographic, spending $7 to $10 million per year. Mayer, for one, was eventually receptive to arguments that blacks needed better treatment in movies. His motive: To protect his profits. [69] But at the local level, there is no sign of a change in movie offerings during or immediately following the boycott to give black actors more prominence, as the Defender suggested had been agreed. Apart from the movie Imitation of Life, which dealt with a light-skinned daughter of a black woman “passing” as white, there were no pictures advertised at the Carolina and the National featuring black actors in dignified roles, but at that time there would have been none from which to choose.

Implications: ‘This was the beginning, maybe’

Similarly, the idea that white exhibitors in downtown Greensboro in 1938 stopped the practice of splicing out movie scenes as a result of the student boycott, as the Carolina Times and the Defender reported appears wishful speculation. Chavis’ recollection of the Fats Waller show attendance by black patrons casts doubt on the Defender’s assertion that the boycott represented anything more than a brief victory for the black community, beyond the initial two to three weeks that black press reports indicate the boycott was sustained. What is clear is that black consumers constituted enough of an economic force that even this short absence was conspicuous, so much so that the National Theatre booked and heavily advertised the Waller performances at the height of the controversy, that management of both white theaters sought meetings with boycott organizers and intermediaries from the Interracial Commission, and also circulated handbills urging black patrons to come back. Another indicator of the conflict the boycott caused is the 180-degree change in the tone of the Defender coverage from incendiary to conciliatory, suggesting the possibility that the newspapers were under pressure, most logically from advertisers.

Yet because this incident turned on racial identity, and took place two blocks from where a subsequent generation of black college students 23 years later staged a sit-in demonstration that sparked a national grassroots movement with a significant impact, the boycott suggests deeper questions that shed additional light on the timeline of the Long Civil Rights Movement. The first is what such a boycott might do to whet the appetite for change and determine by what means that appetite might be satisfied by black people in a specific place across generations. Withholding of black buying power, or otherwise interfering with white commerce, became one of the favored tactics in the subsequent history of civil rights action by black Greensboro, with the 1960 Woolworth sit-ins, for example, and the 1970 blind workers’ broom factory strike, in which the black community showed support by boycotting white downtown merchants during the Christmas shopping season.[70]  As career schoolteachers and administrators who over time  observed generations of black families back-to-back, both Chavis and his fellow teacher Nell Coley, a Bennett College graduate who had returned to Greensboro in 1935 to teach at all-black Dudley High School, spoke of a lighting and passing of the torch of resistance to segregation. Coley, who along with Chavis participated in the boycott, taught both Ezell Blair Sr. and Ezell Blair Jr., one of the original four sit-in participants on February 1, 1960 (Blair later changed his name to Jibreel Khazan.) The veteran schoolteacher said the salient fact was that Khazan was the son of Blair Sr., who “knew what he was about.”[71]

From the media angle, the significance of the 1937-38 boycott is that it revolved neither around equal accommodations, as with the sit-ins, nor around working conditions and pay, as with the blind workers’ strike. Instead, the theater boycott pivoted on representation and imagery, suggesting several insights: The first is that this type of degradation, particularly projected in its larger-than-life screen incarnation, was in some aspects less tolerable than the physical, quotidian life of the second-class restroom, the seat at the back of the bus or the three or four flights of steps up the fire escape black patrons climbed to reach the so-called “buzzard’s roost” reserved for them in the theater. At the same time, the mainstream mass media was showing cracks of resistance to Jim Crow, in the appearance of performers such as Lena Horne or LeGon, and in the 1930s media might therefore have represented a more available avenue for change, given liberal white allies such as Cantor.   

From this perspective, the censorship action by the theater owners, and the changing landscape that prompted it, suggest a racial fissure that goes to the cultural bedrock of the 1930s. As much as white Anglo-Saxon America sought to unite itself, North and South, at the expense of black people (and other non-WASP Others, as enumerated by the Writer’s War Board study), there was a chafing at the oppressive garment of Jim Crow, particularly, in the context of the Great Migration of black people from the South before World War II.[72] By forcing this repression upon the country, Hollywood may have invited rebellion. When that rebellion eventually occurred, in the form of such pedestrian vehicles as Ali Baba Goes to Town, a relatively moderate Southern city such as Greensboro seems an inevitable battleground: On the one hand, the city had rigid a Jim Crow social system now threatened; on the other hand, Greensboro had an emerging class of college-educated African-Americans, including professors born outside the South, training a generation of students now sensing opportunity and change.  Like the images of Horne and LeGon displaying new facets of the black persona in the 1930s, the exercising of protest over an idea, regardless of the failed outcome, seemed to be a revelation for those involved.

In an interview a decade before her death, Dr. Frances Jones Bonner, who had led the boycott as a young student, said that before the boycott, she had perceived segregation as “something monolithic, as if nothing were going to budge it.” Bonner,  who after attending Bennett went on to become a psychiatrist and the first black female physician on staff at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the boycott raised expectations.

“The fact that it (the white power structure) could be moved – it made me know that segregation could be brought down. However many lynchings there were, however much the Ku Klux Klan business was going on, segregation was going to end.” [73]

It was a long-range forecast from the standpoint of youth, but de jure segregation was not to end for another generation in Greensboro and cities like it. Those who stayed on  through World War II, urban renewal and a poisonous school integration fight saw little change in the region prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Yet the boycott, in its very failure, may have created a sense of determination and insurgency among a small group of black residents who refused to return to the two downtown white theaters, except to attend civil defense meetings. Among them were Coley and Chavis, the influential schoolteacher and the city councilman who was by then a principal. Post-boycott, Chavis recalled chiding students who went to the movies.

I think this was kind of an insult to us which we didn’t realize up until that time. But this was the beginning, maybe, of the feeling, because in my classes, I often teased the students about going; I’d say, “You going to see that picture, you going upstairs, walk up all those four or five flights of stairs and sit in there and pay to be segregated?”[74]

Many of the strands connecting the Greensboro’s civil rights story lead back to Bennett College campus. Dr. Willa Player, the faculty mentor who counseled Frances Jones on the eve of the movie boycott was named president of the college in 1955. In 1958, when the local NAACP invited Martin Luther King Jr. to speak in Greensboro but was denied a platform anywhere in the city because of controversy over the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Dr. Player hosted King at Bennett. In his speech, King called on youth to lead the stalled movement. In the audience to hear King were two of the original Greensboro Four, including Ezell Blair Jr., who recalled King’s words as being so strong that he feel his “heart palpitating.” [75] Blair was in high school; two years later, he and his freshmen roommates touched off a grassroots movement that spread to 31 cities within a month,  with two months and 112 Southern cities within six months, eventually involving up to 100,000 students.[76] It was a wildfire prefaced by a long, dry season, fueled by pent-up understory, smoldering underground, burning too hot and too fast to extinguish this time.

Notes 

• How did it all go wrong? (Nov. 2008)

• Refugee says, ‘We want to go back’ (Dec. 2009)

•Their struggles are not over (Nov. 2009)

•Mentally ill man held in ER for 5 days (Feb. 2009)

•Undercover: A unit full of secrets (Dec. 2008)

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 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.