Converged Feature Writer – Reporting With All Five Senses
Conference papers (abstracts):
Public Memory and Constitutive Rhetoric in Lumbee Indian Newspapers
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.
To be presented at the American Journalism Historians Association,
Kansas City, MO, October, 2011
Racial Stereotypes in Black and White:
The Conflict over Jim Crow Censorship of Movie Scenes
Greensboro, North Carolina, 1937-38
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.
Presented at the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication,
St. Louis, MO, August, 2011
Invited Presentations, Manuscripts in Progress
Jim Crow Movie Censorship Boycott multimedia presentation and talk presented by invitation of the Center for the Study of the American South, “Tell About the South” series, UNC-Chapel Hill
“The Fultz Quadruplets as a Window on Race, Advertising and the Emergence of the Black Consumer in post-World War II America” Richard Moore Memorial Lecture, N.C. A&T
“A Sidewalk Perspective on the Civil Rights Journey in Greensboro, North Carolina.” President’s Vespers Address, Bennett College for Women
“Press and Conflict over Jim Crow Censorship of Movie Scenes in Greensboro, NC, 1937-1938″ to be presented at Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication conference in St. Louis, August 2011
“Public Memory and Constitutive Rhetoric in Lumbee Indian Newspapers” to be presented at American Journalism Historians annual conference in Kansas City, October 2011
Field observation ethnography project for JOMC 703 on Lumbee publication Native Visions to be submitted to AJHA for proposed panel on native journalism
