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Georgia’s Long Struggle Toward Democracy: The Role of the Press, Then and Now
November 19, 2023 @ 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm EST
The Baton Foundation will host a lecture about the role of Black press leaders in Georgia’s ongoing struggle for democracy. This program is free to the public, but registration is required.
About the Program
Georgia and its capital city, Atlanta, have long played a central role in the U.S. struggle to achieve the democratic ideals set forth in its founding documents. From the end of the Civil War (1861-1865) to the present, a reactionary, anti-democratic, White nationalist press has often worked against these efforts.
Using their book, Journalism and Jim Crow (University of Illinois Press, 2021), as a backdrop, professors D’Weston Haywood and Kathy Roberts Forde will discuss how White press leaders, collaborating with Georgia governors, senators, officials, and business leaders, helped build a violent White supremacist society and political economy that endured for generations after the war. They also will tell the equally compelling story about how Black press leaders fought back–documenting, in real time, what was happening while marshaling a collective Black power to forge a more inclusive and just democracy in the state, the South, and in the nation. Drs. Forde and Haywood will connect this history to the momentous events taking place in Georgia today.
About the Author
D’Weston Haywood is an Associate Professor of History at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). His work centers on Black protest and cultural politics, and their intersections with the state and public spheres. His award-winning book, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (UNC Press, 2018), explores this. Haywood’s work also includes “Sonic Scholarship.” His projects here include “The [Ferguson] Files: A Sonic Study of Racial Violence in America” (2016), examining a year of racial violence from the killing of Michael Brown to the massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church, and “MADE MEN” (2020), examining White Nationalism, White masculinity, and American politics in the Trump era. He is currently working on two book projects, one reconsidering the Cold War and Space Age through Black Nationalism, and another analyzing Black political theory, Hip Hop, and mass incarceration. Originally from North Carolina, Haywood currently lives in Queens, New York.
About the Editor
Kathy Roberts Forde is Professor of Journalism and Associate Dean for Equity and Inclusion in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is co-editor and contributing author of the book Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America, which received the American Historical Association Palmegiano Book Award, the AEJMC History Division Book Award, and the American Journalism Historians Association Book Award. A U.S. press historian, Dr. Forde is working on a new book about the role of the White press in racial massacres—instigating, organizing, and covering up racial massacres for generations after the Civil War—and the role of the Black press in exposing these atrocities and attempting to hold those responsible to account. Professor Forde was raised in rural East Tennessee.