During the Jim Crow era, authors like James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, William Faulkner, and Jean Toomer were active in interracial and intraracial periodical networks that shaped their literature and concerns about racial violence. Jim Crow Networks examines these networks of newspapers and magazines, which included the Half-Century Magazine, the Crisis, the Chicago Defender, the Little Review, Broom, the Double Dealer, and Ebony. This examination unearths little-known periodical contexts of well-known authors and their works and highlights understudied interactions between periodicals.
The periodicals, both Black and white, were key sites where readers and writers worked toward bottom-up sociopolitical changes during a period of legalized segregation. The very decentralized nature of power in networks made possible the sociopolitical work of questioning racial hierarchies of the Jim Crow era. This work extends, as Jim Crow Networks ultimately demonstrates, to twenty-first century media networks of activism.
// University of Massachusetts Press, January 2021
// Awarded the 2021-2022 Research Society for American Periodicals Book Prize
