Divorce Trials and Sex Scandals

This chapter covers the coverage of sex scandals and divorce trials, which dominated black papers’ front pages in the mid-1920s. Many of these stories involved the black elite and the middle class. Black papers believed that the status of individuals involved in the scandals generated interest among a new and expanding reading audience. Newspapers, however, depicted different images of elite and middle-class black heterosexual relationships from the ones they carefully constructed. This chapter also argues that the Black Press revealed and spoke about what readers could not discuss in other public forums as it related to African American sexuality. Overall, the second chapter reveals how the coverage of divorce trials and sex scandals exposed class tensions among African Americans and, perhaps most importantly, made private sexual matters public.

Introduction

This introductory section introduces the book’s major arguments and provides an overview of the history of the Black Press in the early twentieth century. The introduction also explores the theoretical conceptualization of the public sphere in relationship to African American life and the scholarship on pleasure and class in African American history. In laying out these terms, the introductory section of the book makes the case that they are useful categories of analysis for a deeper understanding of African American sexuality, pleasure, and the Black Press. Finally, the introduction features a discussion of the significance of the interwar period and its relationship to the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press.

Epilogue

The epilogue briefly recounts the history of African American sexuality in the Black Press during the interwar years. The concluding chapter also briefly discusses the Black Press’s coverage and representations of sexuality during World War II through the Civil Rights Movement. National attention on African Americans’ struggles for civil rights inspired black newspapers to strike a more staid approach to covering news. Sex scandals, lurid crime stories, and homosexuality did not fit the picture of “respectable negroes” deserving of full citizenship. In the post-civil rights era, black newspaper circulation took a precipitous fall. Finally, the closing chapter offers a way to think about contemporary black news media by suggesting that discussions of sexuality have migrated to social media spaces such as Facebook and Twitter.