Kristin Gustafson published in Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America

death of democracy

The newly published Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America includes IAS faculty member Kristin Gustafson’s chapter, “Death of Democracy, North Carolina.” The chapter provides a case study with parallels of two newspapers and the men leading them. Josephus Daniels and his newspaper, the Raleigh News & Observer, helped the Democratic Party’s effort to destroy the Fusionist Movement in North Carolina and overthrow Wilmington’s government by force during the state’s 1898 election. Alexander Manly’s Wilmington newspaper, The Daily Record, resisted the white supremacist political campaign strategies and the related press efforts to dehumanize Black men.

The book, which is edited by Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield, addresses how “White publishers and editors used their newspapers to build, nurture, and protect white supremacy across the South in the decades after the Civil War” while “a vibrant Black press fought to disrupt these efforts and force the United States to live up to its democratic ideals.” It includes Alex Lichtenstein’s foreword and contributions from Bedingfield, Bryan Bowman, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Forde, Robert Greene II, Gustafson, D'Weston Haywood, Blair LM Kelley, Alex Lichtenstein, and Razvan Sibii.