Pittsburgh Courier - April 2, 1966
1 2019-03-12T23:56:22+00:00 Stanford University Press af84c3e11fe030c51c61bbd190fa82a3a1a12824 1 1 Pittsburgh Courier - April 2, 1966 plain published 2019-03-12T23:56:22+00:00 AnonymousThis page is referenced by:
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Scalar and Scholarly Communication
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Black Quotidian is a born-digital project that uses Scalar, an open-access, multimedia web-authoring platform that enables authors to assemble images, videos, maps, and other media and to juxtapose these resources with text. I designed Black Quotidian to explore the capabilities of Scalar in two ways. First, as a media historian, I have long appreciated Scalar’s multimedia capabilities. Visitors to Black Quotidian can read news coverage from the black press while also watching or listening to contemporaneous musical performances, athletic events, or political speeches that are difficult to describe textually. Using Scalar, Black Quotidian conveys the sounds, sights, and movements that are so important to African-American history. The March 30, 1942 post, for example, features an article from the Atlanta Daily World describing pianist Hazel Scott performing in a Broadway production called “Priorities of 1942,” alongside a video clip of Scott playing two pianos in the film The Heat’s On (1943).
Similarly, the April 2, 1966 post focused on Texas Western Miners men’s basketball team, who upset Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats, and became the first team to win the college title with five African-American starters. After reading Bill Nunn’s column in the Pittsburgh Courier, visitors can link out to a brief video clip of the team being introduced. As Alexander Weheliye notes, these types of mixes and juxtapositions are particularly important to understanding black cultural history. “The ‘mix,’ as it appears in black cultural production throughout the twentieth century, highlights the amalgamation of its components, or rather the process of this (re)combination, as much as it accentuates the individual parts from which it springs,” Weheliye argues.17 Whether it is witnessing Hazel Scott’s virtuosity or imagining the thrill television viewers got in seeing five black starters take the court, Scalar’s multimedia capabilities create a richer portrait of everyday black history.
Second, Scalar offered new possibilities for structuring my research and writing, both in terms of the Black Quotidian’s development and its scope. This project developed gradually, without a predetermined plan for what each of the daily posts would cover. After each daily post was finished, I would share the link via Twitter. In this way, parts of the project were complete and were being read online, while the larger project was still under construction. What started as a handful of pages and media objects, soon grew to the hundreds, and eventually expanded to over 1,000 newspaper articles, images, and videos. My hope is that this accumulation of these daily posts conveys a sense of the breadth of African-American history and enables readers to explore the project in different ways. Readers do not need to visit every page, read every article, or click every link to learn more about black newspapers and how these newspapers recorded everyday life in black communities.
Through these multimedia capabilities and possibilities for structuring, Scalar enabled me to communicate my research differently. Black Quotidian could only exist digitally and was intentionally designed to be different from a monograph or journal article. As Lara Putnam noted in the April 2015 Perspectives on History, “handcuffing scholarly dissemination” to the academic monograph “imposes opportunity costs” in terms of “collective knowledge,” “individual careers,” and “historians’ place in public debate.”18 I have come to view scholarly communication, via Twitter and elsewhere, as an everyday process rather than something that happens intermittently, at conferences, or through articles and books. Scalar’s open-access format makes it possible to share primary sources about events and people—such as basketball and tennis star Ora Washington, Ghana’s independence, and Cleveland businessman and hairdresser Wilbert Black—with popular audiences in ways that simply are not possible in traditional print forms.
Digital history represents a new way to continue traditions that have long been important for scholars of African-American history and culture. Early practitioners, such as Carter G. Woodson, who founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915 and initiated Negro History Week in 1926, viewed African-American history as a communal endeavor that required popular participation. For decades, teachers, preachers, and parents could write to Woodson and the ASNLH in Washington D.C. to request pamphlets and educational materials on black history. Scholars in the digital era have been similarly creative with regard to networking and circulating knowledge. Founded by Alondra Nelson in 1998, the Afrofuturism listserv and companion website brought together scholars, artists, and activists in both digital and analog spaces to explore how communities in the African diaspora engaged with science fiction, technology, and digital cultures.19 In 2000, Abdul Alkalimat called for eBlack Studies, arguing that “eBlack, the virtualization of the Black experience, is the basis for the next stage of our academic discipline.” Drawing on decades of experience as a scholar-activist, Alkalimat led several digital initiatives, including the H-Afro-Am listserv (which shared daily information on black history and culture with subscribers) and the eBlackStudies.org website, which includes open access curricular resources and e-books, such as Introduction to African-American Studies: A People's College Primer. “For both Nelson and Alkalimat,” Jessica Marie Johnson writes, “digital blackness could not be removed from life beyond the screen and could not be divorced from the politics of everyday black life.”20
From these starting points, black digital studies and practices have flourished over the past two decades, including online blogs and journals like Black Perspectives (founded by Christopher Cameron and edited by Keisha N. Blain, J.T. Roane, and Sasha Turner) and Fire!!! (edited by Marilyn Miller Thomas-Houston and Daryl Michael Scott); large-scale digital history projects like Colored Conventions (co-founded and directed by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Jim Casey) and BlackPast.org (founded by Quintard Taylor); and multimedia websites such as African Diaspora, Ph.D. (founded and curated by Jessica Marie Johnson), Marisa Parham’s digital essays and curation projects, and NewBlackMan (In Exile) (by Mark Anthony Neal). Drawing on deep traditions in African-American Studies, each of these projects are designed to use digital tools and methods to explore black history and cultures in new ways and to bring these materials to audiences within and beyond the academy. Black Quotidian aims to build on these important projects by using Scalar to reach new audiences in new ways.
The next path examines how African-American newspapers popularized black history and encouraged readers to see black history as something that is made, and should be studied, everyday. -
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April - Archived Posts
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Click on date to view post:April 1, 1950: Political April Fools’ Day wishes in Pittsburgh Courier.April 2, 1966: Pittsburgh Courier sports editor Bill Nunn Jr. on Texas Western championship basketball team.April 3, 1954: Cleveland Call and Post reports on death of nightclub owner and numbers racket king Bennie Mason.April 4, 1968: The front pages of black newspapers after assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.April 5, 1933: Hamilton Lodge Ball and drag performances in New York Amsterdam News.April 6, 1972: North Carolina Mutual insurance advertisement in Los Angeles Sentinel.April 7, 1959: Ads for Lydia Pinkham’s tablets and topics to relieve menstrual and menopausal pain in the Philadelphia Tribune.April 8, 1939: Norfolk Journal and Guide on controversy over Louis Armstrong’s swing version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”April 9, 197: Hank Aaron’s record breaking 715th home run covered in the Atlanta Daily World.April 10, 1909: New York Women’s Business Club featured in Baltimore Afro-American.April 11, 1936: Chicago Defender on a Howard University student bet gone wrong.April 12, 1947: Jackie Robinson’s Major League Baseball debut covered in the black press.April 13, 1948: Philadelphia Tribune reports on killing of World War II veteran George Serrell, who refused to sit in a Jim Crow train car.April 14, 1979: Disco advertisements in the Cleveland Call and Post.April 15, 1939: Account from a fugitive from a North Carolina prison in the Baltimore Afro-American. Guest post by Daniel Arico, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 15, 1939: Marian Anderson’s landmark performance at Lincoln Memorial reported in Chicago Defender.April 16, 1904: Anti-profanity campaign reported in The Appeal. Guest post by Caroline Arkesteyn, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 16, 1959: Francois Andre’s male fashion show at Hollywood’s Moulin Rouge in the Los Angeles Sentinel.April 17, 1915: Ohio Governor Frank Willis blocks exhibition of racist photoplay, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Alex Bishop, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 17, 1943: African-American women protest racial discrimination at Bechtel-McCone-Parsons airplane modification plant in Birmingham, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Lillian G. Page, MA student in history at the University of Memphis.April 18, 1942: Eleanor Roosevelt calls for equality in speech at the Hampton Institute, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Connor Callahan, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 19, 1958: New York Amsterdam News on dangerous apartment conditions. Guest post by Mark Speltz.April 19, 1960: Chicago Defender on racial discrimination and student organizing at Indiana University. Guest post by Samuel Carter, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 20, 1929: Chicago Defender on teen runner killed after winning race. Guest post by Trent Cork, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 21, 1953: Washington Afro-American on discrimination in the U.S. Army. Guest post by Katelyn Culver, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 22, 1950: Housing discrimination in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park neighborhood, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Austin Demers, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 23, 1960: White woman in Alabama beaten for dating black men, reported in Chicago Defender. Guest post by Thomas Esposito, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 24, 1954: Chicago Defender on discrimination in Baltimore hotels. Guest post by Mark Fowler, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 25, 1987: Indianapolis Recorder on black student demands at Purdue University. Guest post by Derek Gilman, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 26, 1930: Indianapolis Recorder on movie theater discrimination. Guest post by Ethan Hill, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 27, 1974: Chicago Defender salutes Duke Ellington on his birthday. Guest post by Luke Johnson, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 28, 1962: Police brutality reported in Indianapolis Recorder. Guest post by Samanvay Kasarala, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 28, 1988: Cleveland Call and Post endorses Jesse Jackson for President.April 29, 1904: Iowa State Bystander reports on practical joke gone wrong. Guest post by Robert Kinser, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.April 30, 1960: Student protests in Greensboro, North Carolina reported in the Chicago Defender. Guest post by Samuel Kramer, undergraduate student at Iowa State University.