Robin Hayes
2
By examining how the black press portrayed African
independence and black power organizations between 1957 and
1971, this paper tests my theory of black channels.
The
black press is comprised of newspapers and periodicals that
are owned by African Americans and distributed for African
American consumption. My work here uses data gathered from
in-depth interviews with black press journalists as well as
a content analysis and critical analysis of three leading
black newspapers—the Baltimore Afro-American, New York
Amsterdam News and Chicago Defender— to argue the black
press helped facilitate transnational exchanges between
African independence and black power organizations. My
research provides evidence that 1) the black press used its
resources to provide information to the African American
community about African nationalist and black power
organizations; 2) this information was filtered through the
African American community’s master injustice frames and 3)
the black press used these frames to validate African
independence organizations in the eyes of their audiences.
This study therefore indicates that media institutions
indigenous to the African diaspora contribute to
transnational exchanges between social movements in a
manner consistent with the theory of black channels.
Convention