“The News with Community Views”
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of these movements. Data gathered from in-depth interviews
with veteran black press journalists, as well as a content
analysis and critical analysis of articles and editorials
that appeared in the Afro-American, Amsterdam News and
Defender, indicate that these publications used the African
American community’s civil rights frame to provide
information about African nationalist and black power
organizations. Although the Afro, Amsterdam and Defender
validated these movements when their membership was
portrayed as consistent with the civil rights frame, they
did not usually invalidate these movements when their
membership did not fall within this frame. Instead, these
newspapers demonstrated how “deviant” movement expressed
racial solidarity in the larger context of white
supremacist practices. The interests of the Afro,
Amsterdam and Defender in promoting racial solidarity and
countering racist stereotypes found in the mainstream
press, as well as personal relationships between these
newspapers’ journalists and activists, are likely to have
influenced their reluctance to invalidate the work and
claims of black social movements.
In-depth interviews with George Barner, James Booker
and Edward Peeks--three journalists who worked for the
black press between 1957 and 1971—revealed that black
Convention