The History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) has selected Kathy Roberts Forde and Sid Bedingfield as winners of its award honoring the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2021. Roberts Forde and Bedingfield are co-editors of Journalism and Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press).  

The committee also is recognizing a runner-up for this year’s Book Award. Steven Casey, author of The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War Against Japan (Oxford).

A panel of three distinguished media historians chose Journalism and Jim Crow from a strong field of entries. Focusing on the American South after Reconstruction, this volume of research essays shows how the white press constructed and sustained white supremacy. One judge emphasized the book’s “forceful argument that white journalists were not mere observers but active participants in barbaric practices including lynching, convict leasing, and voter suppression.”

Judges found the book’s cohesive discussions of systemic racism and the counternarrative of the Black public sphere to be compelling and relevant today. Wrote one judge, “Journalism and Jim Crow illuminates the role of the Southern press in building and upholding America’s own system of apartheid in a way that helps us understand how our nation’s current race relations came to be so troubled. It is the right book for this historical moment.”

Judges also praised Casey’s The War Beat, Pacific for its engaging writing and storytelling. “This book vividly portrays the lives, challenges and bravery of the correspondents who covered World War II,” said one judge. 

The committee cited Casey’s meticulous research in a range of archives. The result is a detailed investigation of how journalism in the Pacific theater was, as one judge explained, “shaped by censorship, logistics, interservice rivalries and public opinion — and how the work of war correspondents changed over time in response to commanders’ need for resources and political leverage.”

“Casey told a complex story with precision, power, and grace,” another judge noted.

Forde is a professor of journalism and associate dean of equity and inclusion in the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received the AEJMC History Division Book Award and the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Book Award in 2009 for Literary Journalism on Trial: Masson v. New Yorker and the First Amendment. Forde has twice received the AEJMC History Division Covert Award. Bedingfield is an associate professor in the Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota. He is author of Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935-1965, winner of the 2018 George C. Rogers Award from the South Carolina Historical Society. Before pursuing a doctorate, Bedingfield worked more than two decades as a journalist, covering elections, campaigns, and other major events in the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Haiti, Hong Kong, and Israel. Forde and Bedingfield are co-editors of the newly launched book series Journalism & Democracy at UMass Press.

Casey is a professor in international history at the London School of Economics and author of four previous books on twentieth-century media history: Cautious Crusade: Franklin Roosevelt, American Public Opinion and the War against Nazi Germany; Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics and Public Opinion; and The War Beat, Europe: The American Media at War against Nazi Germany.

Forde and Bedingfield will receive a plaque and cash prize. All three honorees will be recognized during the division’s awards gala, Aug. 2, at the 2022 AEJMC National Convention in Detroit.

For more information on the AEJMC History Division, visit https://aejmc.us/history/