By Rachel Grant, Membership Co-Chair, rlgrant6@gmail.com

AEJMC History Division member Carrie Teresa, an assistant professor and chair in Communication and Media Studies at Niagara University, recently authored Looking at the Stars: Black Celebrity Journalism in Jim Crow America, and we recently had a chance to chat with her about the process of researching and co-authoring this thought-provoking manuscript.

Q: Describe the focus of your book. 

A: Looking at the Stars focuses on an analysis of the entertainment pages of Black press weeklies from 1900 to 1940. It charts the development of celebrity reporting in those pages, and it analyzes the discourse journalists used to discuss famous black performers in theatre, radio, film, and sports. The book argues that early Black celebrities fulfilled three important social functions. First, they constituted what ordinary black citizens deemed “positive representations” of the race, though that definition changed by decade and, I think, continues to evolve today. Second, they worked tirelessly to give back to the communities from which they emerged. And finally, they proudly defined black identity on its own terms, confronting and dismantling racist ideologies along the way. Ultimately, the book argues that early coverage of the popular culture celebrities of the Black press set the stage for the work of modern “entertainer-activists” such as Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, and Colin Kaepernick.

Q: How did you come across this subject? Why did it interest you?

A: This work began as my dissertation project for Temple’s Media and Communication program. My interest in the Black press was first sparked in Carolyn Kitch’s Journalism History course, and my interest in celebrity culture and representation developed after I watched Ken Burns’s documentary on the first Black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson, called Unforgiveable Blackness. Johnson’s position as a polarizing celebrity in the early 1900s prompted me to think about how other Black celebrities might have been framed as representations (or not) of the race, especially against the backdrop of rapidly changing technological, political, and social conditions during the early twentieth century.

Q: What archives or research materials did you use?

A: I relied primarily on ProQuest’s Historical Black Newspapers database for the major weeklies (Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American, and Philadelphia Tribune, among others). I also visited the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University, where I studied archives of W.E.B. Du Bois’s magazine, The Crisis. Finally, I visited the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library in search of materials (institutional records, letters, unpublished manuscripts, and scrapbooks) that might shed some light on how these newsrooms operated.

Q: How does your book relate to journalism history? How is it relevant to the present?

A: Looking at the Stars is just one part of burgeoning body of contemporary scholarship approaching the Black press from a critical/cultural perspective. I have referred to the book as a “love letter” to entertainer-activists of the past, present, and future. My hope is that the legacies of these early entertainer-activists will inspire modern celebrities across cultures, identities, and privileges to use their powerful voices to act as advocates and allies for their communities and to help ordinary citizens to feel a sense of pride and empowerment in a world that often does not see or treat them as equal.

Q: What advice you have for other historians working/starting on book projects?

A: I think it is important to let the evidence take you wherever it needs to go, rather than the other way around and to accept that the archives will have gaps and limitations. Especially when you are exploring a corner of history that has been overlooked, be confident that the contribution you are making is significant, even if it just means telling the world, “Hey, we need to think about this aspect, too!”

Carrie Teresa, Ph.D. is Chair and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Niagara University, where she joined the faculty in 2014. Her research and teaching interests include journalism and mass communication history, memory studies, celebrity culture, race and representation, and gender studies. Her doctoral dissertation, the foundation for Looking at the Stars, was awarded the American Journalism Historians Association’s Margaret A. Blanchard Prize.