Kristin L. Gustafson
Teaching Standards Chair
University of Washington Bothell
gustaf13@uw.edu

When I heard the news of five U.S. journalists killed on the job at their Capital Gazette newspaper, I thought of students who work for our campus news outlets and graduates who work in news organizations around the world.

I thought of the instinct of a journalist, such as Phil Davis, to tweet the news from under his desk while an active shooter moved through his newsroom. I thought, as Poynter Institute’s article that day reminded me, of how the shooting served “as a devastating reminder that journalism is difficult and dangerous work, performed in service to a greater good.”

In the days that followed, I thought of the physical threats and violence against journalists and their organizations, told through documentaries such as “No se mata la verdad” / “You cannot kill the truth” and through data such as those published by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

I thought of the legal and economic pressures making news reporting difficult in 2018. I thought of verbal threats happening as recently as June: people heckling journalists at rallies; a president describing journalists as the enemy of the people; a public call—made a day before the Capital Gazette shooting—for vigilantes to gun down journalists on sight. And I also thought of Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

Wells-Barnett’s story of resisting attacks inspired me during my Master of Arts education more than a decade ago when I looked at whether and how journalists spoke about lynching. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931)—a journalist, newspaper editor and owner, suffragist, sociologist, early leader in Civil Rights Movement, and one of NAACP’s founding members—was born to slaves in Mississippi, became college educated, and investigated and documented lynching.

She challenged dominant narratives of lynching and used direct prose to show how lynching was used to control and punish black people who competed with whites. (See Aptheker, Broussard, Giddings, Madison, NAACP, Ratzlaff, Roessner, Streitmatter, and Wells-Barnett herself for more.)

When a lynch mob killed three black men in Memphis in 1889, during the Reconstruction Era, Wells (later Wells-Barnett) encouraged readers to leave the city. About 6,000 residents left; other people boycotted. After she published an editorial in 1892 challenging the rape myth that had been repeatedly used to justify lynching, a white mob destroyed her press.

I tell this snippet of Wells-Barnett’s longer biography to my undergraduate students at the mid-way point of their quarter-long, basic-skills Introduction to Journalism class. For many of them, this is their first and only exposure to journalism within a program that takes a broad view of media and communication studies.

My questions for them following the first half of the Wells-Barnett story are these: Where did she publish after her presses were destroyed? Where and how did she speak? Answers to those two questions then inform new questions about journalism now: Who do we consider to be journalists today? What is their significance today? Where do they and can they publish? What is the context of our time period? Why is journalism relevant today?

As media historians, we know that threats against the press are not new. We know the merit of critiquing the press and challenging problematic reporting. However, examples such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett provide students and us context of the physical, economic, legal, political, and other kinds of threats made against journalists doing what can be “difficult and dangerous” work.

Historical understanding oftentimes cannot provide answers, or even hope, for these contemporary moments. But historical understanding can frame these moments and the role the press plays within a longer and broader arc.

Wells-Barnett left Memphis the year that the white mobs destroyed her newspaper operation. She never returned. Wells-Barnett continued her crusade in the U.S. Anti-Lynching Movement, and she kept working as a journalist. Living in Chicago, she published in two Black newspapers, The New York Age and the Chicago Conservator. She did two anti-lynching speaking tours to Europe in 1893 and 1894. Those tours garnered attention within U.S. mainstream newspapers. Soon the British Anti-Lynching Committee formed.

As journalism educators and media historians, we have excellent classroom practices and curriculum designs. Let’s share them with one another. As teaching standards chair, I invite you to write to me at gustaf13@uw.edu and tell me about your best practices that encourage pedagogues of diversity, collaboration, community, and justice.