In May 1943, a cohort of prominent black press journalists arrived in Louisiana to watch manoeuvres of the 93rd Division, the first black army unit activated to fight in World War II. The trip had been arranged by Truman Gibson, a key member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's “Black Cabinet,” and was designed to soften criticisms of the President's civil rights record by the black press.Footnote 1 Images of the group, including black press luminaries such as Carl Murphy of the Afro-American and Dan Burley of the New York Amsterdam News, were widely published in black periodicals.Footnote 2 Hovering at the back was Ben Burns, a white Jewish editor and lapsed Communist Party member who had recently begun working for the Chicago Defender and monthly black magazine Negro Digest. By 1945, Burns had become one of the most influential black periodical editors in the country. However, many readers would remain oblivious to Burns's racial and ethnic identity – something which was often encouraged by his employers and consolidated by his public representation. Pictured as part of the Louisiana black press cohort, content and context appeared to substantiate Burns's role as a “black newspaperman.”Footnote 3
This article interrogates Burns's position and representation as an editor for multiple black periodicals during the 1940s and 1950s to shed new light on the intersections of racial and ethnic identity, literary production, and physical space. The editor's entry into the ranks of Chicago's black press can be understood as part of a “dense web of interracial associations” that drew together black and white writers, artists, and musicians during the interwar years.Footnote 4 Burns saw clear continuities between the African American experience and his own marginalized status as a Jewish radical, reflecting broader efforts to establish coalitions between black and Jewish activists in Chicago during the Depression and World War II. In addition, his dark complexion fed ambiguity over his racial identity, something which appeared to deepen through the “presumed osmosis of years spent in race journalism.”Footnote 5
However, Burns was never truly able to reconcile his position as a black press editor with his own racial and ethnic identity, resulting in a sense of professional and racial liminality. Ultimately, the editor's role was mediated by his understanding of and commitment to black civil rights; his status as ethnically, if not religiously, Jewish; and the expectations, demands, and anxieties of his colleagues. Furthermore, Burns struggled to balance a “lily-white” home environment with his role within distinctively “black” professional and political spaces, something which was further complicated by the symbolic role of black periodical buildings as arbiters of black business acumen and racial pride, as well as growing residential segregation in Chicago during the 1940s.Footnote 6 Drawing on a range of archival and biographical material, personal correspondence, and periodical articles, this paper situates Burns within a broader history of white participation in black print, and demonstrates how his experiences as a black press editor were deeply shaped by the spatial politics of the workplace and the racial topography of Chicago's South Side.
BLACK PRESS/WHITE PARTICIPANTS
What makes a black periodical “black”? In his landmark 1971 study on the black press in the United States, Roland Wolseley proposed three major characteristics.Footnote 7 First, Wolseley argued, black people must own and manage the publication, and must be the dominant racial group affiliated with its production. Second, he contended, the publication must deal primarily with the interests, tastes, and concerns of a black audience. Third, and perhaps most important, he asserted, the periodical must function as an advocate for racial progress, must “serve, speak and fight for the black minority.” This emphasis on black editorial or economic control continues to provide a useful conceptual framework, particularly given recent trends towards the absorption of black-owned media outlets by white conglomerates. However, such rigid definitions threaten to reinforce the image of a monolithic black press (and by extension black population), with singular tastes, affiliations, and ideologies. It is perhaps more useful to think not in terms of the black press, but of many “black presses” influenced by specific temporal, racial, geographical, and ideological factors. Similarly, by critiquing the binary division between black and white presses outlined by Wolseley, we can explore how these boundaries were often intellectually and interracially fluid.Footnote 8
As recent scholars of black print culture have noted, white participation can be traced back to the origins of “the black press.” The content and coverage of nineteenth-century black periodicals such as Freedom's Journal was frequently directed towards an interracial audience, and while editors such as Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm primarily addressed black readers, they also sought to educate whites by providing a heavily curated vision of black middle-class respectability and “proper black behavior.”Footnote 9 Issues of practicality and expertise meant that both antebellum and postbellum black periodicals regularly hired white staff.Footnote 10 One such figure was Robert Sears, a white Canadian who, at different times, served as the Colored American’s business manager, correspondent, coeditor and printer.Footnote 11 Even the Christian Recorder – a periodical “conceived by African Americans, edited by Africans Americans … and largely distributed by African Americans to an almost completely African American audience” – was forced to employ white printers, reflecting the broader mediation of nineteenth-century African American literature by white editors and publishers.Footnote 12
As new evidence of white participation in black print comes to light, researchers are faced with some difficult questions. For one, the historical marginalization and cooptation of black cultural and literary production by white actors remain a persistent and unwelcome trend.Footnote 13 While examining the role of white editors and journalists can help shed new light on the form and function of black periodicals, it is also true that the desire of whites to participate in the production of black print has often been problematic.Footnote 14 Similarly, despite a flurry of new scholarship in recent decades which has celebrated the black press's impact and legacy, black periodicals remain largely absent from broader histories of American journalism and print culture. Given their impact and longevity, it is remarkable that the stories of black press pioneers such as Alice Dunnigan and Ethel Payne have only recently begun to reach a mainstream audience. Why should we care about the influence of white editors, when so many African American agents remain understudied and underappreciated?Footnote 15
While these are important questions, I would argue that a deeper understanding of white participation in black print can help us compose a fuller picture of the black press's historical importance, as well as complement recent efforts to complicate and critique existing scholarship on black periodicals. As scholars such as Kim Gallon and Jane Rhodes have noted, conventional approaches to black press scholarship have often relied on “great-man” models of African American history which privilege the role of publishing patriarchs such as Robert Abbott and John H. Johnson.Footnote 16 These approaches have served to reify the connection between black masculinity, publishing acumen, and racial respectability; marginalized considerations of gender and sexuality; and obscured the role of pioneering black female editors and journalists. From a different perspective, the need to celebrate black male authorship and to construct a patrilineal history of black print has also shut down discussion of interracial collaboration and exchange in the production and circulation of black periodicals.Footnote 17
Rather than view the creation and consumption of black print by white actors as a threat to the perceived “racial authenticity” of a given publication, it is perhaps more instructive to assess how such participation enriches our understanding of the black press's public role and impact. What does it mean when publishers such as Johnson routinely championed their periodicals as black and proud, whilst aggressively seeking to expand their white audience through advertising campaigns in mainstream outlets such as the New York Times? How does our understanding of the black press's form and function shift if we view Robert Sears not as a necessary anomaly but as a figure who “exemplifies the interracial production of early black newspapers”? What should we make of white women such as Josephine Cogdell, whose alter ego “Julia Jerome” became a leading advice columnist for the Pittsburgh Courier during the Harlem Renaissance era? And where should we place Ben Burns, a white Jewish radical whom Kinohi Nishikawa has described as “one of the most important, if still unrecognized, figures in the history of the black press”?Footnote 18
BECOMING A BLACK NEWSPAPERMAN
The son of Jewish immigrants, Benjamin Bernstein was born on the South Side of Chicago in 1913.Footnote 19 His birth came at a moment of transformation for the city's Jewish communities, as an increasing number of African Americans moved north as part of the Great Migration. While scholars have often stressed the similarities between the black and Jewish urban experience in Chicago, this did not always translate into equitable social relations. Faced with a mass influx of African Americans during the early decades of the twentieth century, Jewish South Side residents sought to establish their social status as “white,” reflecting the broader efforts of Jewish American communities to situate themselves spatially as well as metaphorically within the nation's racial landscape.Footnote 20 Ironically, these efforts were often ignored by “native” white Chicagoans, who believed that Jews and African Americans were inextricably linked by their perceived “unassimilability” into American society. Such anxieties fed animosity, with McClure's journalist George Kibbe Turner warning in 1908 against the invasion of Chicago by Jews and other “rough and hairy tribes.” Eleven years later, both Jewish and African American communities were targeted as post-World War I ethnic tensions sparked the worst race riots in the city's history.Footnote 21
By the onset of Chicago's 1919 riots, Burns had relocated to New York City with his father. His teenage years mirrored a breakdown in the residential proximity which had characterized the immediate history of black–Jewish relations in Gotham, with upwardly mobile New York Jews moving out of Harlem as the area became an epicentre for African American culture.Footnote 22 If Burns had moved to New York a decade earlier, it is likely that he would have grown up in a Jewish neighbourhood in Harlem, close to many of New York's black enclaves. However, in his autobiography, Burns recalled his childhood in the Bronx as being racially homogeneous, and contended that his limited understanding of the country's racial problems came from “occasional newspaper reports about a Dixie lynching or some other racist atrocity.”Footnote 23 Following his father's return to Chicago after his high-school graduation, Burns enrolled at New York University, where he would eventually rise to become editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper.Footnote 24 Left embittered by the paper's cancellation in 1933 following a fight with faculty administration, Burns returned to Chicago to complete his education at Northwestern's esteemed Medill School of Journalism.
As detailed in his memoirs, Burns's understanding of his own ethnic and racial identity during his formative years was a dual identification as both white and Jewish. He recalled his interactions with black people as being “like that of most white youngsters in that era,” but also offered hints to the ways in which his Jewish identity manifested itself culturally and socially. As a high-school student Burns worked in a seltzer-bottling shop, where he recalled hearing the derogatory Yiddish term for African Americans, “schwarzers,” on a regular basis.Footnote 25 In the literature, scholars have often appeared unsure how to address Burns's Jewishness, with Adam Green explicitly describing Burns as a “white Jewish editor,” but scholars such as Nishikawa downplaying this component of his identity.Footnote 26 This uncertainty is based in part upon the fluid identity politics endorsed by Burns in his later years, with the editor at times embracing, ignoring, or rejecting his status as both white and Jewish. Despite such inconsistencies, it seems clear that Burns recognized the stigma attached to Jewish identity in the United States, something that prompted him to drop his birth surname in favour of the anglicized “Burns” following college in the belief that a non-Jewish name would help him break into the journalism profession.Footnote 27
By the mid-1930s a combination of poor job prospects and personal disenchantment had pushed Burns towards the American Communist Party (CPUSA). Burns was among the many Jewish Americans to join the party during the interwar years, with Robert Rosenbaum contending that by the 1930s Jews had emerged as a “formidable” bloc within the CPUSA.Footnote 28 While concerns over the rise of anti-Semitism abroad fuelled Burns's decision, it also provided him with a route into professional journalism – first as a reporter for the Daily Worker in New York, and subsequently at papers in the Mid-west and California. His work brought him into contact with African American journalists for the first time, with communist papers such as the Worker among the few white publications in the country to hire black staff. Richard Wright, who would go on to achieve widespread acclaim as the author of Native Son, became the Harlem editor of the Worker during Burns's time at the paper.Footnote 29 Another notable black contributor was Ben Davis, a talented attorney and dynamic political organizer who helped to expand the party's influence within Harlem.Footnote 30 More broadly, efforts to integrate “Negro liberation” into the CPUSA agenda during the 1930s led to African American writers being actively courted by the left.Footnote 31
In 1938 Burns returned to Chicago to work at the Midwest Daily Record, a fledgling communist daily. As scholars such as Erik McDuffie and Bill Mullen have noted, the intersections of black protest and communist ideologies fed the development of a “left-inflected black political culture in Chicago” during the 1930s, bolstering connections between working-class whites, Jews, and African American communities.Footnote 32 By the mid-1930s black and Jewish enclaves had become hotspots for communist activity on the West and South Side, while Jews and African Americans had become dominant forces within the city's branch of the CPUSA.Footnote 33 In academia, both groups contributed to the rise of the Chicago school and the birth of American urban sociology.Footnote 34 The threat of Nazism also spurred Jewish organizations to work with African American institutions, something which led to further romantic and cultural connections. Richard Wright and Lorraine Hansberry were two prominent black leftists who married Jewish communists, whilst Jewish musicians such as Benny Goodman, who learned to play clarinet at the Kehelah Jacob synagogue on the West Side, contributed to the integration of Chicago's jazz scene.Footnote 35
Burns's role at the Record helped him to forge new relationships with influential black communists such as William Patterson, the paper's editor in chief and a charismatic and deeply committed political activist.Footnote 36 Several years later, when Burns returned from an aborted effort to launch a communist daily on the West Coast, Patterson intervened to secure an interview at the Chicago Defender. Initially employed on a temporary basis, Burns quickly rose to become the Defender’s national editor, a position which, he argued, afforded almost full control over its editorial pages.Footnote 37 Simultaneously, Burns was drawn into the sphere of John H. Johnson, an ambitious black entrepreneur and budding publisher. Burns helped Johnson create the monthly Negro Digest, which first appeared on newsstands in November 1942, as well as the glossy photo-editorial Ebony, which followed three years later.Footnote 38 By the late 1940s, the combined monthly paid circulation of Negro Digest and Ebony had topped 600,000. As executive editor of both publications, Burns was responsible for guiding their operational strategy, although Johnson retained the final say on editorial and commercial decisions.Footnote 39
PASSING AND THE INTERRACIAL POLITICS OF BLACK PUBLISHING
In a few short years, Burns had gone from almost no professional engagement with African Americans to a leading editorial role at some of the nation's largest black periodicals. It was a transition that was as dramatic as it was unexpected, with the editor likening himself to “some newly arrived immigrant in a strange country.”Footnote 40 Burns's political radicalism may well have provided some common ground with the Defender’s editor Metz Lochard, who had his own connections to the American Communist Party.Footnote 41 While we cannot be certain, it is possible that Lochard saw connections between Burns's marginal status as a communist Jew, and the ongoing plight of African American citizens. Certainly, Burns appeared to rationalize his role as a logical progression from one form of radical journalism to another, suggesting in a later interview with the Chicago Tribune that many of the stigmas attached to Jewish communists during the interwar years could be mapped onto the African American experience.Footnote 42 His relationship with Johnson appears to have been altogether more pragmatic, with Burns providing Johnson with the editorial expertise he lacked to help bring his vision for Negro Digest to fruition.
In his consummate recent history of the Defender, Ethan Michaeli has argued that Burns was the first white to take on a position within the newspaper's editorial department. However, his appointment marked an extension of a complex web of racial politics which had affected the periodical's ownership and production since its inception. This began with publisher Robert Abbott, whose rigorous pursuit of light-skinned women generated fierce debate among the black bourgeoisie.Footnote 43 Christopher Reed has contended that Abbott's desire for “women with a Caucasian appearance” was part of a broader obsession with skin tone that led critics to label him “color struck.”Footnote 44 The contrast between the dark-skinned Abbott and his fair-complexioned partners was so noticeable that it was commented on in his 1941 obituary in Time magazine, which declared both of his wives to be as “white as snow.”Footnote 45 For his part, Abbott understood miscegenation as evidence of the artificiality of racial prejudice, contending that “America must either open the front door to legitimate relations or else the back gate will be torn down by the force of illegitimacies.”Footnote 46
Whereas allegations of “passing” as white were levelled in a pejorative sense against Abbott's wives, among his workforce the concept could be utilized for editorial gain. Abbott was known to deploy light-skinned African Americans to pose as white reporters for sensitive stories.Footnote 47 From a different perspective, Abbott appeared happy to promote interracial collaboration as a means of advancing “the race.” Abbott was appointed to the interracial Commission on Race Relations in the aftermath of the 1919 riots, where he served alongside whites such as newspaper editor Victor Lawson and Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Several years later, Abbott hatched the dream of an interracial all-star football game with local business owner Bill Bottom.Footnote 48 The publisher was also willing to hire white employees at the Defender, although this was generally limited to the use of white printers and at least partially dictated by market demands.Footnote 49 Indeed, by the 1930s Abbott's continued reliance on white printers had become a point of attack from rival black papers. When Abbott relinquished control of the paper to his nephew John H. Sengstacke, his successor quickly assembled a black printing crew before staging a symbolic lockout of the newspaper's white printing staff.Footnote 50
If the use of white printers had been a source of criticism, it is logical to assume that the introduction of a white editor would provide further ammunition to the Defender’s detractors. Sarah Cohen and Joanne Koch have suggested that in America, Jews and blacks “have often shared a teacher and student relationship, based on the fact that Jews were, at certain key moments, in a position of having the educational wherewithal to counsel and defend Blacks.”Footnote 51 This relationship manifested itself in various forms – from the role of Joel and Arthur Spingarn in the NAACP, to the Jewish character of Boris Max in Richard Wright's Native Son.Footnote 52 In describing his early experiences at the Defender, Burns notes that he “became a teacher” to an “underpaid, insufficient staff,” a view which could be challenged by detractors as paternalistic. Despite Lochard's willingness to hire a white editor, there seemed little value in broadcasting this fact to the newspaper's audience or its rivals.
This tension led to something of a split editorial personality. As the paper's national editor, Burns shaped its format and set much of its editorial policy.Footnote 53 Yet at the same time, both paper and editor appear to have employed a range of strategies to downplay to his racial and ethnic identity. Certainly, there is little record of his race being explicitly addressed early on in his tenure, with Lochard providing ample support to his new colleague, but ensuring that Burns kept a low profile.Footnote 54 The somewhat covert nature of Burns's early Defender career is also evident through his relative absence from its pages. Burns's byline was limited to a weekly book review feature entitled “Off the Bookshelf,” remaining largely absent from more substantial editorials or news stories, suggesting that the paper's leadership did not want to draw attention to his editor's racial identity.Footnote 55 Despite this, Burns's hiring helped spur the development of an “international, interracial roster of writers” which included Japanese American professor S. I. Hayawaka and Jewish leftist Earl Conrad.Footnote 56
Such interracial contestations also characterized Burns's role at Johnson Publishing Company. Both Negro Digest and Ebony were periodicals which marketed themselves as “of, by, and for Negroes.”Footnote 57 At the same time, Johnson emphasized the value of his magazines as tools for interracial understanding, and would go on to endorse extensive advertising campaigns in mainstream periodicals, which declared that both black and white readers treated Johnson's publications as a “national authority on negro life.”Footnote 58 The publisher relied on numerous white employees and experts during his company's formative years. One group of contributors “whose cross-racial adventures proved relatively manageable” were white freelancers such as Mike Shea and Archie Lieberman, who provided much of the magazines’ early visual content.Footnote 59 Johnson also utilized the legal expertise of white lawyer Jim Clement, while his magazines were produced by W. F. Hall, a white printing firm on the city's West Side.Footnote 60 Burns was part of a small cadre of white editors that included Kay Cremin and Mark Harris, although the latter two employees were phased out of the company as Johnson looked to hire more black editorial staff.Footnote 61 While Burns's editorial seniority meant that his position was relatively secure, Johnson risked public embarrassment if it became widely known that his leading editor was white.
In his own memoirs, Johnson appears hypersensitive to the editor's prominence during the early years of his fledgling publishing company, describing Burns as “the highly visible white executive editor” of Ebony, and arguing that his detractors often sought to champion Burns as the true brains behind the enterprise.Footnote 62 To counter such rumours, Johnson printed his own photograph in the January 1947 issue of Ebony along with an editorial reassuring its readers that while elements of Johnson Publishing's staff were interracial, it was Johnson who held sole ownership of the enterprise “with no strings attached.”Footnote 63 Such symbolic efforts appeared to have the desired effect, with letters to the editor expressing relief that Johnson was “the brains and money behind this enterprise” and offsetting concerns that the company was not “run by members of the Negro race.”Footnote 64 From a different perspective, just as Burns's byline was difficult to find in the Defender’s editorial content, his name did not feature prominently on the masthead of Negro Digest until nearly two years after its introduction.Footnote 65
The result of such efforts to downplay or obscure Burns's role at both the Defender and Johnson Publishing Company led to frequent confusion over his racial identity. For his part, Burns often did little to clarify the situation, adopting strategies which encouraged readers to think he was African American, such as writing articles using inclusive pronouns, for instance in the title of his 1942 editorial for the Defender “Let My People Work,” or through adopting African American slang as well as the “banalities and obscenities of South Side street talk.” Burns came to rationalize these decisions through the lens of amateur ethnography, contending that “I began to think and feel as a Negro, becoming as angry and bitter at moments as a racial zealot and also having to play the contrite Uncle Tom at times.”Footnote 66 While such statements can be understood as paternalistic, they reflect Burns's increasingly fluid understanding of his relationship with “blackness,” something which led to broader uncertainties over his racial identity.
Perhaps the most famous example of such confusion came in March 1948 on an episode of the popular radio broadcast America's Town Hall Meeting of the Air that was debating the possibility of civil rights legislation being pushed through Congress. Among the panelists was Alabama Representative John Sparkman, one of a coalition of southern Democrats who remained staunch supporters of white supremacy whilst championing New Deal-era social programmes.Footnote 67 Sparkman pushed back against demands for new legislation by arguing that blacks in the United States were much better off than many in the black diaspora, regardless of whether further civil rights bills were adopted or not. To justify his position, Sparkman quoted at length from an Ebony editorial written by Burns which had been published several months before titled “Time to Count Your Blessings.”Footnote 68 “I take as my authority,” Sparkman declared, “an editorial from the magazine Ebony not so long ago,” which he alleged to have been written by “an able Negro writer.”Footnote 69
Ambiguities over Burns's racial identity served to underscore the inadequacies of the “one-drop” rule which was central to maintaining Jim Crow segregation.Footnote 70 In many ways, the editor's swarthy complexion and dark, curly hair offered a “more compelling case for black ancestry” than that of prominent African American leaders such as Walter White, the fair-skinned and blue-eyed executive secretary of the NAACP.Footnote 71 Like Abbott, Johnson was often able to subvert racial categorization through utilizing light-skinned employees to “pass” as white, either for the purposes of pursuing sensitive editorial projects, or for altogether more pragmatic reasons. A prominent example of this was circulation manager J. Unis Pressley, with Johnson recalling that Pressley became the company's “official white” on business trips, entrusted with the task of securing accommodation or procuring food from white cafes and restaurants for the whole Johnson Publishing cohort whilst travelling in the South.Footnote 72
Such individual examples of racial passing can be connected to a broader editorial fascination with miscegenation and interracial mixing in the pages of many black periodicals during this period.Footnote 73 Alex Lubin has argued that during the years between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s, Johnson's magazines regularly contained features on interracial romance, and that the company was “notorious for fabricating interracial stories” to attract readers and sell copy.Footnote 74 This was particularly true of new Johnson periodicals such as Jet and Tan, which were introduced during the early 1950s and which often relied on more salacious stories to draw in readers. Burns, who was listed as the executive editor of Jet from its first issue, contended that features on interracial marriage and passing were a sure-fire way to boost sales, and stories such as “Five Million U.S. White Negroes” and “White by Day, Negro by Night” reflected the often fluid racial politics of the newsroom.Footnote 75 Echoing the earlier sentiments of Robert Abbott, Ebony journalists such as Roi Ottley suggested that the history of forced and consensual racial intermixing “had so blurred the color line that it would, in time, be unrecognizable.”Footnote 76 Many of the magazine's readers expressed similar sentiments, commending Johnson and his editors for tackling a “confidential and taboo subject.”Footnote 77
EDITORIAL SPACES AND SPATIAL POLITICS
These contestations over racial classification and identification were further complicated by the spaces within which they occurred. As scholars such as Eric Gardner have noted, the buildings of black periodicals have historically functioned as important sites of racial identity formation and public symbols of racial progress. For nineteenth-century black periodicals such as the Christian Recorder, building ownership ensured a safe space for black emotional and intellectual labour as well as “protection from the outside world.”Footnote 78 Similarly, as publications such as the Defender evolved from provincial papers into cornerstones of a national black press, the stature of their offices reinforced their growing influence within black communities across the country. During its early years, Abbott had cobbled together the Defender’s copy at his landlady's kitchen table; its relocation to an imposing three-storey headquarters at 3435 South Indiana Avenue in the early 1920s was a concrete symbol of the paper's growing influence over the field of American journalism and its position at “the heart of the great, teeming Negro metropolis.”Footnote 79
If the impressive three-storey facade of 3435 South Indiana gave “high credit to the institution” it housed, the building's location also reinforced the Defender’s role as a voice for the race.Footnote 80 Its offices were situated in the heart of “Bronzeville,” the literal centre for black life in Chicago as well as a key part of what Elizabeth Schlabach has described as black Chicago's “literary landscape.”Footnote 81 During the interwar years, the influx of southern black migrants into Chicago dramatically reshaped the city's culture, politics, and geography, creating a vibrant “city within a city” on the South Side which was exhaustively detailed in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's seminal 1945 study Black Metropolis.Footnote 82 In response, political and business elites enacted restrictive covenants designed to limit black movement and maintain residential and business segregation. This combination of expansion and restriction cultivated a complex and highly charged racial geography, situating Bronzeville as a contradictory space where “African American entrepreneurship, entertainment culture, and political activity thrived,” but which also suffered from redlining, insufficient housing, and high unemployment.Footnote 83
For Burns, the building's appearance and location reinforced the Defender’s role as “the journalistic voice of a voiceless people,” but also provided a daily reminder of his own ethnic and racial identity.Footnote 84 Upon its completion at the turn of the century, 3435 South Indiana had operated as a synagogue for the neighbourhood's large Jewish population. As the influx of African American migrants into Chicago's South Side dramatically altered its neighbourhoods, many Jewish residents moved on, leaving the synagogue without a congregation. Abbott had spent a small fortune transforming the building into a temple for black print, replete with large murals created by African American artist William Scott.Footnote 85 However, echoes of the building's former life remained, including stained-glass windows in the newsroom and Hebrew lettering on its external facade.Footnote 86 Upon entering the building for the first time, Burns was struck by the irony of a non-practising Jew entering the world of black publishing through the doorway of a former Jewish temple: “to become a Negro editor, I, a Jew who had never attended shul, would now spend most of my waking hours in a former synagogue.”Footnote 87
Sensitive to the building's role as a symbol for black achievement and sociopolitical autonomy, Burns sought to minimize his presence within 3435 South Indiana, barricading himself behind an unobtrusive desk “in a far-off second-floor corner where few visitors ever came.” Even after he had been promoted to a position as the Defender’s national editor, Burns contends that he was sequestered to a remote corner office far from the entrance to 3435 South Indiana Avenue; “relegated to the shadows like an outcast to avoid the quandary of being spotted as the ‘white boss’ of a Negro publication.”Footnote 88 While there is little corresponding evidence from Burns's colleagues to corroborate or deny his account of the Defender’s office politics, it would certainly make sense for Burns's superiors to manage his public visibility within 3435 South Indiana as a way to mediate or obfuscate the editor's broader influence over the Defender’s copy. Similarly, it is striking to note that once Burns moved away from the racially charged geography of Chicago's South Side, he became a more visible presence (both editorially and visually), within the Defender’s pages.
The clearest early example of this can be seen through Burns's role on the 1943 black press sojourn to Louisiana described at the beginning of this article.Footnote 89 Alongside his image appearing in the Pittsburgh Courier and The Crisis, multiple images of Burns observing the 93rd Division's manoeuvres appeared in the Defender – something which the newspaper carefully avoided in stories closer to home.Footnote 90 Similarly, the visibility of Burns's byline also appeared to increase the further away from Chicago he moved.Footnote 91 In 1945 Burns was given a European assignment to cover the formation of the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) in France, a privilege likely influenced by his leftist credentials.Footnote 92 Burns's articles relating to the WTFU meeting matched the total number of news bylines he had received during his first three years at the publication – an indication not only of the interest senior editors at the newspaper held in the gathering, but also of how Burns's distance from Chicago arguably lessened the restrictions on his editorial visibility.Footnote 93
The editor's experiences at Johnson Publishing Company also provide us with a telling insight into the racial politics of the periodical workplace. Like the Defender’s prized headquarters at 3435 South Indiana, the spaces inhabited by Johnson's fledgling magazine company played a critical role in legitimating its importance as a “race” enterprise. In Johnson's retelling, Negro Digest had begun its life in a corner office of Supreme Life, one of the nation's largest black insurance firms and a popular landmark on the main thoroughfare of Chicago's “Black Metropolis” at 35th Street and South Parkway.Footnote 94 The building also housed the offices for the Associated Negro Press, a national news agency founded by Claude Barnett in 1919.Footnote 95 Johnson would later declare, with only slight exaggeration, that “all roads in Black Chicago led to Supreme.”Footnote 96 It was in this building that Johnson was first able to “observe black people running a business,” and he was able to secure a private office on the second floor which became the first official address for Negro Digest. Footnote 97
Yet in Burns's recollection, much of the editorial work for early issues of Negro Digest was completed not within this celebrated space for black cultural production, entrepreneurship and political activism, but at his kitchen table at 4428 West Jackson Boulevard on the city's West Side, close to the heart of the city's Jewish community.Footnote 98 During the 1920s and 1930s, dozens of new synagogues had been built in the neighbourhood, alongside the establishment of important new Jewish cultural centres such as the Beth Hamedrash L'Torah (Hebrew Theological College) and the Jewish People's Institute.Footnote 99 It was a scene far removed from the “Supreme Sun” around which Johnson contended that every major event in black Chicago orbited during the early 1940s.Footnote 100 As the company expanded, Burns began to spend more time at its editorial offices. However, both at a one-storey duplex on South State Street and then at a larger property on South Calumet Avenue his office was hidden “away from the vision of routine visitors,” mimicking earlier efforts to minimize his presence at the Defender.Footnote 101
In 1949, Johnson purchased an expansive new site at 1820 South Michigan Avenue.Footnote 102 Perhaps even more so than the purchase of 3435 South Indiana by the Defender, the building's acquisition was tied to racial politics and geographical resistance to residential and business segregation. While his roots were in the South Side's black business district, Johnson was keen to move north to bolster his company's credentials as a major publishing enterprise and to distance himself from the “backstreets” of the South Side.Footnote 103 However, when Johnson found his ideal property, a former funeral home on the margins of the city's central business district, he discovered that its realtor would not sell the building to a black man. Unperturbed, Johnson hired a white lawyer to act as a middleman, before disguising himself as a janitor to inspect the property personally. Purchasing the property in trust, and in cash, Johnson transformed the building into “one of the most elegant office buildings in Black America.”Footnote 104
The opening of 1820 South Michigan was celebrated in the October 1949 issue of Ebony with an extensive photo-editorial which documented a series of open-house events for journalists, celebrities, and community activists. In contrast to the Defender’s reluctance to document Burns's presence within the vicinity of its offices, Ebony’s photo-editorial provided readers with several images of Burns. Yet on closer inspection, we can see how these images were used to both distract reader attention from his racial identity and to downplay his role at the company. In one image, Burns is pictured in an editorial meeting alongside ten other staff in Johnson's office. The decision to avoid identifying Burns by name, and to “hide” him as part of a larger group, helped to downplay his creative influence and editorial seniority within the company.Footnote 105 In another image, Burns is pictured alongside actress Lena Horne, who was one of a number of light-skinned African American actresses to gain prominence during the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote 106 Pictured side-by-side, Horne and Burns's complexions are almost identical, implying to readers that Burns was also a light-skinned African American.Footnote 107
As mentioned previously, Burns's skin tone played a role in his frequent misidentification by visitors to the Johnson Publishing offices, with the editor contending that his dark complexion, particularly alongside lighter-skinned African American colleagues such as librarian Doris Saunders, facilitated his “passing” as black.Footnote 108 However, as Adam Green has noted, this misidentification was also rooted in expectations over who “belonged” in the building, with “the presence of an actual white person in such a thoroughly black-defined environment [being] fundamentally counterintuitive” for many observers.Footnote 109 Such confusion appeared to be a running inside joke within the Johnson Publishing editorial team, with bulletin board messages proclaiming Burns as “the world's only white Mau Mau!”Footnote 110 Milton Smith was one staffer who sparred repeatedly with Burns and other white employees, with the company's darkroom becoming a recurrent “battleground.”Footnote 111 When white photographer Bob Florian complained that the room was being used as a social space, a notice appeared on the company's bulletin board contending that the “eviction” of black photographers had “brought a strong protest from the local NAACP branch.”Footnote 112
While Burns frequently battled Johnson over editorial policy and tone within the confines of the company's building, outside this space they appeared to enjoy each other's company. Indeed, in 1950, Burns and Johnson, along with their respective partners Esther and Eunice, embarked on an extended European tour together.Footnote 113 Burns's archival collections at Chicago Public Library contain an array of photographs from the trip, picturing the two couples posing together on the deck of their ocean liner and in front of famous European landmarks. Such jovial scenes contrast with Burns's descriptions of the frequently tense working relationship he endured with Johnson in Chicago, and speak to how their relationship was complicated by the racially charged spatial politics which underpinned everyday interactions at 1820 South Michigan.Footnote 114 Despite the goodwill of their European sojourn, Burns and Johnson's relationship would deteriorate over the following years, and in 1954 Johnson decided to fire his editor, blaming Burns for an “overemphasis on sex, mixed marriage and other similar stories.”Footnote 115
While Johnson and Burns fundamentally disagreed on the reasons behind the latter's firing, it is telling that they both noted the importance of its location – at the Hall Printing Company at 4600 West Diversey on the city's North Side. Instead of confronting Burns with the news personally, Johnson used an envoy to deliver news of his dismissal.Footnote 116 The Hall building, “made of old English mission brick, adorned with granite garlands and griffins and stately Doric columns,” was once the largest printing facility under one roof in the world. More significantly, it was located in a predominantly white neighbourhood far removed from both 1820 South Michigan and the black cultural and literary landscape of Bronzeville.Footnote 117 For Burns, receiving his letter of termination in the “unlikely setting of the Hall printing plant” was a devastating blow, reinforcing a sense of dislocation from the company at which he had worked for over a decade, as well as the African American community on the South Side.Footnote 118 For Johnson, the decision to wait until Burns was away from 1820 South Michigan before dismissing him can be understood as a way of reinforcing his editor's liminal role as a white editor in black journalism.
CONCLUSION
Following Burns's departure from Johnson Publishing, the editor found work at other black-oriented periodicals such as Sepia, run by the enigmatic white businessman George Levitan, and Duke, a short-lived black pinup magazine.Footnote 119 Mimicking Burns's literary presence at the Defender and Johnson Publishing, Nishikawa has noted that Duke’s editorial pages only featured black contributors to help “craft a front that visually ratified the authenticity of its editorial voice.”Footnote 120 In 1962 Burns returned to the Defender as editor-in-chief, where, in contrast to his earlier tenure, his appointment was greeted with a front-page editorial alongside his photograph.Footnote 121 However, Burns argues that the same spatial concerns which had influenced his first tenure at the paper persisted, with the location of his private office ensuring the he would not “be too visible to the visiting public.” He resigned from the paper after less than a year, reasoning that the “inflamed racial climate of the 1960s” made the prospects of a white editor in black journalism untenable.Footnote 122
Given Burns's unique career trajectory, it is tempting to endorse Bill Mullen's portrayal of the editor as “perhaps the best kept and strangest secret in the history of interracial American radicalism.”Footnote 123 Certainly, the level and scope of Burns's influence over some of the nation's most widely read and influential black publications appears to be unrivalled by that of any other white contributor to mid-century African American publishing. Yet to emphasize Burns's “outsider” status underplays the depth and duration of his influence, and his position within a broader history of interracial collaboration and exchange. Just as we should reconsider the role of white editors in the “interracial production of early black newspapers,” so too might we redefine Burns's role at periodicals such as the Defender and Ebony as the product of a “dense web of interracial associations” born out of coalitions between different ethnic and racial groups in Chicago during the interwar years, which were often facilitated by a mutual commitment to radical politics and civil rights activism.Footnote 124 By the mid-1960s, the proliferation of white contributors to the Defender prompted John Sengstacke to describe his paper as “a veritable League of Nations.”Footnote 125
At the same time, Burns's experiences demonstrate how the impact of the colour line in mid-century Chicago continued to manifest itself in everyday interactions, personal geography, and the negotiation of physical space. Both on the page and in the editorial room, the role of white editors in black journalism posed difficult questions, which publishers such as Sengstacke and Johnson negotiated in a variety of ways. At the Defender, Burns sought to be “noticed as little as possible” by his colleagues – something which was aided by the strategic placement of his personal offices. By contrast, his role as “that white man at Ebony” appeared to attract amusement from his colleagues, who diffused the subversive potential of his role by claiming he wasn't a true representative of his race. In either case, Burns provides us with a telling reminder to rethink who or what we consider to be part of the black press. More broadly, his experiences demonstrate how the offices of black media outlets functioned as key spaces for the formation and reformation of racial identities. Situated within the racially charged geography of Chicago's South Side, this recognizably “black” terrain helped to both solidify and subvert the boundaries of racial identity, and to underscore the fluidity and enduring significance of race as a social construct.
