| Summary: | "Throughout the twentieth century, the black press (alongside the black church) served as one of the most venerable black institutions. As such a respected site, the black press certainly wielded important influence on the way African Americans viewed sexuality and shaped sexual identities. What happens, then, when we take the sexy, unsavory side of the black newspaper business and look at sensational and tabloid journalism as valuable and worthy source material for understanding the black press and its influence? Kim T. Gallon explores that very question by using sensational news coverage as well as readers's letters to the editor to historicize black sexuality. In doing so, Gallon constructs a history of African American sexuality and modernity predicated on the relationship between the black press and its readers between 1925 and 1950--the vibrant interwar era of jazz journalism, the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Negro Movement. Gallon demonstrates that sexual discourse in black newspapers highlighted intraracial class and gender tensions that reshaped African Americans' struggles for racial progress and uplift in the early twentieth century. The black press, in this context, served as a public sphere for modern conceptions and discussions about sexuality. Coverage of bathing beauty pageants, divorce trials and sex scandals, interracial romance and male homosexuality coexisted with ideas and representations dedicated to transforming the African American public image into one that could help African American leaders make the case for full citizenship. The simultaneity of sexual images with racial uplift in the black press demonstrated that modern African Americans possessed the capacity to be at once respectable and sexual. To this end, the early twentieth-century black press functioned as more than a simple advocate for social change relative to racial progress. Rather, it embodied core tenets of American modernity and provided a space for African Americans to work out modern class and gender tensions through sexuality"--
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