20th century magazine journalism | Drums in the Global Village

https://www.vanityfair.com/story/the-next-black-president?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=vf&utm_mailing=VF_VFD_PAID_062226&utm_medium=email&bxid=5c006f54cff06b61476a8260&cndid=55549133&hasha=c2b53ead44f69c1caddbc60036220e6e&hashc=b43e77ef8511b897f121d6fce05314e5f23b9c83c552b32c518c75fbee8552d6&mbid=&utm_campaign=VF_VFD_PAID_062226&utm_term=VYF_Cocktail_Hour_PAID

************************

And here’s my (repost of my) extensive talk on #JaredBall ‘s #imixwhatilike about #TaNehisiCoates when Coates published #TheMessage, his book featuring an essay on #Gaza. I jokingly call this my #KattWilliams interview 🙂

I put this in the Comments two days ago:

Listening to, and laughing about, this rant almost two years later…..

UPDATES:

There is now a book on the history of #TheVillageVoice. It’s called The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of #TheVillageVoice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture.

There is a book about Coates’ run on the #MarvelComics character #BlackPanther. It’s called Writing Black Panther: Ta-Nehisi Coates and Representation Struggles.

2:02:45: Freedom Fighter: My Life as a Soldier in the #BlackLiberationArmy, #AshaBandele‘s collaboration with Black #politicalprisoner #SekouOdinga, is due to be out October 2026, as of this writing.

CORRECTIONS:

14:07 ; 2:01:55: Political prisoner #MaroonShoatz openly said the goal of his 2024 book #IAmMaroon was to get a film deal, a la “#TheHurricane.”

37:41: The James Baldwin essay that pissed #RichardWright off was “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” Baldwin’s obit of Wright was “Alas, Poor Richard.”

50:26: I meant ” AMIRI BARAKA’s daughters from Hettie…”

59:41: The #JohnHenrikClarke essay was called “The Alienation of James Baldwin.”

#TaNehisiCoates #ImixwhatIlike #TheMessage #Blackwriting #politicaleconomy #JamesBaldwin #AlexHaley #AmiriBaraka #CornelWest #MayaAngelou #magazinejournalismhistory #Palestine #literaryjournalism

*Writing history, making history*, *repeating for generations*, *then* *becoming history*

Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett, Jr.

E. James West.

Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 328 pp., $27.95.

West uses his mastery of the histories of Black Chicago and Ebony/Jet well here, significantly building on and adding to his previous work on the topic. An author explains an author in a wonderful intellectual history that sticks to very exciting facts: Lerone Bennett rises in a rising time, gaining knowledge and experience and pointing them toward what he would call in print the Black Revolution. He transforms himself from journalist to historian, from moderate, Kappa Morehouse Man to Pan-Africanist revolutionary. Absolutely necessary for those who want to understand 20th-century Black press history and, perhaps more importantly, how one “Black-famous” author’s Black history texts–all the outgrowth of one national Black magazine, a 20th-century legend once on every Black American coffee table–were significant weapons in the Black struggle before African-Americans had full access to local and national broadcasting and now international streaming.