Great Thinkers and Doers

A corrective history of the essential role that Black women played in the early Black press.

In Great Thinkers and Doers, Teresa Zackodnik looks at the vital—and largely overlooked—role of Black women readers, writers, and editors in the development of the Black press in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Understanding the relationship between the Black press and Black women's political and community organizing helps illuminate how important Black women were to this media phenomenon in its first one hundred years.

In the nineteenth century, Zackodnik reveals, the Black press was second only to the Black church in its centrality to Black politics and communities, but histories of its development have long credited its founding and development to the Black men who were its editors. Despite their underrepresentation in the leadership of Black public politics and the Black press, women were overrepresented in the mutual benevolent, moral improvement, and literary societies that functioned as community centers of political, oratorical, and print culture work. These societies supplied the Black press with content, a readership, and distribution nodes in Black communities throughout the nation.

Zackodnik examines the vital opportunity that this networking of the Black press with literary societies offered Black women readers to enter Black print space and advance communal goals. She also explores how Black women gained a foothold within publications—often, initially, with "gateway genres" such as letters to the editor and women's columns—and shaped the Black press. This book will change how we understand the early Black press and overlooked Black feminist print practices.