Remarkable Redemption Era Music journalism

The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.

W. E. B. Du Bois [i]

Du Bois refers to three milestones in African American History. First, the emancipation of enslaved people. After that, a “brief moment in the sun” during Reconstruction. This was followed by a move backward as Southerners sought to redeem their belief in White supremacy, a period ironically named the Redemption Era.

The Redemption Era lasted from the 1870s until the rise of the Jim Crow laws in the late 1890s. During that troubled time, American media increased their coverage of African American music. Journalists produced influential writings about Black music as the voice of an aggrieved people. These writings were lost to time. Redemption era music journalism produced significant writings that embody the complexities and contradictions of the times.

Redeeming White Superiority

White grievance fueled this backward slide:

By 1873, many white Southerners were calling for “Redemption” – the return of white supremacy and the removal of rights for blacks – instead of Reconstruction. This political pressure to return to the old order was oftentimes backed up by mob and paramilitary violence, with the Ku Klux Klan, the White League, and the Red Shirts assassinating pro-Reconstruction politicians and terrorizing Southern blacks. Within a few years, Northern attentions were consumed by apathy and fatigue, and the South slipped back toward many of the patterns of the antebellum era.[ii]

Music journalists reacted to these patterns. In some cases, writers revealed a subtle or not-so-subtle belief in the inferiority of Black musicians.

In contrast, other journalists joined in the rising appreciation of African American music. They saw it as part of the young nation’s cultural identity.

The debate over African American music occurred as newspapers and magazines grew after the Civil War. Periodicals sprung up across the US. Regional differences influenced the tenor and coverage of music. Southern nostalgists fantasized about a fictional time when enslaved people contentedly played “plantation songs” as the scent of Magnolias filled the air. But Northern abolitionists correctly understood these as “sorrow songs” lamenting the hardships of Black life or celebrating the hope of a better life.

Minor Cadences of Despair

The music journalism of the Redemption Era is an essential body of writing that reveals the paradoxes of that troubled time. For the remainder of Black History Month, I’ll show examples of music writing from that time. Some will shock you with their blatant racism. Others may fool you with their well-meaning but racist notions of White superiority in music. A few will inspire you. Brave reportage by journalists, Black and White, who railed against the rise of racism. Writers who defended the artistic value of African American music. And they despised the mockery of this music in blackface minstrelsy.

When W. E. B Du Bois published his seminal book The Souls of Black Folk in 1901, he titled the final chapter “The Sorrow Songs.” In it, he waxed poetic about African American folk songs and sprituals. Passages from these songs introduced each chapter.

Du Bois wrote:

Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs, there breathes a hope – a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence. Sometimes it is faith in life, sometimes a faith in death, sometimes assurance of boundless justice in some fair world beyond. But whichever it is, the meaning is always clear: that sometimes, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins. Is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs sing true?[iii]

Many journalists believed they did. I’ll bring you their stories as we celebrate Black History Month.

[i] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1935.

[ii] Uncredited, “Reconstruction vs. Redemption,” webpage, National Endowment for the Humanities: https://www.neh.gov/news/reconstruction-vs-redemption.

[iii] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007): 175.

DON ARMSTRONG