Getting the Word Out: The Circulation of Black Power Newspapers

Editor note: this report by Paul Hebert appeared in the African American Intellectual Society (http://www.aaihs.org) blog, December 30, 2015, and was retrieved March 13, 2016 (http://www.aaihs.org/getting-the-word-out/#comment-69795). No changes were made from the original.Back in October, I wrote about Abeng, the short-lived Jamaican radical newspaper which, in the late 1960s, played a central role in articulating distinctly Jamaican and West Indian approaches to Black Power. That first post focused mostly on the issues that defined much of West Indians' approach to Black Power and on the ways in which Abeng reflected the West Indian Black Power movement's rootedness in a long regional history of oppositional thought. In this post, I want to focus on the circulation of the newspapers that were so important in disseminating the ideas that drove Black Power activism.Much of the source material that I used for my dissertation came from small-circulation newspaper like Abeng. I used the radical press, community newspapers and magazines and especially campus newspapers to trace how young Black activist intellectuals in the Commonwealth Caribbean and Canada (where many young West Indians migrants came, often to attend university) formulated distinct approaches to Black Power.Print culture, is, of course, a crucial resource for tracing the development of radical thought. That said, a focus on the content of newspapers like Abeng does not tell us very much about the people who read those papers, or how those papers got into readers' hands. Moreover, as several people pointed out when I work shopped various parts of my dissertation, such a focus risks overselling the importance of a particular text if the researcher cannot say with any certainty if a critical mass of people actually read it. Writing about texts was one thing, but thinking about and researching the histories of how those texts circulated was a particular challenge for me. This month, in order to get a somewhat richer picture of how print culture opened up a space for dialogue between writers and readers in the Black Power era in Canada and the Caribbean, I'd like to talk a little bit about how two papers, Abeng and Uhuru, a Montreal-based newspaper that ran roughly simultaneously with Abeng, made their way to readers.On 30 March 1969, only about eight weeks after Abeng's debut, Denis Sloly, an attorney and a member of the paper's board died in an automobile accident. The next issue of Abeng was dedicated to Sloly's memory and included tributes from noted activist intellectuals including George Beckford, Rupert Lewis, and C.Y. Thomas and Ras Negus, a leader in Kingston's Rastafari community.Even though Sloly was a lawyer, his duties with Abeng included the difficult work of distributing and selling the paper. Beyond the heartfelt appreciation for his activism that was expressed by Sloly's colleagues, perhaps as a way to acknowledge that a professional was ready to haul bundles of newspapers across the island and thereby encourage other salespeople to redouble their own efforts, Abeng's tribute reproduced the last distribution report that Sloly filed. This document gives us a valuable insight into how the producers of a paper like Abeng, working with a shoestring budget and without the support of established distribution networks, got the paper out to readers every week.Nine days before he died, Sloly went to Montego Bay to distribute the most recent edition of Abeng (only the eighth one) and to make contact with people who would be interested in selling the paper. Sloly's report suggests that, at least in Montego Bay, Abeng's distribution relied extensively on a loose network of activist-minded youth and young men looking to pick up some extra cash. This informal structure created problems for Sloly. One contact returned hundreds of unsold copies of the paper because it was unclear to him how he or his sub-distributors were supposed to get paid, so he didn't sell them. …

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