Inside The New York Times Book Review Podcast: ‘The Defender’

defenderA newsboy sells the Chicago Defender 1942.

In The New York Times Book Review, Brent Staples reviews Ethan Michaeli’s “The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America From the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama.” Staples writes:

The end of hard-core segregation meant the beginning of the end for the Negro press. When white papers suddenly needed black faces to cover the urban riots, reporters who had worked in the black press out of a sense of mission — or because white papers refused to hire them — moved on to bigger paychecks. Readers who had once been confined to traditionally black areas had begun to move elsewhere, beyond the need for the papers that had sustained them through the American dark ages.

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