Let Us Make Men

“For readers interested in the history of the black freedom struggle, this work delivers an alternative and important view of the actors involved in producing the black press.”—Library Journal

“Clearly articulates how gender indelibly shapes racial justice and the Black Press' historical role in advancing it. Readers will benefit from Haywood’s careful deconstructions of the complex, and at times, competing 'manly visions' offered by Black newspapermen.”—Black Perspectives

“Haywood contributes significantly to scholarship on the Black press and Black masculinity by revealing the nuances within the rhetoric of manhood so often promoted and debated in newspapers and other publications. . . . Let Us Make Men is a thoughtful and compelling study that enhances scholarly understanding about how the rhetoric of manhood circulated within the Black public sphere, shaping how Black men structured their lives and demanded their rights.”—Journal of African American History

“Haywood’s illuminating study. . . . Opens up the African American freedom struggle to more fine-grained analysis. Let Us Make Men shows how newspaper editors' conceptions of uplift and masculinity, race and resistance, changed depending on calculations of strategy, audience, and historical context. It further highlights the interplay between mainstream and dissident voices in the black press itself—a dynamic informed not only by gender ideology but also by the politics of class, social movement, and generational cohort.”—Reception

“This compelling exploration of the black press . . . leads the reader through the twentieth-century heyday of African American newspaper publishing . . . to deliver a 'gendered reinterpretation of the black press and the black freedom struggle.'”—Journal of American Ethnic History

“Let Us Make Men . . . add[s] compelling considerations of the nuances and complexity in Black press history. . . . Solid, well researched, well written, and persuasive.”—American Periodicals

“Covers new ground on the twentieth-century African American struggle for civil rights to make important, well-crafted points about gender, race, and the media.”—Annals of Iowa

“A compelling account of the gendered discourse of the black press in the twentieth century. This work is essential for those wishing to understand the information economy, public discourse, and the ways men fashioned themselves and a larger quest for black citizenship and liberation.” — Quincy T. Mills, author of Cutting Along the Color Line: Black Barbers and Barber Shops in America

“This book makes an excellent contribution to African American history, media studies, and gender history. It examines the powerful role the black press played in the African American community in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and offers us an opportunity to better define the popular limits and possibilities of manhood during the era of Jim Crow.” — Malinda Lindquist, University of Minnesota