Circulating Jim Crow

In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was perhaps the most popular and influential magazine in the United States, establishing literary reputations and shaping American culture. In the popular imagination, it is best remembered for Norman Rockwell’s covers, which nostalgically depicted a wholesome and idyllic American way of life. But beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of its longtime editor, George Horace Lorimer, the magazine helped justify racism and white supremacy. It published works by white authors that made heavy use of paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor, portraying Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense.Circulating Jim Crow demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to promulgate white supremacist ideology and dismiss Black achievements, citizenship, and humanity. Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism. McKible places the erstwhile household names who wrote for the magazine in conversation with figures such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ann Petry, W. E. B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner. Revealing the role of the Saturday Evening Post in normalizing racism for millions of readers, this book also offers a new understanding of how Black writers challenged Jim Crow ideology.

Through meticulous research and crisp prose, Circulating Jim Crow greatly deepens our understanding of The Saturday Evening Post, whose success in the first half of the 20th century depended greatly on George H. Lorimer’s campaign to define American identity as white supremacist and antiblack. McKible offers a crucial warning for our time., Between 1903 and 1942—by anyone’s definition, the era containing Harlem's literary renaissance—the most widely read U.S. magazine published not a single work of fiction by a Black author. Adam McKible’s new book shows why, revealing that when not wrapping the American way in Rockwellian nostalgia, The Saturday Evening Post did its best to thwart Black modernity. Full of sobering detail and impassioned judgment, Circulating Jim Crow documents the forbidding height of the wall modern African American writing climbed and conquered., A brilliant new book by a major scholar of American periodical culture, Circulating Jim Crow reveals the efforts to undermine black modernity at the heart of one of the most successful purveyors of nostalgic Americana. As voices for white supremacy again grow louder, McKible’s compelling analysis of the role cultural institutions play in normalizing racism and xenophobia couldn’t be timelier.

Adam McKible is associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is author of The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002), editor of Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue (2004), and coeditor of Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2007).