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In the comments on this post, people got to wondering: who was the first African American to grace the cover of Time? The answer, TF Smith suggests, was Walter White, then head of the NAACP, on the cover of the January 24, 1938 issue. It’s an interesting image for a host of reasons, I think, not least color: White’s, I mean. But I’m especially fascinated by the painting of an in-progress lynching that appears in the background. Kevin points out, in the comments of the aforementioned post, that, “The NAACP in 1938 was pressing hard for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, so it was no accident that White (or the editors) pressed for the image.” No doubt that’s right. Still, I’m surprised that Time ran that cover. So if anyone knows more of the back story here, please post a comment. Thanks.
The Edge of the American West 
30 comments
August 7, 2009 at 2:22 pm
Vance Maverick
Here’s the cover story, I think. Interesting though uncomfortable reading — doesn’t seem to identify it.
August 7, 2009 at 2:32 pm
TF Smith
Wow – fascinating, the overall style and tone, the sympathy toward White and the NAACP position (albeit without any quotes – that is weird), the snarkiness toward the southerners…much less the bizarre capitalization.
Old line Republican paternalism and nobless oblige with a hint of Popular Front?
August 7, 2009 at 3:39 pm
Kathy
Luce saw himself as a racial liberal, and Time ran many anti-lynching stories. But the magazine also criticized “uppity” African Americans, calling them “blackamorons.” Apparently, the editors believed that this showed their journalistic objectivity.
August 7, 2009 at 3:42 pm
TF Smith
Dr. K – Really? “blackamorons” in print? That seems pretty low-rent for an Eastern Establishment type…Was this in the 1920s and 1930s, or later?
Thanks
August 7, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Vance
The only instance Google finds at time.com is in a theater review from 1925.
Lots of “blackamoor” — here in political coverage from 1930.
August 7, 2009 at 4:03 pm
TF Smith
Vance –
That quote from the theater review in Time is interesting – it is still nasty, but suggests at least some sympathy to AA and distaste for minstrely.
The political story is something – “blackamoor” is used both (sort of) neutrally, as a synonym for negro, and more negatively, as in Republican vote wrangling; the most respectful/polite synonyms appear to be negro and colored.
August 7, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Kathy
TF Smith: I got the “blackamoron” quote from James Baughman’s excellent book on Luce; here the page:
http://books.google.com/books?id=2cEGllc6YBoC&pg=PA50&dq=blackamorons&ei=8LV8StToOIv8lQSA_MCcCg#v=onepage&q=blackamorons&f=false
August 7, 2009 at 4:40 pm
TF Smith
Dr. K – Thanks; Luce et al were men of their times (in more ways than one), obviously…
August 7, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Randy
Bob Edwards Weekend has been rebroadcasting Edward Murrow’s “This I Believe” series and on June 12, 2009 they had Walter White’s contribution. I had never heard of him before, and on that show they provided some interesting background on Mr. White. They didn’t mention this Time cover, but it’s still an interesting show
August 8, 2009 at 12:13 am
Linkmeister
Nice quote in there (he said sarcastically) from that courtly old bastard Richard Russell, too. Seems to me if the Senate had any historical sense it would rename its oldest office building for someone other than him. Why not LBJ?
August 8, 2009 at 10:05 am
dance
It’s not so much bizarre capitalization as bizarrely giving everyone a title, even if that title has to be “Millhand” “Planter” “Negro” “Negro Valet” etc. Is that normal 1920s style? Very odd to read.
I did not know that was how White had started out. Pretty incredible work, undercover with the lynch mobs.
August 8, 2009 at 1:13 pm
JPool
From the article:
“[White] himself does not know how much Negro blood runs in his veins; Harvard’s far-ranging Anthropologist Earnest Alfred Hooton computes it at 1/64.”
Ah, the waning days of “racial science.” If only today’s academics were so available to the press for authoritatives computations.
dance, obviously being Negro was a profession as much as a title; a full-time job, as it were.
August 8, 2009 at 1:17 pm
ari
I’m 1/64 authoritative, JPool. It’s all from my mother’s side, of course. My father’s people were but humble worker bees.
August 8, 2009 at 3:14 pm
Vance
Time was known for having a strange style — one mark was profession-as-title, e.g. Historian Ari Kelman, and another was portmanteau words invented on the spot (like “blackamoron” above, though most were merely irritating rather than offensive).
August 8, 2009 at 5:54 pm
Ben Alpers
Time’s distinctive style was also taken up by the March of Time, the extended newsreel series that Time, Inc. began in 1935 and that is perhaps best known to audiences today through the parody of it that is the second sequence in Citizen Kane: News on the March.
“Legendary was the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decried his stately pleasure dome….”
August 8, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Ben Alpers
Dept. of Preview Button, Please:
“Legendary was the Xanadu where Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome….”
August 8, 2009 at 7:58 pm
peter ramus
The parody in Citizen Kane was undoubtedly a nod to Wolcott Gibbs’ immortal “backward the sentences ran until reeled the mind” in his famous New Yorker profile of Henry Luce, which singlesentencely brought a halt to most of that kind of stylistic nonsense in Time.
August 8, 2009 at 8:08 pm
peter ramus
Department of Preview Button Part II:
s/b “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.”
August 9, 2009 at 8:37 am
kevin
“[White] himself does not know how much Negro blood runs in his veins; Harvard’s far-ranging Anthropologist Earnest Alfred Hooton computes it at 1/64.”
I’m sure Walter White was flattered to have his ancestry determined by the man who was then championing the idea that African Americans were biologically closer to apes than white men, and also claiming there was “scientific” proof of the natural tendencies of blacks to be criminals.
August 9, 2009 at 9:58 am
dance
Incidentally, to bring two threads together—one of the birther claims is that Obama’s father was really an Arab from Kenya, and so he’s not black because in the US you have to be at least 12.5% of African-American descent to be black, so he’s not the first black president at all! (they use percent, not 1/8th) I don’t see how that would be a triumph even if it weren’t nonsense. But I guess by that logic, Walter White isn’t black either, head of NAACP notwithstanding.
August 9, 2009 at 10:49 am
JPool
When I’ve taught the Hamitic hypothesis and all that (it’s not strictly speaking neccessary, but it helps students understand why earlier accounts of Bantu migration and Egyptian cultural diffusion are not to be trusted), students are always blown away by the fact that racist science actually gets nastier and more academically established in the twentieth century. It’s easier for them to think of a steady course of progress, rather than the rocky and uneven course of history.
August 10, 2009 at 6:34 am
grackle
It is a sad fact of modern life, that a full three days after posting, no cracker-jack art historian has stopped by to ID this wonderful painting. The style looks so familiar but long depressing Google searches for lynching paintings have left me as clueless. Ari, where is your art historian public?
August 10, 2009 at 10:59 am
TF Smith
I am no art historian, but it does have sort of TH Benton look to it:
August 10, 2009 at 11:07 am
grackle
Yes, You’re right, I thought of him myself but I couldn’t verify it and I have doubts. I’d say certainly a similar school.
August 10, 2009 at 11:11 am
TF Smith
Do any of the Edgers have friends at Missouri or Kansas? I’d expect those are centers of Bentoniana…
August 10, 2009 at 11:28 am
kevin
Benton did do a 1934 painting titled “A Lynching,” but it looks nothing like this one.
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA98/haven/wood/benton2.html
August 10, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Vance
There’s an interesting chapter on the exhibit White organized in Dora Apel’s Imagery of Lynching (2004). But I don’t see the image there. As Kevin says, it’s not the Benton.
(But check out Noguchi’s sculpture. One of these days I’ll get it together to write a post on him — it won’t be a short one either. Curiously, in light of Apel’s discussion, the image online at the Noguchi Museum appears not to be emasculated.)
August 10, 2009 at 1:15 pm
Vance
(FWIW, the sculpture looks shiny in the image Apel reprints. Either there are two versions, or it’s gone dull with time.)
August 10, 2009 at 1:43 pm
Vance
Also, while I’m commenting in dribs and drabs between urgent activities in other windows, the various accounts make clear that White gathered these pictures not only for the exhibit, but for the offices of the NAACP. So a photographer who visited him there for an official photo would have had many such to choose from.
August 11, 2009 at 3:34 pm
andrew
I took a look at the print cover, since I can’t read the photo credit on the digitized cover. The caption says “Color photograph for TIME by Leigh Irwin & Nicholas Langen.” The same pair are credited on some other covers in the bound volume I looked at. Flipping through the Jan. 24, 1938 issue, I couldn’t find any sign of who did the painting in the background of the cover.