The media and the Black response

Lewis Diuguid serves as the Kansas City Star’s vice president for community re-sources and serves on the paper’s editorial board. He writes two weekly columns in the paper’s opinion section and cochairs the diversity initiative at the paper. Adrienne Rivers, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, teaches a course on minorities and the media. The former television news producer’s re-search interests include the development of private media in Africa. ABSTRACT: African American men have played a role in all aspects of the media in the United States, but their participation has not al-ways been welcomed or come easily. The dominant media have either excluded African Americans or portrayed them in such a bad light that some black people may have preferred exclusion. But over the years African Americans have used adver sity to motivate them to cre-ate opportunities for themselves. Racist editorial attacks on black people motivated Samuel Cornish and John Russworm to found the country’s first black newspaper. Years later, Percy Sutton purchased his first station, WLIB radio (New York), as a means of marshaling political power for the city’s black and Hispanic communities. As the twentieth century comes to a close, African American men work in all areas of the media in positions ranging from technicians to owners. The level of their authority and their images vary, but they have a definite presence