"George Padmore of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender: A Decidedly Different World War II Correspondent" Patrick Washburn, Professor E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, Ohio University Thursday, Feb. 21, 2 p.m. Carroll Hall Room 340
Patrick S. Washburn is a professor in the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, where he has been on the faculty since 1984, and was assistant director of the school from 1989 to 2000. He received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Baylor University in 1963, a master’s in journalism from Indiana University in 1973, and a doctorate from Indiana in mass communications in 1984.
His dissertation was published in 1986 by Oxford University Press (A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press during World War II), and in 2000 it was named by Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly as one of the thirty-five most significant mass communication books published in the twentieth century. In 2005, Greenwood Press published a book that he co-authored on war correspondents in the European theater in World War II, and Northwestern University Press published The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom in 2006.� In 2007, it was the winner of the Tankard Award, which is given annually by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for the best book that breaks new ground that was published in the previous year by an AEJMC member.
He has been an invited speaker twice at the Smithsonian about the black press in World War II, and he also has given talks on the same subject at the National D-Day Museum, a number of universities around the country, and an international conference in Edinburgh, Scotland. In addition, he was an advisor for a 1999 PBS documentary on the history of black newspapers, The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords, which won a duPont/Columbia Award. In 2007, he was the recipient of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Eleanor Blum Distinguished Service to Research Award, which has been given only eleven times since it was established in 1980. He has been head of the AEJMC’s History Division and president of the American Journalism Historians Association. Since 2001, he has been editor of Journalism History, the country’s oldest mass communication history journal.
Title: George Padmore of the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender: A Decidedly Different World War II Correspondent
Abstract: George Padmore was one of twenty-seven war correspondents for black newspapers in World War II and one of only two who served the entire time that the U.S. was in the war. Writing almost 600 bylined articles for both the Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, the two largest and most influential black papers in the country, he was not a typical war correspondent. He spent the entire war in London, never going to the front lines to cover a battle or flying on a bombing run or being on a naval raid. As expected, he covered black American soldiers in England and played up the contributions that the “Dixie boys” were making to the Allied war effort. But the heavy majority of his coverage did not deal with Americans. Instead, he wrote extensively about colonial imperialism, particularly as it was practiced by Great Britain, and how blacks around the world were contributing to winning the war and what their fates might be following it. These stories were clearly important to U.S. blacks, who viewed the war as a chance for blacks to make great gains not only in America but worldwide. The presence of the large volume of such stories by Padmore is significant, and breaks new ground, because historians have ignored the fact that black papers during the war were covering blacks in other countries rather than just in the U.S.
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