Kathy Roberts Forde Shares Book Award From the American Historical Association

Kathy Roberts Forde, professor of journalism and associate dean of equity and inclusion in the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is sharing the Eugenia M. Palmegiano Book Prize from the American Historical Association with her co-editor Sid Bedingfield. The authors will be honored at the 136th annual meeting of the American Historical Society in Philadelphia in January.

The scholars are being recognized for their book Journalism & Jim Crow: White Supremacy and the Black Struggle for a New America (University of Illinois Press, 2021), which documents how White newspaper publishers and editors collaborated with White political, industrial, and business leaders to build violent political economies and social orders in the South from 1875 to 1920 and beyond.

“I’m especially proud of the deep involvement of undergraduate students in the research for this book and the diverse team of scholars we tapped to contribute,” Professor Forde said. “Creating the book was a passion project. We intended the book to be less like an edited book of essays and more like a coherent monograph with a strong controlling argument and rich empirical historical research. We wanted to make a major intervention in various fields and to show how the press can either defend democracy or serve the ends of authoritarianism, kleptocracy, white supremacy, and violence. I think we’ve succeeded.”

Dr. Forde joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 2008 after teaching at the University of South Carolina and the University of Minnesota. She holds a master’s degree in English language and literature from Middlebury College in Vermont and a Ph.D. in mass communications from the Univerity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.