Lucile H. Bluford and the Kansas City Call
Activist Voice for Social Justice
By (author) Sheila Brooks, Clint C. Wilson
Publication date:
04 April 2018Length of book:
112 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498535632
This book on publisher and editor Lucile H. Bluford examines her journalistic writings on social, economic, and political issues; her strong opinionated views on African Americans and women; and whether there were consistent themes, biases, and assumptions in her stories that may have influenced news coverage in the Kansas City Call. It traces the beginnings of her activism as a young reporter seeking admission to the graduate program in journalism at the University of Missouri and how her admissions rejection became the catalyst for her seven-decade career as a champion of racial and gender equality.
Bluford’s work at the Kansas City Call demonstrates how critical theorists used storytelling to describe personal experiences of struggle and oppression to inform the public of racial and gender consciousness. Lucile H. Bluford and the Kansas City Call illustrates how she used her social authority in the formidable power base of the weekly Black newspaper she owned, shaping and mobilizing a broader movement in the fight for freedom and social justice. This book focuses on a selection of Bluford’s news stories and editorials from 1968 to 1983 as examples of how she articulated a Black feminist standpoint advocating a Black liberation agenda—equal access to decent jobs, affordable health care and housing, and a better education in Kansas City, Missouri. Bluford’s writings represented what the mainstream news ignored, exposing injustices and inequalities in the African American community and among feminists.
Bluford’s work at the Kansas City Call demonstrates how critical theorists used storytelling to describe personal experiences of struggle and oppression to inform the public of racial and gender consciousness. Lucile H. Bluford and the Kansas City Call illustrates how she used her social authority in the formidable power base of the weekly Black newspaper she owned, shaping and mobilizing a broader movement in the fight for freedom and social justice. This book focuses on a selection of Bluford’s news stories and editorials from 1968 to 1983 as examples of how she articulated a Black feminist standpoint advocating a Black liberation agenda—equal access to decent jobs, affordable health care and housing, and a better education in Kansas City, Missouri. Bluford’s writings represented what the mainstream news ignored, exposing injustices and inequalities in the African American community and among feminists.
Brooks and Wilson’s intersectional examination of Lucile Bluford’s dual roles as advocate and journalist for both the women’s rights and civil rights movements is recovered history at its best. They bring to life a lesser known figure in American journalism who became a central spokesperson through her paper the Kansas City Call for both black women and the broader black community as the civil rights and modern feminist movements built up in the 1960s. Grounded in archival research and interviews, this book contains extensive details about Bluford and the times, while also extending black feminist and critical race theories. This is a brilliant, readable text that should be required reading for all those in journalism, history, political science, and women’s studies.