Happy Birthday Paul Robeson, the New York Times’s Favorite Giant Negro
A couple of decades ago, Spy magazine pioneered the Nexis search as journalism — they’d gin up a query and publish the results as a chart in the front of the book, telling you (for instance) which dozen outlets had recently described vaguely blond public figures as Robert Redford look-alikes. (The LA Times said it of Cary Elwes andFortune of Dick Gephardt in mid-1989.)
Nowadays, full-text newspaper archive searches let you take the game a step further, going beyond Nexis as journalism into the realm of Nexis as history. So when the late David Mills of Undercover Black Man went digging a few years ago, he discovered that between 1897 and 1968 The New York Times deployed the phrase giant negro on more than a hundred occasions.
Nowadays, full-text newspaper archive searches let you take the game a step further, going beyond Nexis as journalism into the realm of Nexis as history. So when the late David Mills of Undercover Black Man went digging a few years ago, he discovered that between 1897 and 1968 The New York Times deployed the phrase giant negro on more than a hundred occasions.