Great Thinkers and Doers is an ambitious book that covers a century of African American organizing through the press and institutions of literacy and education led by African American women. Central to Teresa Zackodnik's discussion is the establishment of hundreds of large and small presses, periodicals, and lyceums. These platforms provided the basis on which African Americans shaped educational, social, and political opportunities. The focus on lyceums as critical subjects is especially revealing and disrupts the view that African Americans were not critical participants in that 19th-century movement. Her book demonstrates a robust network of activities aimed at defending Black rights and activity. It also stakes a claim on the spatial democracy these women shaped through communities of literacy and educational organizing.Across five chapters with an introduction and a coda, the author reconstructs a vast landscape of literary and political activity. Zackodnik asserts the Black feminist articulations in print beginning with the Kansas-based Parsons Weekly Blade, which introduced readers to a range of Black women thinkers and organizers from Frances E.W. Harper to Henrietta Vinton Davis and Ida B. Wells. These women stood at the intersection of “women's rights, suffrage, education, Black nationalism and the Black women's club movement” (24). These activities represent the constant and multiregional disruption of white hostility, violence, and racist thinking that refused to admit Black political and educational success.Great Thinkers and Doers next takes up the letters to the editor written by Black women and the rise of lyceums, which were critical spaces of place-making and community-building. Chapter three surveys a range of instructional activities at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute surrounding The Southern Workman, a periodical that has received scant scholarly attention. As Zackodnik writes: “Hampton students were exposed to periodicals as essential reading and teaching material and African American and Indigenous male students were trained in all aspects of print production” (88). The work of the students and faculty as writers, typesetters, editors, and distributors, demonstrates the professionalism and commitment required to produce it. Chapter four adds interpretive layers to more well-known publications, The Crisis of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and The Negro World of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. Zackodnik hones in on the role that African American and Caribbean women played in shaping each periodical's aesthetics and internationalism.The final section shifts back in time to argue that fugitive slave ads contributed both to the emergent practice of photography and the determined choices of African American image-construction. Here, Zackodnik emphasizes the tension between images of African Americans by slaveholding Americans hoping to recapture freedom-seeking fugitives, to frontispiece images that appeared in slave narratives, and the images made by African Americans in their efforts to redefine citizenship. The latter is evidenced by the periodical The Colored American, based in Washington, D.C. Under the editorship of Pauline Hopkins, the periodical left no doubt as to Black people's humanity. The book's coda looks ahead from the 1920s to discuss the impactful work of Carlotta Bass and The California Eagle in the 1950s.Ultimately, Great Thinkers and Doers highlights innovative and creative activity in virtually every region. Zackodnik's main intervention is capturing the vast number of literary societies and lyceums. As she writes in the introduction: “We do not yet fully appreciate their longevity and geographical reach.” Shaping what she calls a “media ecology,” she identifies “a wealth of historical African American newspapers provides evidence of women's literary societies” that reached nearly all of the U.S. as well as “Liberia, Canada, and Haiti from the 1820s through the 1950s” (5). In this way, Great Thinkers and Doers is as much about spatial politics and fugitive citizenship as about the periodicals themselves, which facilitates the reconstruction of narratives of migration, place-making, and literacy mapping in nearly every space Black people migrated and settled.Great Thinkers and Doers is part literary history with digital mapping methodologies, and part exploration of African American institution-building and literacy through lyceums, periodicals, literary societies, early schools, universities, and churches. Although it fills important gaps in scholarship on literary communities scattered throughout the country from 1820s–1920s, it is not intended as a narrative history. Yet, scholars and advanced students will find in Zackodnik's nuanced work an alignment with Black feminist historiographies and biographies that center the signature contributions of Black women. Zackodnik has produced a thick assemblage of pivotal elements of the vast network of multiregional, translocal periodicals that further evinces the literacy practices at the heart of histories of Black self-determination.
Christopher Tinson (Mon,) studied this question.