{"id":2129,"date":"2018-12-04T01:29:29","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T06:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2129"},"modified":"2018-12-04T01:29:29","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T06:29:29","slug":"thoughts-on-unseen-unpublished-black-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/?p=2129","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on Unseen: Unpublished Black History"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">On Friday the 29th, I had the opportunity to attend <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the NYT Archives<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">. The room was packed and the event organizers had to keep bringing in more chairs for the attendees of the event. It was exciting to see that so many members of the Barnard community were interested in learning more about Black history.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One thing that I found surprising was that photography was not always an important component of the New York Times. In fact, it wasn\u2019t until recently that photography was seen as deserving of space in the paper. The images that were commonly placed in the NYT were ads. This is frustrating because photojournalism is a moving and inspiring way to tell stories and it\u2019s sad that the opportunity to utilize photos as a form of storytelling was often ignored by the NYT.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of the writers of <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Unseen: Unpublished Black History <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">said the book was about \u201cwho wasn\u2019t there\u201d when stories were being told. She said that the book explored what the New York Times chose to cover or not cover and why. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">I wonder why the NYT didn\u2019t believe that these photos were worth publishing when they were taken. If they didn\u2019t think that these photos were worth publishing, why were they taken in the first place?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">One of my favorite stories discussed at the event was the story of Lena Horne. Lena Horne was a Black singer, actress, and dancer. Horne had trouble finding an apartment in the city because she was Black. Her good friend <\/span><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Harry Belafonte, who was a Black musician, was also having a difficult time getting an apartment in the city. As a result, Belafonte decided to send his white publicist to rent an apartment for him. When the owners found out Belafonte was Black, they refused to give him the apartment. Furious, Belafonte decided to secretly buy the entire building and give Lena Horne a penthouse in the building. This story is so beautiful and inspiring because I don\u2019t always hear stories about Black people winning. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">This story is one of the many that was hidden in the NYT archives and is now being brought back to life by this book. It\u2019s sad that these inspiring stories were hidden for so long. More importantly, it\u2019s frustrating to think about how Americans consuming the news were missing important elements of the stories they were reading about, simply because these images were never printed.<\/span><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_2130\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><a href=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/UBH-Lena-Horne-master768-v4.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2130\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-2130\" src=\"http:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/UBH-Lena-Horne-master768-v4-300x196.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"196\" srcset=\"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/UBH-Lena-Horne-master768-v4-300x196.jpg 300w, https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/12\/UBH-Lena-Horne-master768-v4.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-2130\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A photo of Lena Horne in her apartment.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Friday the 29th, I had the opportunity to attend Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the NYT Archives. The room was packed and the event organizers had to keep bringing in more chairs for the attendees of the event. It was exciting to see that so many members of the Barnard community were interested in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2129"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2131,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2129\/revisions\/2131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bcrw.barnard.edu\/digitalshange\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}