The Black Press Centering on Injustice (1938): An Afrocentric Analysis of Black Newspaper Coverage

This is a content analysis of coverage by the Seattle Times, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Seattle Star (mainstream papers), and the Northwest Enterprise (NWE, a Black press weekly newspaper) of the 1938 Berry Lawson police brutality case in Seattle, Washington. This study proposed to answer three research questions: (1) How did each type of news organization, Eurocentric and Black, frame the Lawson case? (2) Are these frames the same for both types of papers? (3) If not, how do the papers frame the case differently? The NWE’s frame was Afrocentric. The mainstream papers’ frame was Eurocentric.