Invoking the era of American journalism when big headlines and whistling paperboys jostled for readers’ attention, A House for the Struggle by E. James West narrows our focus to the heady streets of Chicago’s Black Belt to trace the evolution of two major Black press entities through the physical buildings they once occupied. At one point in the mid-twentieth century, the Chicago Defender boasted a global print circulation of a quarter million readers, and Johnson Publishing Company’s suite of colorful magazines could be found on coffee tables throughout the Black diaspora. As reinforced by the reach of the readership of the Black press, West’s particular claim is “that [the history] of the buildings of Chicago’s Black press matter” (4). Importantly, contrary to studies promoting a view of twentieth-century Chicago as a space of unrestrained creativity, West argues that the buildings that housed the Black press reflected a more complex negotiation...

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