Institutional Censorship of African Americans

DEFINITION: Americans of African descent.

SIGNIFICANCE: African Americans have systematically had their freedom of expression limited through laws and institutional practices.

Freedom of speech was denied to African Americans upon their arrival to the colonies and later the United States. Slave codes, which were strictly enforced as a means of social control, prohibited enslaved people from having any form of freedom of speech. Slave owners deprived African Americans freedom of speech because of fear that free communication among enslaved people would threaten the institution of slavery. Therefore, slave owners established policies and practices that prevented enslaved people, individually and collectively, from expressing themselves except under specific preestablished conditions.

While there were myriad constraints that limited free expression among enslaved people, many restrictions were more universally applied. For example, enslaved people were denied the right to converse in their African languages. Slave owners also prohibited enslaved people from using drums, which were considered a telegraph system. In addition, enslaved people were not permitted to meet without a White person being present. Further, slave owners denied enslaved people the right to be educated, which limited their ability to learn and use standard English. Moreover, severe penalties were imposed on any individual who was found to be educating an enslaved person, especially teaching them to read. The formulation and implementation of such policies, practices, and laws that restricted the communication of enslaved people with others were intended to foster control of those enslaved. That is, the propertied class believed that it would be able to maintain the profitable system of slavery if it could prevent enslaved people from fleeing the plantation and planning revolts. Among the preventive measures that slave owners took was the prohibition of communication, except under the supervision of the slave owner or his designees.

In addition, the ability of enslaved people to use standard English as a method of communication presented a major threat to the institution of slavery by enabling enslaved people to inform critics and individuals involved in the abolitionist movement with information regarding the inhumane treatment that characterized the institution of slavery in the United States. While slave owners developed rigid policies to prevent and control communication between enslaved people, their methods of enforcement were designed to ensure that these policies and laws were strictly followed. When an enslaved person violated the slave codes and rules that governed plantations that prohibited communication, the common practice was whipping. Generally, whippings were administered by an overseer hired by the slave owner. State laws as well as the Constitution protected the right of the slave owner to control the behavior of enslaved people, as they were considered chattel or property of slave owners. Accordingly, the slave owner’s use of any means to retain his property, including censorship, was supported by the legal system.

Reconstruction

The censoring of African Americans continued after emancipation. Black codes were enacted throughout the United States, especially in the Southern states, to prevent African Americans from becoming integrated into the American social, economic, and political system. These efforts became universally accepted and protected by the Constitution in the legislation that enforced what was called separate but equal treatment of African Americans in most institutions throughout the United States. In effect, African Americans were limited regarding their access to quality education, medical care, housing, employment, legal protection, and the use of public transportation and facilities. Depriving African Americans of the benefits of these important services and access to these institutions was an effective method of preventing African Americans from expressing their needs, interests, and desires. Equally important, this form of censorship precluded African Americans from correcting the distortions and omissions regarding their history that were reflected in US history, science, literature, and the natural sciences. They were also prevented from expressing their views and concerns that would have enabled them to contribute to the shaping of the direction of the country and that would have strengthened their own community. Other legal actions that Southerners enacted were vagrancy laws that also restricted the ability of African Americans, particularly African American men, to acquire the freedom necessary to communicate freely. These laws required African American men to have a full-time job or business, during a period when jobs for African American men were virtually nonexistent. Newly freed African American men found themselves forced to work as sharecroppers or tenant farmers, in a system of servitude for farmers. This system was similar to the institution of slavery that had recently been abolished.

Basically, African Americans were forced to work and live on the land in exchange for a substandard rented shelter, food, clothing, seed, and borrowed farm animals. They were kept in abject poverty because they were compelled to borrow, but were not permitted to generate sufficient money from the sale of their crops to rise out of poverty. This subsistence living made African Americans totally dependent upon Southern farmers for survival. African American men who were without a job or business were jailed and released to the farmer who paid their bail. When this occurred they became indentured servants, providing free labor to Southern farmers. Therefore, White Southerners were able to continue to control the behavior of African Americans.

Southern White people exerted control over African American expression by dissuading African Americans from voting and expressing their interest in various activities that would have enhanced their social and economic position. Throughout much of the United States after the Civil War, African Americans could not register to vote, obtain library cards, or use media for their purposes.

The Black Media

The mainstream media have not been vehicles through which African Americans’ views, opinions, and interests have been expressed. Consequently, African Americans have founded their own journals, newspapers, and publishing companies to transmit their ideas, points of view, and information. Freedom’s Journal, founded in 1827, was the first African American publication. Two publications that have provided the African American community with critical news and information for fifty years are Ebony Jet and, a weekly and monthly magazine respectively, both founded by John H. Johnson in 1945 and 1951, respectively. In addition to numerous publications, African Americans have sought freedom of expression through black-owned and -oriented radio stations and television programs. The Black Entertainment Television is an African American-oriented network that offers news, sports, and entertainment.

Education

Throughout the educational system in the United States, textbooks covering a variety of subjects have historically prevented African Americans from having an opportunity to express their perspectives, values, beliefs, and experiences. To a large extent, when multicultural curricula have been adopted the experiences of African Americans in the United States are generally presented by White Americans rather than African Americans.

There are many practices within the United States that result in the censorship of African Americans as individuals and as a cultural group. While these practices vary depending on the societal institution in which these restrictions occur, the mass media are responsible for the most pervasive and comprehensive efforts to constrain the free expression of African Americans. For the most part, the mass media have either submerged the voices of African Americans through omission or distorted the expressions of African Americans through stereotypical imagery. Nevertheless, African Americans have continued to challenge the mass media and various institutional policies and practices that limit the free expression of African Americans. A project aimed at teaching history through the Black perspective, The 1619 Project, has been challenged and banned in schools and libraries on the grounds that it teaches people to “hate their own country.” Since 2021, these forms of censorship have increasingly shaped public education, as many states have enacted or proposed measures restricting how race, racism, gender, and American history—particularly from Black perspectives—are taught in classrooms.

The Twentieth Century and Beyond

There are myriad ways in which constraints have been placed on African Americans relative to the freedom of expression. The electronic media have excluded African American voices from radio, television, and film. During the 1920s, when African Americans were portrayed in movies and on radio, it was usually the case that they were portrayed by White actors and that the roles reinforced stereotypes. These actors spoke in Southern dialect and engaged in dialogue that contained broken English. For example, the Amos ’n’ Andy radio program of the 1940s employed White actors whose speech perpetuated stereotypes of African American men as ignorant, lazy, and untrustworthy. In addition, African American women remained speechless in radio.

Historically, American films that have included African American casts have restricted their roles. Films have generally portrayed African Americans using stereotypical imagery. Until the 1970s, speaking films that represented African Americans at all generally portrayed them as enslaved people and domestic servants. In the 1970s, in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, the U.S. film industry began to market movies with African American casts. However, the actors were compelled to portray characters that continued to conform to racial stereotypes and to perpetuate the themes of the African American male as hypersexed, a criminal, or a shady detective. The African American writer, actor, and producer Robert Townsend, in his Hollywood Shuffle (1987), satirizes the Hollywood film industry’s systematic efforts to distort and silence the actual voices of African Americans. He depicts the behind-the-scenes activities of White directors who insist that African American actors speak and use mannerisms, gestures, and behaviors that are consistent with stereotypical beliefs. A comical scene in the film shows a television commercial for a Black acting school, run by White people, that teaches students the completely unrealistic and stereotypical Black English of the film and television industry and that shows how to perform such roles as slaves, butlers, street hoods, and dope addicts.

Another common practice on the part of the US film industry is the refusal of major filmmakers to finance movies that accurately portray the positive qualities of African American culture.

The print media is also a vehicle through which African Americans have not had the opportunity to freely express their views. News reports of African American events and community concerns have not historically been presented in mainstream newspapers in the United States. Aside from the established pattern of omitting African American’s voices, another factor that contributes to the failure of US newspapers to provide a medium for African Americans to express their views is the mainstream newspapers’ underrepresentation of African American journalists, editors, and executives.

While efforts were made in the twenty-first century to include more Black voices in media, education, and history, these efforts were often met with backlash and concentrated efforts to suppress these voices. Professional football player Colin Kaepernick, a promising quarterback on the San Francisco 49ers, chose to kneel during the National Anthem in 2016 to raise awareness of racial inequality and police brutality against Black people. The action was met with wide criticism and debate over free speech. Ultimately Kaepernick did not return to field and many also believed that he was blacklisted from the NFL. The NFL went further to try to silence players, mostly Black men, by instituting fines for players who knelt during the anthem in 2018. After the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020, NFL players took a stance by releasing a video speaking out against the killing and the NFL stark stance of attempting to censor players speaking out against injustice. The powerful video featured many top players speaking the names of Black individuals murdered by the police. The league ended up issuing an apology after the viral video for their attempts to silence players and made a statement against racism and police brutality.

Despite what people felt were steps forward after the publicized murder of George Floyd in 2020, censorship of Black media, books, voices, and history continued to dominate the first quarter of the twenty-first century. States passed laws limiting the teaching of Black history and Black perspectives in the curriculum. Libraries banned books from Black perspectives, including the works of Ibram X. Kendi and Angie Thomas. In 2025, the administration of President Donald Trump took aim at what he called DEI programs, removing the history of several minority groups from government websites, including temporarily erasing the stories of Navajo “code talkers” on the Pentagon website and purposely demolishing a “Black Lives Matter” mural in Washington.

Bibliography

Dirks, Sandhya. “Scholars Say Trump Administration is Trying to Erase America’s Non-White History.” NPR, 29 Mar. 2025, www.npr.org/2025/03/29/nx-s1-5333846/scholars-say-trump-administration-is-trying-to-erase-americas-non-white-history. Accessed 4 May 2026.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. Knopf, 1988.

Hooks, Bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. Routledge, 1994.

Romo, Vanessa. “NFL On Kneeling Players’ Protests: ‘We Were Wrong,’ Commissioner Says.” NPR, 5 June 2020, www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/05/871290906/nfl-on-kneeling-players-protests-we-were-wrong-commissioner-says. Accessed 4 May 2026.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Routledge, 1994.

Woo, Ashley, et al. “Policies Restricting Teaching about Race and Gender Spill over into Other States and Localities: Findings from the 2023 State of the American Teacher Survey.” Rand.org, 15 Feb. 2024, www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-10.html. Accessed 4 May 2026.