Recalling Black America's newsmagazine

books

Recalling Black America's Newsmagazine

The Best of Emerge Magazine

Edited by George E. Curry

One World/Ballantine, $19.95 paper)

I can't remember when I first read Emerge magazine, but I well remember becoming an aficionado sometime during the mid-nineties. In its day, Emerge struck me as the most intelligent wide-circulation newsmagazine written from an African American perspective. And I certainly remember the June 2000 issue, featuring H. Rap Brown on the cover. That issue remained on the newsstands and on the library shelves an unnaturally long time. Months passed - a replacement issue never appeared. Emerge was no more.

The Best of Emerge, compiled by the late magazine's editor-in-chief, George E. Curry, gathers feature stories, reviews and occasional humorous asides from the magazine's heyday in the nineties. Emerge was an anomaly of the kind we need more of: Its writing was sophisticated and the focus stayed on news - important news, recent events, investigative journalism or interesting phenomena from the world of ideas. Except that the feature stories were actually somewhat longer and the writing somewhat better, Emerge was Black America's Time magazine.

The Best of Emerge is mammoth, at nearly 700 pages. Thick as the book is, it can be read enjoyably from cover to cover. Emerge had substance. That's why, despite the passage of time, this compilation can still both inform younger readers and recall - for those who regularly read the magazine - valuable lessons and memories.

The compilation is a time capsule that begins with a 1995 story entitled "Is Jesus Black?" recalling the nineties surge in popularity of Black images of Jesus Christ. The Best of Emerge circumnavigates, alighting upon the OJ. Simpson trial, the Million Man March, the racial bias of mandatory sentencing drug laws, Jesse L. Jackson, Nelson Mandela and the Rwanda massacre, to name a few subjects.

As with any quality magazine, there is variety. The Best of Emerge features the occasional personal essay, notably "The Driving Lesson," a moving account by Gerald Early, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, about watching his daughter come to an awareness of racial stigmas. One of the finest news stories is Curry's two-part "Farrakhan, Jesse and the Jews," an in-depth look at the two leaders and the controversies that strained their relationship.

Even the celebrity profiles are much more substantial than the usual fare. A prime example is the 1998 Emerge profile of comedian Dick Gregory. Although published on the eve of Gregory's return to Broadway, Sherry L. Howard's "Dick Gregory: He's No Joke" isn't a promotional piece as much as a remembrance of Gregory's passage through the civil rights years. The clairvoyant Gregory claims to have told Medgar Evers two weeks before Evers' assassination "...this will probably be the last time I'll see you. Look like you're gonna have to take that hit by yourself."

Emerged forte was not breezy, lifestyle journalism - but rather journalism with a human face. The stories characteristically are heavily informational, but at the same time there is latitude for more than information. Typically, that extra element is an insider glimpse, or a personal story.

In Lori S. Robinson's "Rape of a Spelman Coed," she pairs reportage on a Spelman student's rape charge against four Morehouse students with an account of her own sexual assault. On one level, it's a whodunit story about an incident on the campus of a historically Black college; on another level, it's a story about how the charge of sexual abuse ruptures the fabric of society, which makes legitimate cases of sexual assault that much more difficult for victims to talk about.

The book's one flaw is that it lacks a subject index. The Best of Emerge isn't arranged chronologically, nor is it divided by subject headings. This makes it seem disorganized and makes it a difficult tool for readers who want to research specific areas of interest.

The writing, however, is thoroughly excellent, which is why reading The Best of Emerge is saddening when you contrast it with the newsstand magazines that vie for the attention and respect of African American readers today. They're overloaded with glitz, Hollywood and movie industry stories. Emerge published long stories; today's lifestyle magazine stories are shorter and shorter - short on words, and even shorter on real content.

The last story, "Future Focus," recounts the explosion of opportunities provided by the Internet. It's appropriate, then, that while Black readers may be able to find Web sites that still offer substantive commentary, there's very little in the popular print media that will help them put the news together as holistically as Emerge did. That's a major loss in a world where there's more news happening every day.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a poet and critic in Charleston, S.C.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated Jul/Aug 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved