RACISM AS “AMERICANA”

Photo: Courtesy of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency

When people think about The Saturday Evening Post, they usually picture the magazine’s folksy, nostalgic covers, especially those created by its iconic illustrator, Norman Rockwell. But George Horace Lorimer, the magazine’s editor, was a proponent of anti-immigrant xenophobia and anti-black stereotyping and under his leadership The Saturday Evening Post—America’s largest circulating magazine in the early 20th century—was a major vehicle of racial and ethnic intolerance. Dr. Adam McKible, in his forthcoming book Jim Crow Modernism, The Saturday Evening Post and the Harlem Renaissance, will examine the magazine’s portrayal of African Americans and help readers better understand the constructions of blackness that dominated American print culture, especially during the 1920s.