The Saturday Evening Post was the most popular and influential magazine in the United States for much of the twentieth century. Today, the Post is usually remembered for its nostalgic Norman Rockwell’s covers, but beneath those covers lurked a more troubling reality. Under the direction of editor George Horace Lorimer, the Saturday Evening Post helped justify racism and white supremacy by publishing white authors whose work used paternalistic tropes and demeaning humor that portrayed Jim Crow segregation and violence as simple common sense. 

In Circulating Jim Crow (Columbia University Press), Associate Professor Adam McKible tells the story of Lorimer’s rise to prominence and examines the white authors who provided the editor and his readers with the caricatures they craved. He also explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post and its commodified racism.

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