ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the interplay of nineteenth-century African American memoirs or slave narratives with commercial or mainstream American newspapers. It examines how William Grimes, Mattie Jackson, and Nicholas Said published memoirs of enslavement and fugitivity, which constitute forms of the genre of literary journalism and which helped shape American print culture. Through comparative readings of slave narratives and articles in American newspapers, this chapter demonstrates how Grimes and Jackson critiqued racist perceptions about African Americans and how Said repurposed stylistic and narrative elements in order to tell his story. This chapter also shows how these writers’ memoirs exemplify a transition from confronting the stereotypes of African Americans to appropriating and adapting the memoir form in order to examine themes of race relations, education, and democracy in the US.
