Introduction: Editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, Percival L. Prattis fought several public battles to fully integrate the U.S. armed services and to reward the African American mess hall attendant, Dorie Miller, with the Congressional Medal of Honor for his heroics during the attack on Pearl Harbor that led the United States to enter World War II. 

In this editorial, Prattis responded to what he saw as the government trying to pressure the African American press into either silence or patriotic fervor during World War II. 

The hysteria of Washington officialdom over Negro morale is at once an astonishing, amusing and shameful spectacle. 

It is astonishing to find supposedly informed persons in high positions so unfamiliar with the thoughts and feelings of one-tenth of the population.  One would imagine they had been on another planet, and yet every last one of them insists that he “knows the Negro.”  

It is amusing to see these people so panicky over a situation which they have caused and which governmental policies maintain. 

It is shameful that the only “remedy” they are now able to put forward is jim crowism on a larger scale and suppression of the Negro newspapers; i.e., further departure from the principles of democracy….

If the Washington gentry are eager to see Negro morale take an upturn, they have only to abolish jim crowism and lower the color bar in every field and phase of American life.  

Squelching the Negro newspapers will not make the Negro masses love insult, discrimination, exploitation and ostracism.  It will only further depress their morale.

Source: “Editorial,” Percival L. Prattis, Pittsburgh Courier, 1942. Reprinted in Simmons, Charles A. The African American Press: A History of News Coverage During National Crises, with Special Reference to Four Black Newspapers, 1827-1965. McFarland & Company, Inc., 1997, pg. 84.