'National Geographic' Reckons With Its Past: 'For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist'

Laurel Wamsley
NPR

If National Geographic's April issue was going to be entirely devoted to the subject of race, the magazine decided it had better take a good hard look at its own history.

The April issue of National Geographic is all about race. National Geographic

In a full-issue article on Australia that ran in National Geographic in 1916, aboriginal Australians were called "savages" who "rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings." The magazine examines its history of racist coverage in its April issue. C.P. Scott (L) and H.E. Gregory (R)/National Geographic

'National Geographic' Reckons With Its Past: 'For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist'

If National Geographic's April issue was going to be entirely devoted to the subject of race, the magazine decided it had better take a good hard look at its own history. Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg asked John Edwin Mason, a professor of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, to dive into the magazine's nearly 130-year archive and report back.