Pleasure in the News

Between 1927 and 1930, the country's leading Black newspapers closely followed a case filed by the tearoom proprietor Eva Fitzhugh against Dr. Arthur L. Curtis and Helen Gordon Curtis, a prominent Washington, D.C., couple. The details of the case were scandalous. Fitzhugh accused the Curtises of assault after having an affair with the doctor and then being subjected to an abortion procedure conducted by him and his physician father. The keen interest of the press in the case turned the domestic conflict into a vehicle for social commentary. Court proceedings pitted Fitzhugh against Washington's Black elite, including the Howard University faculty peers of Arthur Curtis. Testimony regarding infidelity and abortion brought to the fore issues rarely discussed in public. At the center of it all was the Baltimore Afro-American, a local newspaper that not only popularized the case but also provided important evidence for the defense, as Fitzhugh sent the paper's editors an affidavit shortly after her assault

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