Black Press turns 197 and it’s more critical now than ever

(Photo: Woman and man at desk with laptop  Credit: Diamonde Williamson via Third & World Media/Nappy, Creative Commons Zero License/Open Access ))

Sunday marks the 197th anniversary of the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the United States, the origin of today’s Black Press. That paper, The Freedom Journal, was published and distributed on March 16, 1827 from its offices in what is now the Tribeca neighborhood of New York City. Its co-founders, John B. Russwurm and the Reverend Samuel Cornish wrote in the inaugural issue, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.”  

Their mission was to be an outlet for abolitionists (Cornish was the leader of the Shiloh Presbyterian Church, a stop on the Underground Railroad), reporting on the conditions of slavery in the South and to protest against racial discrimination in the North. That inaugural issue contained an excerpt from the memoirs of Paul Cuffee, a Black sea captain and entrepreneur considered the first to champion the “Back to Africa” movement for freed Black people, setting the tone for what makes the Black Press thrive.

At its peak, The Freedom Journal was circulated in 11 states and Washington D.C. It lasted for 103 issues, ending operations in 1829. But it led to the creation of other Black newspapers such as The North Star in 1847, founded by Frederick Douglass. By 1861, 40 Black-owned newspapers were in circulation throughout the country, committed to the mission of providing pathways of emancipation for the Black community. 

After the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Black Press chronicled numerous injustices inflicted upon Black people including the terror of lynching, covered by the work of trailblazing journalists like Ida B. Wells-Barnett who described the horrors thusly in 1892: “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”

The early 1900s saw newspapers such as the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News became anchors of the Black Press, giving readers essential news. such as reporting on the unionization of Pullman porters whose ranks were comprised of Black men.

In the 1930s, the Black press extended its coverage of African affairs with the call to arms for Black Americans to fight against the Italian invaders in Ethiopia, thus fulfilling reader requests. This would be seen again with the Pittsburgh Courier’s “Double V” campaign in World War II, inspired by a Courier reader for Black soldiers to fight for democracy abroad and for civil rights at home.

In Newark, the Unity and Struggle newspaper founded by the late Amiri Baraka and the Congress of Afrikan People issued calls for Black citizens to mobilize and defend themselves against police brutality in the 1970s.  All in the name of empowerment, education, and emancipation.
Almost two centuries later, the Black Press has undergone a digital shift to account for numerous challenges such as misinformation through social media as captured by the Onyx Impact’s Black Online Disinformation Landscape Analysis and a lack of funding
on federal and local levels, restricting the amplifying of stories from the community level
from engaged civic journalists. 

Working with these constraints, Black media newsrooms still produced more intentional coverage of the impact of COVID-19 on the Black community as well as the rise in police brutality and extrajudicial murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd which sparked global uprisings in 2020. 

“With so many media outlets going out of business, news about where Blacks are globally and what we are doing is low on the list of coverage,” said Washington Informer reporter Brenda Siler in an interview with The Atlanta Voice.

The legacy of the Black Press is more relevant than ever amid these challenges, exemplified in the mission of Public Square Amplified and its work serving the Black diasporic community of New Jersey with engaged civic journalism.

In a time where corporations are acquiring outlets to minimize and neuter voices, newsrooms like Public Square Amplified harken back to the tenets that guided the beginnings of The Freedom Journal - Black people exercising their power to tell their truths, and to engage and collaborate with their community members in magnifying civic journalism that matters to them.