The Black Press

Abstract

The term “Black Press” is an umbrella term that includes a diverse set of publications that include a small number of religious and mostly secular magazines and newspapers published by Black people in the United States from 1827 to the present. While religious newspapers are an integral part of the Black Press cultural tradition, of particular interest is how papers outside of formal Black religious dominations and institutions negotiated their self-defined racial uplift mission with their desire to attract readers to purchase and read newspapers. This focus does not deny the tremendous significance of Black religious print culture and the role it played in conveying African American cultural expression. Nineteenth-century religious papers like the Christian Recorder (1852–) were instrumental to the publication of early Black literature. Focusing on a small number of religious publications, then, provides a window into how they worked in conjunction with secular newspapers to define Black life in the United States. A newspaper is defined as “Black” if the publisher and principal editor or editors characterized themselves as such. Immigrant and foreign-language Black newspapers published in the United States were closer to the immigrant press. The history of the Black Press in the United States is simultaneously rooted in uplift and protest against racial injustice. Two Black abolitionists—Presbyterian minister Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, one of the nation’s first African American college graduates—created the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1827 to promote self-help and respond to anti-Black attacks in white papers. The first issue of Freedom’s Journal famously related the sentiments of its founders: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations in things which concern us dearly.” Indeed, Cornish and Russwurm’s statements define close to 200 years of Black journalism that created the necessary political and social space for African Americans to recover their humanity. Despite the significant role the Black Press has and continues to play, to some degree, the cultural history of the Black Press is underexamined relative to the emphasis that historians place on the race advocacy and protest mission of African American newspapers. Close examination reveals that the Black Press’s power lay not only in its capacity to assert the rights and humanity of Black people through agitation but also in the ways it reinforced and amplified the unique and lively culture of African Americans. To this end, the Black Press created a countercultural public of Black peoples’ image and identity that was equally instrumental in refuting the discrimination they faced in American society.