Before There Was a Movement, There Was a Press

The first African American-owned newspaper in the United States appeared on a Saturday morning in New York City, March 16, 1827. It was a four-page broadsheet, typeset in a printing shop on Varick Street, founded by two free Black men named Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm. They called it Freedom's Journal, and its opening declaration — printed in the masthead of that first issue and every issue that followed — announced not merely a publication but a proposition: that Black Americans possessed both the capacity and the right to speak for themselves in the public square.

"We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly." Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, Freedom's Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 16, 1827

That sentence — "We wish to plead our own cause" — remains the most concise statement of the Black press's foundational mission ever written. It is also a precise diagnosis of what was wrong with the existing press. In 1827, New York newspapers ran advertisements for the return of escaped slaves alongside news of the day. Southern papers published pseudoscientific defenses of human bondage. Northern papers that opposed slavery nonetheless spoke about Black Americans as objects of concern, never as subjects of their own history. Freedom's Journal was founded to correct the record — by the people whose lives were being distorted.

Samuel Cornish was a Presbyterian minister and an organizer, committed to immediate abolition and Black civic life. John Brown Russwurm was, when the paper launched, one of only two African Americans to hold a college degree in the United States — a Bowdoin graduate who had published his senior thesis on the Haitian Revolution. Together they represented two strands that would run through the Black press for the next two centuries: the minister-activist and the credentialed intellectual, the pulpit and the academy, united by the conviction that words could move the world.

The paper ran for two years. Russwurm ultimately embraced colonization — the controversial movement to relocate free Black Americans to Africa — a position that split the partnership and led Cornish to resign. Russwurm eventually emigrated to Liberia. Their disagreement prefigured a debate the Black press would stage repeatedly over the next two centuries: assimilation versus separatism, integration versus self-determination, accommodation versus confrontation. Freedom's Journal did not survive the argument, but it had already accomplished something permanent: it proved the thing could be done. The Black press had been born.

Frederick Douglass and the North Star: Journalism as Liberation

Twenty years passed between Freedom's Journal and the paper that would become the most famous in the antebellum Black press. Frederick Douglass launched The North Star in Rochester, New York, on December 3, 1847, from the basement of the First AME Zion Church. He had escaped slavery in Maryland nine years earlier, had published his first autobiography in 1845, and had spent two years lecturing in Britain and Ireland, where the response to his speaking confirmed for him what he had long suspected: that the written word could reach where the living voice could not.

The decision to launch a newspaper put Douglass in direct tension with his mentor and champion, William Lloyd Garrison, who published the white-owned abolitionist paper The Liberator and who believed — with some condescension — that Douglass was more valuable as a speaker and symbol than as an editor. Douglass understood the argument differently. He had spent years being introduced as "a graduate from the peculiar institution," a living exhibit of slavery's brutality. A newspaper was a way of asserting his full intellectual agency — not the former slave who had survived, but the thinker who had analyzed, who could write, who could argue, who could lead.

The North Star was named for the star that guided escaping slaves north. It merged in 1851 with the Liberty Party Paper to become Frederick Douglass' Paper, and it published under various names until 1863. Throughout that run, Douglass used it to argue for the full civil and political equality of Black Americans, to report on the growing abolitionist movement, to cover international affairs, and to publish the writing of Black intellectuals, including the young orator Sojourner Truth. The paper's motto — "Right is of no Sex — Truth is of no Color — God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren" — declared, in 1847, a universalism that American democracy would not formally codify for another century.

What Douglass understood about journalism that many of his contemporaries did not was that the press was not merely a medium of communication but a medium of legitimation. A people whose newspapers were read, whose arguments circulated in print, whose intellectual life was documented and discussed — that people existed, in the public imagination, in a way that an undocumented people did not. The Black press was building the record that the mainstream press refused to keep.

Ida B. Wells and the Memphis Free Speech: Anti-Lynching Journalism Under Fire

The year 1892 was the bloodiest in the history of American lynching since the practice had been systematically documented. One hundred and sixty-one Black Americans were killed by mobs that year — hanged, burned, shot, and dismembered — while local authorities looked on, participated, or photographed the proceedings for sale as postcards. It was a reign of terror so normalized by the white press that most Northern newspapers reported lynching, when they covered it at all, as an understandable response to Black criminality. Into this landscape walked a twenty-nine-year-old journalist named Ida B. Wells.

Wells had been born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862, and freed by the Thirteenth Amendment at age three. She had educated herself, sued the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad for forcing her from a first-class car — and won, before the Tennessee Supreme Court reversed the verdict — and by 1889 had become co-owner and editor of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, later shortened to Free Speech. Her journalism was confrontational by design. She wrote about segregation, about inadequate Black schools, about the unequal application of the law, with a clarity that made her enemies among Memphis's white establishment long before 1892.

The event that transformed her journalism into a crusade was the murder of her friend Thomas Moss, a Black grocery owner who was lynched in March 1892 by a white mob angry that his People's Grocery was taking business from a white competitor. Moss had done nothing illegal. He had done nothing but succeed. He left behind a wife, a daughter, and a dying request: "Tell my people to go West. There is no justice for them here." Wells followed the story — and kept following. She began researching hundreds of lynching cases and discovered what the white press had systematically hidden: that the accusation of rape, universally offered as the justification for lynching, was in the vast majority of cases a pretext, a way of destroying Black economic competition or punishing Black men for consensual relationships with white women.

"The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them." Ida B. Wells, The Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, 1928

She published her findings in the Free Speech in May 1892. The response was swift and violent. A white Memphis mob destroyed the newspaper's offices and printing press while Wells was traveling in the North. She received word that she would be killed if she returned to Memphis. She never went back. The destruction of the Free Speech did not silence her — it exiled her, first to New York where she wrote for the New York Age, and then to Chicago, where she continued her anti-lynching campaign for the rest of her life. Her 1895 pamphlet The Red Record documented three years of lynching statistics with a methodical precision that left no room for the comfortable fictions white America had told itself. She had turned journalism into a weapon against state-sanctioned terrorism, and the state had responded by trying to destroy her press. She survived by becoming unfireable.

The Chicago Defender and the Great Migration

Robert Sengstacke Abbott founded the Chicago Defender on May 5, 1905, with twenty-five cents and the use of his landlady's kitchen. He had no staff, no backers, no printing press of his own. He set type himself, distributed copies himself, and in the early months sold the paper in barbershops and on street corners while working another job to cover costs. Within fifteen years the Defender had become the most widely read Black newspaper in America, with a circulation of over 230,000 and a readership estimated — through the sharing of each copy across multiple readers — at well over a million people.

The Defender's rise was inseparable from the Great Migration — the mass movement of Black Americans from the rural South to the urban North that began accelerating around 1910 and continued through the mid-twentieth century. Historians estimate that between 1910 and 1970, approximately six million Black Southerners relocated to Northern and Western cities. The Defender was one of the primary catalysts. Abbott used his newspaper to publish detailed accounts of the higher wages available in Northern factories, the relative absence of Jim Crow, and the quality of life possible beyond the plantation economy. He printed train schedules and migration guides. He ran editorials urging Black Southerners to leave — not gradually but immediately, by "the Great Northern Drive" of 1917.

The mechanism by which the Defender reached its Southern readers was itself a marvel of the Black freedom network: the Pullman porters. George Pullman's sleeping-car company employed tens of thousands of Black men as porters — a workforce that was exploited, underpaid, and subjected to constant indignity, but that also traveled everywhere the rails went. Pullman porters carried the Defender from Chicago into Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas in their bags and their coat linings, slipping copies to subscribers at depots along their routes. The paper was contraband in parts of the South; in some counties it was illegal to possess. This made it more valuable, not less. The porters were, long before they organized into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters under A. Philip Randolph in 1925, already functioning as the circulatory system of the Black information economy.

Abbott's editorial philosophy was not subtle. He used red ink on his front pages to signal outrage. He called the South's treatment of Black Americans by names that white papers would not print. He named names, published photographs of lynching victims, and kept a running account of the violence that defined Southern Black life in a way that Northern white papers were happy to ignore. The Defender made visible what was designed to be invisible.

The Pittsburgh Courier and the Double V Campaign

The Pittsburgh Courier was, for much of the mid-twentieth century, the most sophisticated and widely distributed Black newspaper in the country. Founded in 1907, it reached its peak influence during World War II under the editorial direction of Robert L. Vann, who had been editor since 1910 and who understood that a world war created both opportunity and danger for Black Americans. The opportunity: leverage. Black labor and Black military service were essential to the war effort. The danger: that Black Americans would again sacrifice their lives for a democracy that did not extend to them — as they had in World War I, returning from France to race riots in the Red Summer of 1919.

The campaign that made the Courier's wartime reputation was the Double V — Victory Abroad, Victory at Home — launched in February 1942 following a letter from a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker named James G. Thompson. Thompson wrote to the paper asking why Black Americans should fight for democracy overseas when they were denied it at home. Vann and the Courier's editors recognized immediately what they had: a framing that was patriotic enough to avoid censorship and radical enough to make an argument that needed making. They built a national campaign around it.

The Double V logo — two overlapping V's — appeared on the Courier's front page for months. Readers submitted photographs of themselves flashing the Double V sign. Black celebrities endorsed it. It spread to other Black papers. It became the dominant editorial framework through which the Black press covered World War II, insisting simultaneously on Black patriotism and on the legitimacy of Black grievance. The federal government was alarmed enough to investigate the Black press for potential sedition — a measure of how seriously the campaign was taken and how much power the Black press had accumulated by the 1940s.

Jet Magazine and the Open Casket: Mamie Till's Decision

Emmett Till was fourteen years old when he was murdered in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955. He had been visiting relatives from Chicago, and an accusation from a white woman named Carolyn Bryant — later admitted by Bryant herself to have been fabricated — was enough. Her husband Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam abducted Till from his great-uncle's home in the middle of the night, beat him beyond recognition, shot him, tied a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw him in the Tallahatchie River. His body was found three days later.

Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, made a decision that changed American history. She insisted on an open-casket funeral. She had seen what had been done to her son's body. She wanted the world to see it too. "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby," she said. The open casket at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago drew thousands of mourners. And then two Black journalists from Jet magazine — David Jackson, who took the photographs, and editor Simeon Booker, who reported the story — did what no mainstream American publication had the courage to do: they published the photographs of Emmett Till's mutilated face.

"I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." Mamie Till Bradley, 1955, as quoted in multiple contemporaneous press accounts

Jet was a weekly pocket-sized magazine launched by John H. Johnson in 1951 as a companion publication to Ebony, designed to be carried in a back pocket and read in spare moments. By 1955 it had a circulation of over 600,000 — a remarkable reach into Black households across the country. The September 15, 1955 issue carried two photographs of Emmett Till's open casket on pages 6 and 7. They showed a face so disfigured that it was barely recognizable as human. The issue sold out. It was reprinted. It circulated in churches and barbershops and beauty parlors and living rooms. Historians of the civil rights movement have identified it, consistently, as one of the galvanizing events of the era — one of the moments when a critical mass of Black Americans went from enduring the terror of white supremacy to organizing against it.

Rosa Parks said that when she refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus three months later, she was thinking of Emmett Till. John Lewis said the same. Muhammad Ali said it. The photographs that Jet had the courage to publish — that Mamie Till had the courage to authorize — had done something that political argument and legal strategy could not: they had made the abstract concrete, the distant immediate, the deniable undeniable. That is what a press free to tell the truth can do. That is what a press owned by the community whose truth it is telling will do when the mainstream press will not.

The Black Press in the Civil Rights Era

The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is often narrated through the lens of television — the footage of fire hoses in Birmingham, of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, of the March on Washington. Television mattered enormously. The visual shock of state violence against nonviolent protesters, broadcast into white American living rooms, shifted Northern public opinion in ways that decades of Black press coverage had not been able to achieve, simply because television reached audiences the Black press did not. But this narrative, by centering television, obscures the years of groundwork the Black press had laid before a single camera crew showed up.

The Black press had been documenting the conditions that made the movement necessary for a century before Montgomery. It had covered the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns of the 1920s and 1930s. It had reported on the legal strategy that would eventually produce Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It had amplified the voices of Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's long litigation campaign. It had covered the returning veterans of World War II who came home to find that the democracy they had fought for stopped at the color line — and who were, in increasing numbers, no longer willing to accept that. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began, when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized the sit-ins at Woolworth lunch counters — the Black press was there, not as observers but as participants in the information ecosystem that made organized resistance possible.

Ebony and Jet brought the movement into Black living rooms with a visual sophistication that matched their white counterparts. The Crisis, still publishing, continued its documentary function. Regional Black papers — the Atlanta Daily World, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Baltimore Afro-American — covered the movement as local news, because it was local news, because the people marching were their readers. The Black press was not covering someone else's story. It was covering its own.

The Digital Era: The Root, Blavity, and the Ongoing Mission

The late twentieth century brought structural crisis to the Black press. Integration — one of the things the press had fought for and won — paradoxically weakened it. As mainstream newspapers and television networks began, however fitfully, to hire Black journalists, advertisers followed white readers rather than Black ones, and Black-owned outlets found their audiences fragmenting. The Pittsburgh Courier shrank and eventually merged. The Chicago Defender struggled. Dozens of regional papers folded. The economic model that had sustained the Black press through the Jim Crow era was eroding at the same time that the formal barriers it had fought against were coming down.

The internet created both a crisis and an opportunity. The crisis was the same one facing all print journalism: digital distribution destroyed the classified advertising revenue that had subsidized news gathering, and the aggregation of content by platforms rewarded speed over depth. The opportunity was that the barriers to entry — the printing presses, the distribution networks, the printing contracts — evaporated. Anyone with a domain and a voice could publish.

The Root, launched in 2008 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Donald Graham as a Washington Post Company property, brought the Black intellectual tradition online with the ambition of a flagship publication. It covered politics, culture, and society with an explicitly Black perspective — and proved, in its early years, that there was a substantial digital audience for that perspective. Blavity, founded in 2014 by Morgan DeBaun, applied a startup mentality to Black media, building a portfolio of digital properties targeting Black millennials and Gen Z readers across lifestyle, technology, and entertainment. Both publications, and the dozens of smaller digital outlets, newsletters, podcasts, and social media accounts that have proliferated alongside them, are operating in the tradition Cornish and Russwurm established in 1827: Black-owned, Black-edited, speaking to Black audiences about their own lives in their own voices.

The need has not diminished. The years since 2013 — when the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the killing of Trayvon Martin gave rise to the Black Lives Matter movement — have demonstrated once again that mainstream media remains structurally unable to cover Black life with the depth, context, and consistency that the moment demands. Mainstream outlets covered the protests; Black media covered the movement. Mainstream outlets covered the policy debates; Black media covered the people. The same structural gap that Cornish and Russwurm identified in 1827 — the gap between how Black Americans are covered by others and how they would cover themselves — has not been closed. It has merely migrated to new platforms.

Why the Black Press Still Matters

There is a question embedded in the history of the Black press that is rarely asked directly: Why did it need to exist in the first place? The answer is not simply that white-owned papers were racist, though they were. It is that the purpose of mainstream journalism — in every era — has been to make sense of events for the community it serves. The mainstream American press served white Americans. It made sense of events from a white perspective, using white frames, for white readers. Black Americans existed in that framework as problems, as threats, as curiosities, as objects of philanthropy. They did not exist as subjects of their own experience, as people with interior lives and legitimate grievances and the capacity for self-determination.

The Black press corrected this not by being a mirror of the mainstream press with Black faces in the bylines, but by being a fundamentally different enterprise: journalism conducted from inside the community it covered, accountable to that community, shaped by its concerns and aspirations. This is not a deficiency to be overcome through professionalization and objectivity norms borrowed from mainstream journalism. It is a distinct and valuable function that no amount of diversity-and-inclusion hiring at mainstream outlets can fully replicate.

"The press is the mouth, the tongue, the voice of the people." Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass' Paper, 1852

Nearly two hundred years after Freedom's Journal, the Black press's foundational mission remains unchanged in its essentials: to plead its own cause, to speak in its own voice, to refuse the mediation of those whose interests are not its interests. The platforms have changed — from broadsheet to tabloid to glossy magazine to website to newsletter to podcast to social media account — but the logic has not. A community that does not control the means by which its story is told does not fully control the story. The Black press, in all its forms and across all its centuries, has been the insistence that Black Americans would not cede that control.

The journalists who built that infrastructure — Cornish and Russwurm, Douglass, Wells, Abbott, Vann, Simeon Booker, the editors of Jet who published what no other publication would — were not simply reporters. They were builders. What they built was not just a press. It was a record of a people's humanity at a time when that humanity was under systematic assault, and a tool for organizing the resistance to that assault. The Black press has always been, in this sense, more than journalism. It has been, as this essay's title holds, the infrastructure of the freedom struggle itself.

Sources & Further Reading

  1. Cornish, Samuel E. and John B. Russwurm. "To Our Patrons." Freedom's Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, March 16, 1827.
  2. Bacon, Jacqueline. Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007.
  3. Douglass, Frederick. "Prospectus for The North Star." Rochester, NY, November 1847.
  4. Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.
  5. Wells, Ida B. Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. New York: New York Age Print, 1892.
  6. Wells, Ida B. The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894. Chicago: Donohue & Henneberry, 1895.
  7. Bay, Mia. To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009.
  8. Grossman, James R. Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
  9. Ottley, Roi. The Lonely Warrior: The Life and Times of Robert S. Abbott. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955.
  10. Washburn, Patrick S. The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006.
  11. Booker, Simeon. Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013.
  12. Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America. New York: Random House, 2003.
  13. Squires, Catherine R. African Americans and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009.
  14. Jordan, William. Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.