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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 42. The Negro Press - 2. The Growth of the Negro Press
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Chapter 42. The Negro Press 913
The most famous of them was the North StaVy edited by Frederick Doug-
lass. It continued to be published—later as Frederick Douglasses Paper—
until Emancipation, and had some white subscribers. Emancipation marked
the end of this first period of Negro journalism. For the later development
of the Negro press the tradition of militancy set during this first period was
important. Many of those journals had been protesting, not only against
slavery but also against discrimination in the North, and had advocated
full civil liberties. They generally kept a high intellectual standard. James
Weldon Johnson testifies:
It is astounding on glancing backward to see how well written and edited were the
majority of these periodicals. I’hey stated and pleaded their cause with a logic and
eloquence which seldom fell below the highest level of the journalism of the period.
And yet it is not, after all, astounding—there was the great cause, the auspicious time;
and, by some curiously propitious means there were, too, the men able to measure up
to the cause and the time. There were among the editors of these papers, especially
in New York, men of ability and men of learning.^^
After Emancipation, Negro papers could be published and distributed In
the South. The campaign of Negroes to learn to read and the high prestige
of the printed word provided a steadily growing Negro public. Negro
papers started after Emancipation were ^^organs” for the Republican party.
The Restoration was a hard blow for the Negro press, but the slow migra-
tion to the North and the gradually rising proportion of literates in the
Negro population sustained a rising number of Negro newspapers.
In 1870 there were only about 10 Negro journals in America^ in 1880
there were 31 j
and in 1890 there were 154.^® In 1880 there were Negro
publications in nineteen states 5
in 1890 in twenty-eight states. Most of
these journals had a small circulation j
many were only fly-by-night enter-
prises. Some of them, as the Washington Bee, the Cleveland Gazette^ the
Philadelphia Tribune and the New York A gey were, however, destined
to have many years of national influence. Their success was largely the
result of the of the personalities of their editors.”^’^
From the Negroes’ point of view, this period was a time of reaction and
pessimism. The Negro press was not belligerent according to present
standards, but followed Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory course.® But
in 1901 the Boston Guardian was launched by William Monroe Trotter
as an uncompromisingly militant organ in the Abolitionist tradition. It got
• When the Niagara movement started, one of the main points of the reform program
launched by the radical Negro intellectuals was to fight the corruption of the Negro press.
More specifically, they accused the ‘‘Tuskegee Machine” (see Chapter 35, Section 3) of
exerting undue pressure upon the Negro press In 1904 Du Bois published a statement in
the Boston Guardian concerning the venality of certain Negro papers which he charged
had sold out to Mr. Washington. In his autobiography he reiterates the charges. (See Dusk
of Dawn [1940], pp. 76 ff., 86 fiF., passim^.
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