Journalism: An Overview

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Journalism: An Overview

Even before the nation's founding, America's journalistic output reflected a society in conflict with its core principle of freedom. The same proto-nation that had inspired Thomas Paine to write Common Sense, an enormously popular pamphlet that challenged British authority over the American colonies, also shaped a lucrative market for the trafficking of human beings. In 1729 Benjamin Franklin became the publisher of The Pennsylvania Gazette, a newspaper that carried slave advertisements. According to the historian Thomas Leonard (1986), when Paul Revere was still a young engraver he decided to whiten the image of Crispus Attucks, a free black man who was the first man to die in the Boston Massacre of 1770—a martyr spurring on the coming Revolution—for the purposes of propaganda. For whatever reason, the historiography of American journalism largely ignores the paradox of the abstract idea of press freedom coinciding with the direct, physical oppression of Africans by British subjects, who, after the revolution, became Americans. The history of American journalism tells the story of the struggle to create and maintain American freedoms, but many of the contradictions posed by slavery remain on history's margins.

Pro- and Antislavery Journalism

Under the First Amendment, newspapers were free both to promote slavery and to oppose it. In fact, journalism had a significant influence on proslavery and abolitionist movements, the latter of which produced its own press, led by the led the Southern, Democratic cause in the North. All these papers took positions on the extension of slavery into the West, the issue that led to the outbreak of the Civil War.

The abolitionist press was a great example of American advocacy journalism. The Liberator (1831–1835) fired up the cause by printing graphic details and testimony about the horrors of slavery. Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, which began publishing in 1841, was a champion of the antislavery Republican Party and in 1861 attempted to push President Abraham Lincoln to free the enslaved Africans in the Southern states. Abolitionist publishers such as James G. Burney of the Philanthropist of Cincinnati and Elijah Lovejoy of the St. Louis Observer were attacked by mobs. After moving his printing press from St. Louis to Alton, Illinois, Lovejoy could not escape the violent militancy of proslavery adherents. Lovejoy's first-person accounts of both the Alton mob's destruction of his press and of being attacked in St. Charles, Missouri, after giving a sermon, were both reprinted in The Liberator. He was killed by a proslavery mob in Alton in 1837.

The Black Press during Slavery

In The Shaping of Black America, the historian Lerone Bennett Jr. describes the period 1737 to 1837 as "perhaps the most important in the history of Black America" (1993, p. 114). He divides this critical era into two periods: 1787 to 1816, during which free northern blacks, barred from mixing with whites, began to found their own schools, lodges, churches, and other institutions after the Revolutionary War; and 1817 to 1837, during which blacks began their agitation for full civil and human rights. During this 100-year era, black Americans began to think of themselves as "as a common people with common aspirations and a common enemy" (Bennett 1993, p. 116). They transformed social gatherings into a form of survival and the locus of resistance. One institution that developed during the second period was the black press, created to give the "founders" of black America a means to publicly air their grievances, to demonstrate black achievements and aspirations, and to add a black voice to the collective voice of the abolitionist movement.

By 1827 New York City had the largest population of blacks of any northern city. An estimated 15,000 blacks lived in New York City—10 percent of the 150,000 free colored people living in the North. Racial stereotypes generated by media made the lives of poor freeman even more difficult. In their study of the emerging black press, Armistead Pride and Clint C. Wilson II observe:

The indigent, ill-housed, underfed, uneducated, disenfranchised Negro became stereotyped, and that stereotype was fixed in the public eye…. Driving home the ugly image were a number of newspapers and magazines advertising rewards for capture of escaped slaves, promoting the sale of slaves, and depicting the animal qualities of the freedman." (1997, p. 6)

One such paper was the New York Enquirer (1826–1829), founded and edited by Mordecai Manuel Noah, which vilified blacks and was unapologetic in its views of black inferiority. Two freemen, the Rev. Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister and an articulate abolitionist in New York, and John Brown Russwurm, a graduate of Bowdoin College and the third black to graduate from an American college, wrote letters to the paper protesting its attacks on black Americans. But the Enquirer refused to print them. As a result, several leading free blacks held a meeting and decided to found a newspaper. Freedom's Journal (1827–1829) became the nation's first black newspaper and the first abolitionist newspaper to be written and published by blacks.

The first edition of the paper was published on March 16, 1827, at 6 Varick Street, with Russwurm and Cornish as publishers. They placed their first editorial, "To Our Patrons," on the front page. It began: "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us." Explaining their purpose, Russwurm and Cornish continued:

It is our earnest wish to make this Journal a medium of intercourse between our brethren in different states of this great confederacy: that through its columns an expression of our sentiments, on many interesting subjects which concern us, may be offered to the publick: that plans which apparently are beneficial may be candidly discussed and properly weighed."

They went on to assert the paper's commitment to present information relating to Africa to show the continent in a truer light. "In conclusion," they wrote, "whatever concerns us as a people, will ever find a ready admission into the freedom's journal, interwoven with all the principal news of the day."

The black press of the nineteenth century began articulating the themes that would propel it into the twentieth century and beyond: freedom, self-determination, and social and political equality for African Americans. During the era of slavery, others followed in the footsteps of Cornish and Russwurm—David Walker (Appeal), Frederick Douglass (The North Star), and Mary Ann Shadd Cary (the Provincial Freeman). The published words of free African Americans were forged into human rights documents demanding emancipation. Journalism was part of a mission to fight white supremacy and to secure black self-determination. Walker's Appeal was, literally, a call to arms. Shadd Cary called for emigration to Canada to escape slavery. Douglass fought for black rights and the dignity of African Americans. During slavery and afterward, black activist-publishers contributed to African Americans' freedom, and America's freedom, particularly the press freedom central to the First Amendment.