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The US still needs a strong Black press 

For hundreds of years, through slavery, post-Emancipation terror and much of Jim Crow segregation, America’s white newspapers generally either ignored African Americans’ plight or actively supported their subjugation.

Especially in the South, but also in the North, white publications from rural weeklies to national magazines cranked out inflammatory news stories and essays supporting white supremacism, calling for everything from political suppression to lynching. 

For most of two centuries, the Black press has been pivotal in fighting white supremacism, articulating it without other voices’ mediating. 

In 1827, John Brown Busswurm and Samuel Cornish established Freedom’s Journal, the first African American periodical. Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass launched The North Star in 1847. Other free Blacks’ sporadic efforts followed — sometimes helped by white abolitionists and, later, white liberals — published in the North and later circulated hand-to-hand throughout the South.

“The Black press remained pivotal after emancipation, encouraging African Americans to migrate north and west during the early twentieth century,” said Trevy McDonald, who teaches a course on “The Black Press and U.S. History” at the University of North Carolina. “Unlike mainstream newspaper reporting,  Black publications gave voice and humanity to their communities’ experiences.” 

The most prominent and powerful publications included the Chicago Defender, circulated surreptitiously throughout the South by A. Philip Randolph’s Pullman Porters’ union, the Baltimore Afro-American and the Pittsburgh Courier. The height of their circulation saw 250 newspapers and a news service, the Associated Negro Press, which covered sensational political cases such as those of the Scottsboro Boys and Emmett Till. Martin Luther King Jr. was a syndicated columnist.

The Crisis, the NAACP’s journal, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois, highlighted African Americans’ achievements, but famously focused on early 20th century lynchings, through Walter White’s pioneering on-site reporting. Other publications followed suit, sometimes taking aggressive, provocative stands against white supremacist tropes that resulted in mob violence. 

In 1892, assailants burned to the ground the Memphis office of the Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, co-edited and co-owned by Ida B. Wells. The attack followed Wells’s editorials condemning a recent spate of lynchings and denouncing “that old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women. If Southern men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion might be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.”

Wells famously wrote: “The way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth upon them.” 

Six years later, the precipitating spark for 1898’s Wilmington, N.C., Massacre was a strident editorial in a Black-owned Daily Record newspaper that challenged the notion that Black men had sexual designs on white women. In the subsequent white riot, the newspaper was a prime target: Its building was burned, its presses dragged into the street and destroyed. The editor, Alexander Manly, barely escaped alive. 

During the mid-20th century civil rights movement, the Black press was prepared to do its part. Writing in 1958, Martin Luther King Jr., called the Black press “the conscience of our nation. … It has become angry for people who dare not express anger themselves. It has cried for Negroes when the hurt was so great that tears could not be shed. … It has been a crusading press and that crusade has, from its beginning in 1827, been the cry of ‘Freedom.’” 

Most North American legacy newspapers today are ailing or failing, with AI greasing the skids. Earlier this month, the weekly African American Richmond Free Press announced it was closing after 30 years, citing a collapse of advertising. 

Still, some Black newspapers, like some rural white weeklies, have managed to survive the print implosion by providing local news, information and opinions simply not available in aggregated form elsewhere. They also provide training and entry-level opportunities for young Black journalists. These jobs are evaporating in legacy white media; witness recent Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution layoffs.

The internet and social media have transformed both mainstream publications and the modern Black press. Black dailies and weeklies have shifted entirely or partially to digital, reaching a potential audience of more than 20 million.

“We have shown the nation the struggle, sacrifice, progress and triumph of Black Americans and of America as a nation from the Black perspective,” wrote the Rev. Benjamin Chavis, CEO of the National Newspaper Press Association, the nation’s Black press trade organization. “No other print or digital media serves in this role quite like the Black Press.” 

Mark I. Pinsky is a journalist and author based in Durham, N.C.

Copyright 2026 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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