Profiting From Slavery
Although it’s rarely discussed, even at elite journalism schools like the one where I teach, a significant portion of America’s existing news business was built on slavery and other forms of racist terror. While the Orleans Gazette ceased publication in the 19th century, there still exist numerous newspapers that once sustained themselves by selling advertising space to slaveholders who wanted to recapture runaways or who sought to sell their human property at auctions like the one where my ancestor Stephen once found himself. These outlets include some of America’s oldest periodicals, both Northern and Southern: The Baltimore Sun, the New York Post, The Times-Picayune (New Orleans), The Augusta Chronicle (Ga.), the Richmond Times-Dispatch (Va.), The Commercial Appeal (Memphis), and The Fayetteville Observer (N.C.), among others. A typical example of such an advertisement is one printed in the July 3, 1805, edition of the New-York Evening Post, the predecessor title of today’s New York Post, which reads, “TWENTY DOLLARS REWARD. RAN-AWAY from the subscriber on the 30th of June, a negro man named Joseph, aged about 30 years.” Or this one printed on April 18, 1854, in The Daily Picayune, the predecessor title of the present-day Times-Picayune, which reads, “For Sale…A likely lot of SLAVES, consisting of men, women and children, which I will sell low for cash or city acceptance.”
There is no known record of the sights and sounds of the 1820 auction where Stephen was sold, but descriptions of similar auctions were published elsewhere. Such accounts were usually provided by Northern abolitionist outlets like Frederick Douglass’ Paper and The Anti-Slavery Bugle, but in a letter published in The Washington Union on November 14, 1857, the pro-slavery journalist Edward A. Pollard describes witnessing the auction of several families in Macon, Ga., and even praises the virtue—the “humanity”—of the slaveholders:
During the sale referred to, a lot was put up consisting of a woman and her two sons, one of whom was epileptic (classified by the crier as “fittified”). It was stated that the owner would not sell them unless the epileptic boy was taken along at the nominal price of one dollar, as he wished him provided for. Some of the bidders expressed their dissatisfaction at this, and a trader offered to give two hundred dollars more on condition that the epileptic boy should be thrown out. But the temptation was unheeded, and the poor boy was sold with his mother. There are frequent instances at the auction-block of such humanity as this on the part of masters.
Anti-Blackness has been at the heart of American society since this nation’s founding. It was codified in the original US Constitution, which stated that an enslaved person would count as three-fifths of a white person for the purposes of taxation and representation. Two decades into the 21st century, more than a century and a half since the legal abolition of slavery, Black Americans continue to experience the long-term impact of slavery and other forms of racist terror—much of it promoted and perpetuated by the news media.