A note on Black News: Black News was a newspaper edited and published by Martin Sostre from Wallkill Prison in 1970, with logistical support from the Workers World Party (WWP). Sostre intended the paper to be Buffalo’s first radical Black newspaper, written by and for the Black and Puerto Rican communities within the city. He planned to recruit young writers and editors from Buffalo and pay “newsboys” to distribute the paper on the East Side. Although originally intended to be a monthly newspaper, Sostre discontinued Black News and broke with his defense committee in May 1970 after they refused to publish an article he wrote calling for the capture and exchange of state agents with Black prisoners of war. The full run of Black News only lasted two full issues with a couple special supplements, including the following essay on Dr. King.
On the second anniversary of the murder of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., BLACK NEWS joins the nation and his family in mourning the irreparable loss of this great Civil Rights leader.
But since the examples that King set for us in defying and breaking the white man’s “law and order”, in willingly “paying dues” by going to jail, in being brutalized, and in finally making the supreme sacrifice in the cause of Black liberation from white racist oppression, are now threatened by a conspiracy between the oppressors and their willing Black tools, to minimize, pervert and suppress King’s militant acts of defiance to white authority, it is my duty to alert my people to this plot for mass deception now being executing through the enemy’s controlled news media.
As publisher and editor of BLACK NEWS - - the only Black revolutionary newspaper in Western New York free to tell it like it really is – I offer this article as a tribute to the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and to protect his legacy from our enemies who, not satisfied with having taken King’s life, now seek to rob him in his grave of his greatest deeds and contributions to the Black liberation struggle: his militant mobilization of the Black masses for the purpose of confrontation with the white racist oppressor, violating white “law and order”, undermining white authority, and radicalizing the Black masses.