The black press has been the subject of several recent books, including James McGrath Morris’ biography of journalist Ethel Payne and Ethan Michaeli’s history of the Chicago Defender. What sets Delmont’s Black Quotidian site apart is that it lets readers engage with the papers directly. Delmont, who used articles from the black press in researching two books (one on American Bandstand and civil rights, and one on the failure of busing), started the site as a way to share more widely from an archive that fascinated him.
Throughout 2016, Black Quotidian will reproduce and analyze historical articles from the black press that were published on a given day. High points so far include a young Nelson George writing about the controversy over the 1979 movie The Warriors while an intern at the New York Amsterdam News; the Atlanta Daily World’s 1936 report on Ethiopians fighting Mussolini’s invading forces; and a 1942 notice in the Pittsburgh Courier, written by the wire service Associated Negro Press, informing readers of the Red Cross’ decision to segregate blood donated by black people.
Kim Gallon, a historian who has started a site called the Black Press Research Collective, argues that reading historical black newspapers offers a complex and unvarnished perspective on black history. Because black newspapers, the first of which was founded in New York City in 1827, have often been black-owned and black-operated, Gallon said, they were accountable to their own communities and reflected community interests. “[Black newspapers] didn’t have to depend and couldn’t depend on white advertisers, who didn’t want to advertise in black newspapers,” Gallon told me. “So they could say what they wanted to say. They could call out white society as much as they could.” In their granular detail, black newspapers are also a great place to see how individual communities dealt with larger national issues.
I decided to take a look for myself. Using the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site, I read the Oct. 15, 1894, issue of the Helena, Montana, weekly the Colored Citizen, curious to see what the black community in a place like Helena was talking about in the 1890s. I picked the Colored Citizen on a whim, but the experience of looking through its pages immediately confirmed something Gallon had told me about the diversity of black newspapers: “The term ‘black press’ is almost a misnomer because that doesn’t suggest the nuances,” she said. “These papers had different politics, and different ways of understanding the black community; readership looked really different across the nation.”
It turns out that the newspaper I had picked was a short-lived venture, funded for the duration of one election season by boosters who wanted Helena to be named Montana’s state capital (an issue that was on the ballot that year). J.P. Ball Jr., the editor—who (historian William Lang writes) was the son of a photographer and had recently immigrated west from Ohio—was charged with convincing black citizens of the state to vote for Helena, and against the faction led by the Anaconda Copper Co., which pushed for the company town Anaconda to be named capital in its stead.