Matthew F. Delmont on the importance of recognizing the legacy and future of African-American newspapers.
Earlier this year the Chicago Defender, a legendary black newspaper, published its final print edition after 114 years and made the decision to focus exclusively on digital content. At its peak in the late 1920s, the newspaper claimed a circulation of over 250,000, but in the 2010s The Defender’s had only 16,000 print subscribers, while the newspaper’s website recorded 450,000 unique visitors each month. “It is an economic decision,” Hiram Jackson, chief executive of Real Times Media, which owns The Defender and several other black newspapers, told the New York Times. “But it’s more an effort to make sure The Defender has another 100 years.”
In the three years I have been working on Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African-American Newspapers I have been thinking a lot about the history, legacy, and future of the black press. Black newspapers were important to readers because they covered a wide range of news related to politics, civil rights, sports, arts and culture. This was important because most mainstream white newspaper did not treat black people as equal citizens in the cities or country in which they lived. Through much of the twentieth century, if you picked up a big city newspaper like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, or Los Angeles Times, you would have no idea that those cities had thriving African-American communities. While millions of African Americans lived in these cities, the mainstream newspapers carried only a handful of stories about black people. And the stories that did appear were often sensationalized crime stories. In contrast, African-American newspapers were dedicated to recording and sharing stories about the everyday joys, struggles, and complexities of black life. Looking through the archives of these newspapers it is clear that Black lives mattered everyday in papers such as the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Los Angeles Sentinel, and New York Amsterdam News. And when African-American newspapers openly advocated for the humanity of black people, they also made it clear that mainstream white newspapers were not politically neutral.
I chose to focus on African-American newspapers because I wanted to focus on the lives, and not only the deaths, of black people.
While Black Quotidian includes posts about iconic figures such as Carter G. Woodson, Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Harriet Tubman, I also try to call attention to people and events that are not commonly featured in textbooks, documentaries, or Black History Month celebrations. From January 2016 to January 2017, each day I posted at least one black newspaper article from that date in history, accompanied by brief commentary. The digital publication now includes introductory chapters on the history of the black press, more than 365 daily posts (including guest posts from scholars and students), and more than 1,000 media objects, which are arranged in flexible pathways that enable readers to explore the text and media in different ways.