Resources
Online Resources
If you are interested in exploring African-American newspapers in more detail, there are several good resources online:The Library of Congress has digitized 50 African American newspapers from 1850 to 1922.
This Guide to African American Newspapers, compiled by Elizabeth Clarke of Marist College’s library, includes links to dozens of open access African-American newspapers from across the country.
Selected years from the Afro-American newspaper (Baltimore) are available via Google News: 1906–1917 and 1940s–2000s.
The website for the PBS documentary The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords (dir. Stanley Nelson Jr., 1999) includes several biographies of key figures in the history of the black press.
The Black Press Research Collective, founded and directed by Dr. Kim Gallon, examines the historical and contemporary role of black newspapers in Africa and the African Diaspora.
The Colored Conventions Project team at University of Delaware, led by Dr. P. Gabrielle Forman and Dr. Jim Casey, has compiled an extensive list of Black Digital Humanities Projects & Resources, several of which engaged with black newspapers.
Dr. Julian Chambliss’s Advocate Recovered project recovers the contents of the Winter Park Advocate, an African-American newspaper published in Winter Park, Florida.
Selected images from the Chicago Defender have been digitized as part of the Obsidian Collection’s partnership with Google.
Mark Charles Roudané’s Roudanez: History and Legacy examines the history of La Tribune de la Nouvelle Orléans (the New Orleans Tribune), which was founded by his great-great grandfather, Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez.
Among sources that require an institutional subscription, ProQuest and Readex have excellent digitized collections.
Selected Bibliography
In addition to these online sources, below is a selected bibliography of scholarship on the black press:Thomas Aiello, The Grapevine of the Black South: The Scott Newspaper Syndicate in the Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018).
Carol Booker, ed., Alone atop the Hill: The Autobiography of Alice Dunnigan, Pioneer of the National Black Press (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2015).
Jinx Coleman Broussard, African American Foreign Correspondents: A History (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
Jinx Coleman Broussard, Giving a Voice to the Voiceless: Four Pioneering Black Women Journalists (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Andrew Buni, Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier: Politics and Black Journalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974).
Fred Carroll, Race News: Black Journalists and the Fight for Racial Justice in the Twentieth Century (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
Hayward Farrar, The Baltimore Afro-American: 1892-1950 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998).
Lee Finkle, Forum for Protest: The Black Press During World War II (Rutherford : Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1975).
Cheryl Finley, Laurence Glasco, and Joe W. Trotter, Teenie Harris: Image, Memory, History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).
D’Weston Haywood, Let Us Make Men: The Twentieth-Century Black Press and a Manly Vision for Racial Advancement (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018)
Gerald Horne, The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett’s Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017).
William G. Jordan, Black Newspapers and America's War for Democracy, 1914–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 2001).
Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016).
Burnis Morris, Carter G. Woodson: History, the Black Press, and Public Relations (Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 2017).
James McGrath Morris, Eye on the Struggle: Ethel Payne, the First Lady of the Black Press (New York: Harper Collins, 2015).
Irving Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and its Editors (Springfield, MA: Willey & Co., 1891).
Armistead Pride and Clint Wilson II, A History of the Black Press (Washington DC: Howard University Press, 1997).
Lori Amber Roessner and Jodi L. Rightler-McDaniels, eds., Political Pioneer of the Press: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Her Transnational Crusade for Social Justice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Henry Lewis Suggs, P.B. Young, Newspaperman: Race, Politics and Journalism in the New South, 1910–1962 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, 1988).
Todd Vogel, ed., The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
Patrick Washburn, The African American Newspaper: Voice of Freedom (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2006).
Patrick Washburn, A Question of Sedition: The Federal Government’s Investigation of the Black Press during World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Roland Wolseley, The Black Press, U.S.A. (Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press, 1989).