Journalism, Early

By: Carolyn Calloway-Thomas, Marilyn Kern-Foxworth

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Journalism, Early

History was made on 16 March 1827, when the first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, was founded in New York City by the black antislavery spokesmen Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm and became a vehicle to galvanize black communities around the issues of slavery, freedom, and lynching. The newspaper appeared 137 years, or seven generations, after the first colonial American newspaper, Publick Occurrences, was published in Boston during 1690. The role played by African American women in the initial creation of the black press is not known because few sources document their journalistic activities as often as they do their male counterparts. The first provable instance of black women's participation in journalism did make a dramatic debut over two decades after the launch of Freedom's Journal, when Mary Ann Shadd Cary published a black abolitionist newspaper, the Provincial Freeman, in Canada during the 1850s. Still, though the 1850s marked the official entry of African American women into journalism, it is likely they turned to journalistic writing as early as Freedom's Journal's 1827 founding.

Beginnings of the Black Press

To understand and put into context the importance of a newspaper devoted to black issues during the nineteenth century, it is imperative to note certain statistics and information. The advent of the black press did not exist in a vacuum; many factors were directly correlated to why the black press evolved and why some individuals, male and female, felt compelled to start and report for newspapers and magazines. Firstly, it must be understood that the black press was a mechanism used as a survival tool to push “the race” forward. The publications unified communities, disseminated useful and pertinent information, provided economic stimulus for publishers and their families, and encouraged blacks to learn to read. Additionally, religious publications helped churches convey valuable information to their members. Black women were able to use their writing talents to discuss religious issues, as well as social issues within these faith-based periodicals.

By 1860 there were 4,441,830 people of African descent in America. Nearly 500,000 were free. Punitive laws, economic deprivation, and disenfranchisement, however, often denied enslaved and free access to educational opportunities, contributing to high rates of illiteracy. Most publications founded during the early nineteenth century were clearly intended to assist abolitionists in their efforts to free blacks and to get whites to understand why slavery and its associated atrocities had to be abandoned. Following the Civil War, the number of black newspapers, schools, and churches rose dramatically, and illiteracy experienced a notable decline. Black women played crucial roles in all of these institutions, especially in journalism.

Julia Ringwood Coston, editor and publisher of Ringwood's Afro-American Journal of Fashion, which she began issuing in 1891; this was the first illustrated journal for black women. She also published Ringwood's Home Magazine, from 1893 to 1895.

Austin/Thompson Collection, by permission of Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library

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During the antebellum period, black women also contributed their efforts to Frederick Douglass's North Star and white-owned abolitionist newspapers, including William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. The masthead for the North Star, which first appeared on 3 December 1847, proclaimed, “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no-Color—God is the Father of Us All, And All We Are Brethren.” Maria Stewart, the first American-born woman to lecture in defense of women's rights, published her essays in the Liberator. Other, anonymous, contributions in the antebellum period, conscious of sexual oppression, expressed considerable unhappiness with women's status.

Although some identified themselves simply by bylines such as “a young woman of color,” “Zillah, a Young Lady of Color,” and “Matilda,” their letters to editors provided cultural and psychological insights into the thoughts of literate, free, northern black women. Another insight into how women dealt with their ostracism in the press was by assuming the names of their male relatives. One such occurrence was with C. C. Stumm, the wife of the Reverend C. C. Stumm, who wrote under her husband's name. In 1890, the Stumms together produced the Christian Banner, a religious home journal.

Like their brothers in the struggle, black women also recognized the power of newspapers as a vehicle to increase their audience and as a forum to discuss gender and issues important to the black community. They denounced slavery, and addressed political and economic discrimination in the North. Unlike black men, however, African American women's protest extended beyond the horrors of slavery and discussions of race and education to the issues of sex, gender, and class. By introducing the issue of gender into the public domain, black women shifted their symbolic environment significantly by calling attention to the double bind of being both black and female. Some of the men immersed in the publishing and editing of newspapers were quite vocal regarding their opposition to the idea of women working in the press. They were adamant that women were too frail to stand the rigors of meeting deadlines and paid too little attention to detail to work effectively in “hard news.”

After the Civil War

In 1891, Irving Garland Penn, a twenty-four-year-old freeborn African American, compiled a seminal work titled The Afro-American Press and Its Editors that outlined the beginnings of the black press. While Penn apologized profusely for not being able to include every black newspaper and every journalist in the compendium, he did include women. The second, and longest, part of Penn's book gives short profiles and portraits of the leading African American journalists, both male and female, of that period. Of the 140 portraits, nineteen were women. The majority of the women, who were often called “correspondents,” appeared to be in their twenties and thirties. They wore formal, dark dresses, and their hair was styled in ways that were fashionable for middle-class black women of that time.

In the introduction to the section on women, Penn wrote, “There is a divine poetry in a life garlanded by the fragrant roses of triumph.” All nineteen of the women profiled were selected for their exceptional journalistic abilities, but all had different socioeconomic standings. Some had only completed some college courses, whereas others had earned their degrees. This latter group included Josephine Turpin Washington and A. L. Tilghman, who both graduated from Howard University; C.C. Stumm who attended Berea; Alice McEwen who attended Fisk University; Lucreta Coleman who pursued an education at Lawrence in Canada; and Lavina Sneed, Ione Wood, and Mary V. Cook, who graduated from journalism programs at State University of Louisville, Kentucky.

After the Civil War, black women also utilized the press as a means of creative expression. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, for example, not only published her poetry and short stories during the 1850s in the black press, but she also published her novel, Iola Leroy, in 1892. Harper contributed articles to several prominent black press periodicals including the Christian Recorder, the A. M. E. Review, and the Philadelphia Tribune. Her illustrative career in journalism inspired the historian Garland Penn to refer to her as the “journalistic mother” of the many black women who entered the field after Reconstruction. Following in the footsteps of Harper, other African American women writers showcased their intellectual creative talents in journals and magazines, including the Repository of Religion and Literature and of Science and the Arts, a journal of the African Methodist Episcopal Church begun in 1858, and the Anglo-African magazine, founded in 1859. Church publications often served as conduits for black women to display their journalistic talents. Lucy Wilmot Smith, who handled the children's column in the American Baptist, eventually became head of the women's department at Our Women and Children and often contributed to the Baptist Journal, the Boston Advocate and the Indianapolis Freeman.

Scores of other women followed the print tradition, among them, Mary V. Cook, the editor of the education section of Our Women and Children, Meta E. Pelham, a reporter for the Detroit Plain Dealer, Gertrude Mossell, the correspondent for the Indianapolis Freeman, and Lillian A. Lewis, who wrote a fascinating column, “They Say,” for the Boston Advocate under the pen name Bert Islew. Mary E. Britton wrote under the pen name “Meb” in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1858 and at the age of nineteen she was published in the Cincinnati Commercial. Britton, a former teacher, later edited a women's column in the Lexington Herald. Before her career ended she had contributed to a number of newspapers in and around the Lexington area.

As the problems faced by freedpeople intensified during post-Reconstruction, black women focused even more vigorously on themes and ideas essential to their uplift—self-reliance, temperance, education, home building, and the creation of social service organizations—as vehicles for mobilizing women. To encourage women's involvement in their communities and to inform them of social service activities in every major city, black women edited several newspapers and journals. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, founder of the New Era Club, edited the Woman's Era. National Notes, founded in 1897 in Tuskegee, Alabama, served as the organ for the National Association of Colored Women, organized in 1896.

Unlike the white press, which often relegated white women to marginalized positions—sob sisters, stunt women, or editing the women's pages—the black press offered more varied opportunities and exposure for the reporting skills of black women. One woman, however, dominated journalism at the end of the nineteenth century: Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Dubbed the “Princess of the Press” by her peers, Wells-Barnett wrote for church periodicals and later became editor of the Free Speech and Headlight, a small weekly in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee. She used scathing language in her crusading efforts against lynching. In fact, Wells-Barnett, by introducing the idea that white women were culpable in these crimes, redefined lynching, its causes and consequences. At considerable cost, with the burning of the Free Speech office and her subsequent exile from Tennessee (induced by letters to editors all over the South that warned she would be torched next if she returned), Wells-Barnett became only the second black female journalist (Cary proceeded her) to focus on issues that were traditionally reserved for black males and to successfully mobilize both black and white readers through print.

In addition to Wells-Barnett's contributions, the post-Reconstruction period also introduced the first periodicals targeting a female audience and featuring the work of black women. In 1887, A. E. Johnson, a woman poet from Baltimore, Maryland, founded a monthly literary journal, Joy, perhaps the earliest of these efforts. The magazine was published until 1890 and received complimentary reviews from both black and white contemporaries, a striking testament to the journalistic skills of African American women.

The Twentieth Century

By the close of the nineteenth century an increasing number of African American women were firmly entrenched in the black press. Yet, the writer and activist Gertrude Mossell admonished her female colleagues for remaining “willing captives, chained to the chariot wheels of the sterner element,” and she criticized black men for not fully including their female colleagues. Greater opportunities were available to African American women in the twentieth century as the black press evolved into a thriving institution. In the early 1900s, there were close to fifty newspapers and forty magazines and periodicals published by African Americans, and women played a central role in their publication.

In 1900, for example, the Colored American Magazine hired the young novelist and writer Pauline Hopkins to edit the women's section of the Boston-based magazine. Three years later Hopkins was literary editor of the magazine, and today she is best known for her four novels serialized in its pages. Despite her efforts to spark a black literary movement, Hopkins was unable to sustain her journalistic career. She supported herself as a stenographer, and although she had achieved such notoriety during her journalistic endeavors, she ultimately died in obscurity. In contrast, Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington and the dean of women at Tuskegee Institute, began as editor of National Notes. Washington figured prominently in the women's club movement and African American self-help activities, and she continued as editor of National Notes until 1922.

The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the publication of two black women's periodicals in states west of the Mississippi. Women's World was founded in Fort Worth, Texas. Colored Women's Magazine began in Topeka, Kansas, in 1907 and was edited by two women, C. M. Hughes and Minnie Thomas, as a monthly family magazine. It was published until at least 1920, and women maintained editorial control throughout its history.

Black women also figured prominently in periodicals targeted to a more general audience. Josephine Silone Yates, a teacher at Lincoln Institute in Missouri and a two-term president of the National Association of Colored Women, served as the associate editor of the Negro Educational Review, founded in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1904. Agnes Carroll, a music teacher in Washington, DC, helped edit the Negro Music Journal, published in that city during the same period. Amanda Berry Smith, an evangelist, itinerant preacher, and perhaps the most colorful woman journalist of the period, published the Helper (1900–1907), a magazine that focused on the issues of child care, temperance, and religion.

The turn of the century brought an era of development and growth for influential African American newspapers, such as the Baltimore Afro-American, the Chicago Defender, and the New York Age. The polemical, romantic writing of nineteenth-century American journalism gradually was replaced with a quest for objective reporting of the news, and powerful black newspapers were part of this developing professionalism. Black women worked at these papers as reporters, columnists, and editors.

Some black women writers of the early 1900s included journalism among their other literary outlets. Alice Dunbar-Nelson, the wife of the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, is not often identified as a journalist, but she wrote for both black and white newspapers at the beginning of the century, including the Pittsburgh Courier, the Washington Eagle, the Chicago Daily News, the Chicago Record-Herald, and the New York Sun. She published poetry and short stories in numerous periodicals, and she wrote reviews of other black writers' works, as well as news stories. She also edited the Wilmington Advocate, served as an associate editor for the AME Church Review, and later tried unsuccessfully to launch her own syndicated newspaper column.

Other contemporaries of Dunbar-Nelson devoted their energies more exclusively to journalism, including Delilah Beasley, who began her career writing for a black newspaper, the Cleveland Gazette, and went on to contribute to white-owned papers such as the Cincinnati Enquirer. After moving to California, Beasley wrote a regular column for the Oakland Tribune—the daily with the largest circulation in the state at that time—from 1915 to 1925.

California was home base for another journalist, Charlotta Bass, who is thought to be the first black woman to own and publish a newspaper in the United States. Bass started her career in 1910 as a writer for the California Eagle, a black-owned weekly in Los Angeles, and she purchased the paper two years later. She supported Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and numerous civil rights organizations on the West Coast. Bass published the Eagle for nearly forty years, but she is perhaps best known as the first African American woman to run for vice-president when she joined the Progressive party ticket in 1952.

Political activism frequently became a partner to black women's journalistic work. Marvel Jackson Cooke began her career as an editorial assistant to W. E. B. Du Bois at the Crisis in 1926. Two years later Du Bois helped Cooke obtain a position at the New York Amsterdam News, where she struggled to improve the newspaper's quality and expand coverage of the African American community. Her efforts to organize a union local and lead a strike against the paper in 1935 prompted a move to the People's Voice, founded by Adam Clayton Powell, where she served as assistant managing editor. In 1950, Cooke became the first African American full-time woman reporter for a mainstream newspaper when she joined the staff of the Daily Compass, where she worked with the renowned journalist I. F. Stone.

Lucille H. Bluford was an outspoken activist, writer, and editor who began her tenure as a reporter in the early 1930s. As a 1932 graduate of Kansas University, she famously sued the University of Missouri at Columbia in 1939 for denying her admission to its world-renowned journalism school. Although she lost the case, her legal maneuvering did result in the establishment of the journalism school in 1942 at Lincoln University, the black state school. Bluford became managing editor of the Kansas City Call during the late 1930s and was cited by Lincoln University for her editing experiences in 1961. She became the only woman enshrined in the Gallery of Distinguished Publishers of the National Newspaper Publisher's Association.

World War II and After

By the 1940s, African American women had seized new challenges within the black press. Hazel Garland broke into the newspaper business as a stringer for the Pittsburgh Courier. In 1946, she was hired as a full-time reporter, and she traveled the country to cover crucial issues such as lynching and African Americans' responses to World War II. In one interview she recalled writing an award-winning series titled “The Three I's: Ignorance, Illiteracy, Illegitimacy,” based on her travels through poor black communities in the South. During her years at the Courier, Garland served as entertainment editor, radio-television editor, women's editor, and finally editor-in-chief. Garland's daughter, Phyllis, also became a journalist, beginning her career at Ebony magazine in 1966 and then teaching in Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

Elizabeth Murphy Moss was connected with one of the black newspaper giants at mid-century: her family's paper, the Baltimore Afro-American. She began her career at the paper at age eleven and became the first black woman to be certified as a war correspondent from England during World War II. Unfortunately, she became ill and had to return without filing reports. Later Moss became vice-president and treasurer of the Afro-American Company and publisher of the largest black chain of weekly newspapers in the United States, the Baltimore Afro-American Group. Just as Moss had made a name for herself by working with black newspapers, Ariel Perry Strong gained professional stature by working with black magazines. Strong, who began as a proofreader for Ebony, Jet, and Tan, eventually became the first woman to head Tan (later Black Stars) magazine as managing editor in 1963.

Another woman who gained prominence in the newspaper industry was Daisy Lee Gatson Bates. Bates and her husband settled in Little Rock, Arkansas, and used their savings to launch the Arkansas State Press in the early 1940s. After the paper covered the brutal murder of a black soldier by a white police officer, white advertisers withdrew their support. The paper attracted a large following across the state, and Bates became more involved in racial issues. She was eventually elected president of the Arkansas branch of the NAACP. She also was a major figure in the desegregation of schools in Little Rock and a major influence in helping the Little Rock Nine to integrate in 1959. The newspaper, suffering from financial problems, ceased publication in 1959. Following the death of her husband in 1980, Daisy Lee resumed publication of the Press in 1984 in his honor. She eventually sold the paper in 1988.

Alice Dunnigan became the first African American woman to cover the White House when she was the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Defender. In the mid-1960s, Ethel L. Payne pioneered as a commentator for six years on the CBS network opinion program “Spectrum,” the only black woman to have held such a position at that time. She subsequently spent ten weeks in Vietnam covering the war. She traveled extensively throughout Asia and Africa during her career and became one of the first black women in broadcasting when she provided commentary to CBS News. Her most outstanding contribution came from the distinction of being the first black woman war correspondent. For twenty years (1953–1973) she ran the Washington bureau of the Sengstacke newspaper chain.

The death of Philippa Duke Schuyler in Vietnam in May 1967 at the age of thirty-four, as she tried to evacuate Vietnamese children trapped in an orphanage, is a tragic episode among the stories of black women journalists. Schuyler was best known as a child prodigy who performed as a classical pianist when barely in her teens. She began her second career as a journalist in the 1960s, first covering the war in the Congo, and later the Vietnam War, for the Manchester Union Leader.

Cynthia Tucker joined the Atlanta Constitution in 1976 and served as a reporter, a columnist, and an editorial writer prior to becoming the first black woman to edit a mainstream daily newspaper in 1992.

The diverse and courageous black women who worked as journalists during the mid-1950s and later were women who risked their lives and their families to report and write about the black experience. They served as role models for those who would follow in their footsteps and continue their pioneering legacy. These path-finding women paved the way for the women mentioned above and other individuals like Dorothy Gilliam, the first African American woman columnist for the Washington Post; Barbara Reynolds, Washington bureau correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, columnist for USA Today, and editor of Dollars and Sense magazine; and Pamela McAllister Johnson, who became the first black woman publisher of a white-owned daily newspaper, the Ithaca Journal, in 1982 (the newspaper was part of one of the largest newspaper chains, Gannett, which later founded the national newspaper USA Today). In 1987, Johnson received the Candace Award from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women. She became director of the School of Journalism and Broadcasting at Western Kentucky University in 2003.

Black Women in Broadcast News

Black women also have become increasingly visible in broadcast news; Charlayne Hunter-Gault was the first black woman to anchor a national newscast, public television's MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. The ABC newscaster Carole Simpson, who was once told by a dean at a journalism program that she would not make it in journalism because she was black, eventually became the first African American female anchor of a national television news broadcast. Simpson's inspiration to succeed may have come from Xernona Clayton, who became the first black woman to host a television program in the South when her show premiered in Atlanta in 1969. Following that, Clayton distinguished herself by becoming the first black assistant corporate vice president of urban affairs at the Turner Broadcasting System in 1988. Oprah Winfrey became the first black woman to host a nationally syndicated weekday talk show, the Oprah Winfrey Show, in 1983. In 1989, Winfrey formed Harpo Productions to develop her own television and movie projects.

Another black woman who made significant strides in the electronic media was Joan Murray. Murray was the first major African American television news correspondent for CBS-TV. In 1969, she co-founded Zebra Associates, the first integrated advertising agency with black principals. There are numerous others who have pioneered in the electronic media, including Norma Quarles, Carol Jenkins, and Renee Poussaint.

Legacy of African American Journalism

Historians have surmised that there have been more than three thousand black newspapers. Due to financial problems, most of them folded within a few years of operation. Fortunately, the journalistic contributions of black women have not been limited to newspapers, and thus, black women have used their writing fortes on the news staff of black-oriented, as well as mainstream, magazines, radio, and television stations. Although the full extent of their writing during the earlier periods of the press are not documented, there is evidence that they were appreciated for the value they brought to the field of journalism.

The American Baptist gave an illustrative account of Lucretia Coleman's career in 1884. Articles were featured on Coleman, Kate Chapman, and Gertrude Mossell in the Indianapolis Freeman. The Detroit Plain Dealer provided a lengthy account of the success of black women working for newspapers during its fifth anniversary issue during May 1888. As another testament to their acceptance, unlike their white female counterparts who were denied acceptance in mainstream trade organizations, black female journalists were allowed to join the Afro-American Press Association. Ida B. Wells-Barnett served as the first assistant secretary, and then later served as secretary of the National Afro-American Press Convention meetings, during 1888 and 1889. Some of the women journalists also wrote about the roles of other black women journalists. One the most comprehensive, Work of the Afro-American Women, was written in 1894 by Gertrude Mossell. Another, Lucy W. Smith wrote biographies on black women working in journalism for the Journalist.

Today's black women journalists face the challenge of increasing their numbers and visibility in every facet of the news business more so than at any other time in history. Their predecessors demonstrated daily that black women are a vital link in the nation's quest for free expression and social justice.

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