The Black Press: Ida B. Wells, the Chicago Defender, and the Counter-Record

Freedom's Journal, founded by John B. Russwurm and Samuel Cornish in New York City on March 16, 1827, was the first Black-owned and -operated newspaper in the United States. Its inaugural editorial announced its mission with a directness that defined the entire tradition that followed: "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us." The paper was founded in part as a response to the New York newspaper Enquirer, whose editor Mordecai Noah had been publishing anti-Black editorials. The founders decided the response was not to write letters to the Enquirer but to build a competing institution.

The paper covered abolitionist arguments, documented the conditions of free Black communities in the North, reported on violence against Black people, and provided a forum for Black political thought that existed nowhere else. It ran for two years before ceasing publication — a pattern that characterized much early Black press: significant in its moment, often short-lived due to the economic constraints of publishing for a community that was systematically denied the wealth accumulation that sustains media institutions. But its founding logic — "too long have others spoken for us" — is the logic of every Black press institution that followed.

Ida B. Wells began her anti-lynching journalism in 1892 after three of her friends — successful Black grocery store owners in Memphis — were lynched for the crime of competing too successfully with a white-owned store. The white Memphis press covered the lynchings approvingly. Wells investigated: she documented the actual facts of the case, showed that the "rape" justification commonly used to rationalize lynching was frequently a post-hoc explanation for economic or personal conflicts, and published her findings in her newspaper The Memphis Free Speech.

The response was immediate: a white mob destroyed the Free Speech's office while Wells was traveling. She was warned that she would be lynched if she returned to Memphis. She did not return. She moved to New York, continued writing for the New York Age, published two landmark pamphlets — Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892) and A Red Record (1895) — and conducted a speaking tour of England that generated international pressure on the United States to address lynching. Her work established the factual record that all subsequent anti-lynching advocacy depended on: case-by-case documentation of who was killed, the stated reason, and what the evidence actually showed.

Robert Abbott founded the Chicago Defender in 1905 with $25 in capital, printing the first issue himself. By 1920, its circulation had reached 230,000, making it one of the most widely read newspapers in the United States. Two-thirds of its readers were outside Chicago — the paper was distributed nationally through Pullman porters (Black railroad workers) who smuggled it into Southern states where its distribution was often illegal or dangerous.

The Defender's role in the Great Migration — the movement of approximately 1.6 million Black Southerners to Northern cities between 1910 and 1930 — was explicit and self-conscious. The paper ran the train schedules out of Southern cities. It published letters from readers who had moved North describing wages, housing, and conditions. It contrasted the daily reality of Southern Jim Crow with the conditions available in Chicago. Southern white employers and sheriffs understood the paper's impact: in some parts of the South, reading or distributing the Defender was a de facto crime, and Black people who received it did so covertly. The Great Migration was, in part, a response to what the Defender told people was possible.

When Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi in August 1955 and his killers were acquitted by an all-white jury in 67 minutes, the white press covered it as a murder trial. Jet magazine — founded in 1951 by John H. Johnson — published the photographs that Mamie Till insisted on making public: the open-casket images of her 14-year-old son's mutilated body. She said she wanted the world to see what they did to her boy. Jet's circulation at the time was approximately 300,000. The photographs reached millions.

The Emmett Till photographs are now understood as one of the catalytic events of the Civil Rights Movement — the visual evidence that galvanized a generation of young Black Americans who were approximately Till's age when they saw them. Mamie Till's decision to make the photographs public, and Jet's decision to publish them, was a deliberate use of Black media to do what white mainstream media would not: show what was actually being done to Black children in America. The acquittal was covered by white papers as a local Mississippi story. The photographs, distributed through the Black press, made it a national one.

W.E.B. Du Bois founded The Crisis — the official publication of the NAACP — in 1910 and edited it until 1934. In 24 years, he built it from a new publication to a monthly magazine with 100,000 circulation, widely read by both Black and white readers. The Crisis documented lynching statistics, reported on the NAACP's legal campaigns, published Black writers and poets during the Harlem Renaissance, critiqued Booker T. Washington's accommodationist politics, and provided a running account of what segregation actually meant in practice — the daily indignities, the legal architecture, the economic consequences.

Du Bois used The Crisis to wage specific political campaigns: he documented World War I's impact on Black soldiers and the continued denial of their rights upon return; he covered the East St. Louis race riot of 1917 (39 Black Americans killed) when white newspapers dismissed it; he published "Returning Soldiers" (1919), his editorial demanding that Black veterans who had fought for democracy abroad receive it at home. The magazine was the primary intellectual platform of Black America for two decades. Its back issues are among the most valuable primary sources for historians of the period — because Du Bois documented what was happening in the language of those living it, at the time it was happening.

The civil rights victories of the 1960s changed the Black press in ways that were simultaneously triumphs and structural threats. As mainstream white media began hiring Black journalists and as legal segregation ended, the audience and talent base of Black newspapers shifted. The Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and other papers that had been essential to Black community life when segregation meant there were no alternatives faced competition from mainstream media that now had some Black voices and covered some Black stories.

Advertising revenue — the economic foundation of print media — shifted as advertisers who had been unable to reach Black consumers through white-only media now had alternatives. The classified advertising that had been a staple of Black newspapers (job listings, housing, announcements) migrated to the internet. By 2010, most major Black newspapers had reduced publication frequency, downsized staff, or folded entirely. The Chicago Defender — once 230,000 circulation — became a weekly and then ceased print publication in 2019, continuing only online.

The primary sources that historians use to document Black American history are, in enormous measure, the products of the Black press. Ida B. Wells' lynching statistics. The Crisis's documentation of the NAACP's legal battles. The Chicago Defender's Great Migration coverage. Jet's Emmett Till photographs. The Baltimore Afro-American's coverage of the Civil Rights Movement. The Los Angeles Sentinel's documentation of the Watts uprising. These are not supplementary sources. They are, in many cases, the only sources. The white mainstream press was not covering these events with the specificity, the insider access, or the accountability to affected communities that the Black press brought to them.

The archive this site draws on exists because Black journalists, editors, and publishers spent 200 years keeping the record under conditions of violence, economic constraint, legal suppression, and community dependence. The Mississippi newspapers that found ways to keep the Defender out of Black readers' hands understood what the paper represented: a community keeping its own record. The lesson for 2025 is the same one Russwurm and Cornish drew in 1827: "Too long have others spoken for us." The Black press is not primarily a media history. It is a documentation history. It is the record of who kept the record — and why, without them, so much of what this archive documents would not be known at all.