A History of African American Newspapers in New England: Massachusetts

By Kenneth J. Cooper

By the time Benjamin F. Roberts started The Anti-Slavery Herald, only a few black newspapers in the country had been established to follow the lead of Freedom’s Journal in 1827, and most of those were published in New York state. African Americans in Boston and other cities heavily patronized Garrison’s Liberator, whose run lasted from 1831 to 1866.1

Roberts’s timing in launching the Herald in 1838 was not good. The country was in a recession, and black and white abolitionists were divided over their movement’s secondary goals. Roberts tried to bolster the paper’s financial prospects soliciting donations from prosperous white subscribers to support apprenticeships for African Americans as printers and typesetters. But some white abolitionists who supported the paper apparently disliked its independent tone. Roberts indicated his goals included guiding “the free colored people in raising themselves.”2

Starting in 1841, the Emancipator and Free American competed with the Liberator. The authors of a recent history of the black press identify the Emancipator as the city’s first African American paper, but it was an organ of the Massachusetts Abolition Society and its editor, Joshua Leavitt, appears to have been white.3 The paper spoke for the wing of the abolitionist movement that believed political activism was a more powerful tool for ending slavery than moral suasion.

Samuel Ringgold Ward was a politically-oriented abolitionist. He founded the Impartial Citizen in Syracuse and, after two years, relocated it to Boston when he moved to the city in 1850. Like Hartford’s Pennington, Ward had escaped from slavery in Maryland.4

One author describes Ward as “an outstanding thinker and orator, second only to Frederick Douglass in stature among black public figures.”5 At the time, Douglass called Ward “the ablest black man the country has ever produced.”6

The Impartial Citizen was allied with the abolitionist Liberty Party. The weekly paper called for citizenship rights for African Americans, opposed the emigration of free blacks to Liberia in West Africa and condemned the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which allowed southern owners to recapture runaways in northern states.7

Three weeks after Congress passed the law, Ward advised black northerners pursued by slave catchers to resist with violence, to kill or be killed. “It gives us that alternative of dying freemen [or] of living slaves,” he wrote from Boston.8

The paper’s circulation extended beyond the city, as documented in letters to Ward from three subscribers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Those letters from 1851 indicate The Impartial Citizen, like other abolitionist papers, suffered from financial strains. One subscriber noted an anti-slavery group in Philadelphia was holding a sale to benefit the Boston paper. William Grant Still, a prominent black Philadelphian, complained about not receiving his paper by mail for a month but still sent checks to cover four subscriptions he had solicited.9

The Impartial Citizen was published from Boston for a little more than a year, from July 1850 to October 1851.10 Historical accounts differ on why publication ceased. Ward declared himself bankrupt. He moved to Canada, possibly to avoid capture as a fugitive slave (in which case, he didn’t follow his own editorial advice). Later, he retired in Jamaica, where he died.

In 1853, Roberts tried again with The Self Elevator, “Devoted to the subject of general elevation among the Colored People of the country.” The semi-monthly's office was on Washington Street in downtown Boston.11 As his Herald, the Elevator experienced financial problems and expired before long.12
The Boston Coordinator was being published in 1880. Other papers that emerged in the city during the late 1800s include the Leader, Courant, Observer and Advocate.

The Leader, edited by Howard L. Smith, also expired by 1885. J.Gordon Street owned and edited the Courant, which was founded in 1888 and published until 1903. Street was a Jamaican immigrant who had contributed articles to black papers in New York, Philadelphia and Detroit, and later to three Boston dailies, the Record, Herald and Beacon. The Observer was short-lived.13

The Boston Advocate first appeared in 1885. The weekly published on Saturdays, sold for a nickel a copy and on its front page declared itself, “Devoted to the interests of the colored people of the United States and Canada.” W. Grandison was the publisher, and J.B. Powell Jr. the editor. The paper’s office was at 47 Hanover Street in the North End.14

It was a worldly, intelligent, lively paper whose columns were filled with correspondence from learned African Americans around the country. The paper’s network of distributors extended as far west as Corpus Christi, Texas and abroad to Kingston, Jamaica and El Mina in what is now Ghana.

Editorials from editions in the summer of 1885 had a pragmatic bent, promoting black homeownership, proposing the creation of an “African Historical Society” to preserve black history and calling for African Americans to display more independence from the Republican Party, which dominated the black vote then the way the Democratic Party does now. Another editorial proposed an “Emancipation celebration” on August 1 “to show the enlightened world the great progress made by us.”

Correspondence came from people in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and elsewhere around the country as well as from residents of Lynn, Worcester, Salem and other cities in Massachusetts.

Some of the writing could be elegant. A correspondent in Charlestown, S.C., for example, mocked how southern papers reported on black criminal suspects: “If a negro is killed, he is a desperado; if he kills anyone, he is a desperado; if he escapes, he is a desperado; if he is captured and locked up he is a desperado.”15

The Advocate lasted at least until 1887 or 1888, and perhaps into the early 1900s. At least one issue of another paper, the Advance, survives from 1900.16

The best-known chapter of the black press in New England began in 1901 with the launch of the Guardian. Its editor, William Monroe Trotter, became a national figure whose relentless advocacy of civil rights led to the creation of the NAACP. He was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Harvard and the son of a prosperous real estate agent.

In the Guardian, Trotter waged a running battle in nearly every issue against Booker T. Washington, who advocated accommodation and self-help as the paths to black progress. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, who pushed protest and liberal education as strategies for advancement, were the principal leaders of African Americans in that era.

It was a hard-edged, pugnacious, crusading paper. Trotter apparently saw the strident tone of the Liberator as a model and even located his paper’s office in the same building where the Liberator had been published at 3 Tremont Row. (Now demolished, the building was in the old Scollay Square in downtown Boston.)

The first issue promised to voice “the needs and aspirations of the colored American,” adding: “We have come to protest forever against being…shut off from equal rights with other citizens, and shall forever remain on the firing line…in defence of such rights.” 17

In a skybox on the front page in 1902, the Guardian declared itself, “America’s Greatest Race Journal.” The editorial page carried the motto: “For every right, with all thy might.”18

Trotter’s paper reflected technical advances and changes in newspaper conventions since the Advocate’s run. The Guardian carried small photographs of newsmakers and large drawings on its front, graphic elements the Advocate lacked. The masthead listing the paper’s leaders was moved inside to the editorial page. The lead story was played under heavy headlines on the top left (under current convention, it is on the right). The Advocate had started its lead piece of correspondence near the bottom of the far left column, under the masthead.

There was more news reporting in the Guardian and less correspondence from readers. But the line between news and opinion was often blurred, particularly when it came to Booker T. Washington. For instance, a large cartoon in a 1902 issue lampooned Trotter’s nemesis—on the front page. In the daily papers of that era, publisher’s passions often infiltrated news columns.

Washington tried to counter Trotter on his own turf by setting up Boston publications. He revived the Advocate in 1902, and formed the Enterprise and Colored Citizen in 1903. The first two did not last long at all; the Colored Citizen survived until 1905. For four more years it existed as Alexander’s Magazine, a monthly.19

The Colored American Magazine was a literary monthly, created in 1900 by the Colored Co-Operative Publishing Company and styled after the Atlantic Monthly. Washington was initially a minor shareholder in the publishing company, but his influence was little felt during the publication’s first four years or so in Boston, after which it shifted to New York. Pauline Hopkins was the prime editorial force during the magazine’s early years, becoming editor in 1904. She was in the DuBois camp.20

The early Guardian proved a healthy enterprise, with lots of advertising and a growing circulation. It had strong community support. The authors of a 1997 history of the nation’s black press wrote: “A contemporary estimate of the Boston Guardian was that it bound the Negroes of Greater Boston more closely together than any other agency or vehicle had managed to do before and thus furthered the national unity of the Negro people.”21

The impact was indeed national. “William Monroe Trotter and his militancy led directly to the formation of the NAACP in 1909,” those authors concluded. But they added, “the Guardian had reached its zenith by 1910.”22

Trotter died in 1934. His sister and brother-in-law, Maude and Charles Steward, continued to publish the paper at least into the 1950s. By 1944, the paper had moved to 977 Tremont St. Trotter’s combative tone was evident in opinion columns and a quote of his published atop the editorial page: “Segregation for colored is the real permanent degradation in the United States of America. Fight it.”23

In 1915, a competitor to the Guardian was created, the Chronicle. Its founders were West Indian immigrants, primarily from Jamaica. Initially, its coverage was targeted to settlers from the Caribbean, and editorially the paper took a British-style conservative slant. By the 1930s, its appeal and staff had broadened to African Americans of all backgrounds.24

From offices at 794 Tremont Street, they built a substantial enterprise that included the Providence Chronicle, from the 1930s to about 1960, and a Hartford edition in the 1940s. (The last may have circulated in Springfield, Mass. as well.) The printing plant was in the same building at the corner of Tremont Street and Massachusetts Avenue and, a former staffer boasted, the Chronicle “had a better newsboy and distribution system than the Guardian.”25

In 1944, the front page of the weekly Chronicle had a cleaner layout than the Guardian’s. The upstart also covered sports, which did not seem to interest the Guardian. The Chronicle at one point had correspondents in other New England states, Canada and the West Indies.26

The Guardian, in its final years, lapsed into irregular publication. An effort in the mid-1950s to merge the two papers failed.27 By the early 1960s, both had ceased publishing. The dates of the final edition of each remain uncertain.

The vacuum left by the Guardian and Chronicle was filled in 1965 by the Bay State Banner. In early 2007, the weekly tabloid is the only black-owned newspaper in Massachusetts and the region's oldest. Publisher Melvin B. Miller, a lawyer and Harvard graduate, was a co-founder of the Banner, whose alumni include Gwen Ifill of the Newshour on PBS. Miller writes the paper’s editorials. Howard Manly, a former columnist at the Boston Herald and veteran of the Boston Globe and Newsweek, is executive editor. The Banner has a free distribution of 32,000.28

Several other weekly papers have tried to compete with the Banner and failed. There was the Revolutionary News in the 1960s, whose name reflected the leftist politics of that era. The New England Black Weekly was a well-written, feature-oriented tabloid that appeared in 1980 and folded within the year. “That New England paper was the only one that was a real threat,” Miller recalled. The Boston People’s Voice was founded in 1998, with little staff, but passed into white ownership in 2005 with its sale to Bulletin Newspapers, though its coverage remains black-oriented. Unity First started publishing a paper from Framingham in the around 1994 before going online sometime after 2001.29

(Last updated, May 20, 2007.)