"No Other but A Negro Can Represent the Negro": How Black Newspapers 'Founded' Black America and Black Britain

The narrative of African-American history has yet to incorporate the centrality of the modern mass media to how African-Americans conceive of themselves as a people, how they communicate with one another, and how they preserve, transmit, and transform their music, culture, politics and religion. (1) Whether against numerous police frame-ups, to which West Indians and other colored migrants are frequently subject, to opposing discrimination.... WI [West Indian] news publications have attempted to emulate the path of progressive 'Negro' (Afro-Asian, Latin-American and Afro-American) journals who uncompromisingly and fearlessly fight against imperialist outrages and indignities to our peoples. --Claudia Jones, founder, West Indian Gazette (2) Introduction: Pan-Africanism Through the Newspaper Printing Press This discussion explores how the idea of Pan-Africanism developed through the newspaper printing presses of free African descendants in America and Black immigrants, also free African descendants, in Great Britain. (3) We are defining Black newspapers as the start of Black media. We are defining Black media as the Black-owned and/or Black-oriented transmission of Black experiences--the basis of Black mass (and now, de-massified) media, which would include magazines, radio, television and the World Wide Web, the latter of which combines all of them. Black media, for purposes of this exercise, serve to reflect and reinforce a respective African-American and Black British identity outside of white political, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual hegemony. Black media create connections--exchanges of ideas and information--that lead to the development of a collective, albeit varied, political, social, economic, cultural and spiritual consciousness. (4) We are defining, and using, Pan-Africanism the way the newspaper publishers defined it at the time, on both sides of the Atlantic: an attempt by Blacks outside of Africa to create a collective cultural and political Black identity based in African roots. The Black newspaper press in America began with the founding of Freedom's Journal, the first Black American newspaper, in 1827, in New York City. Black newspapering in the British Isles began with The Pan African journal, in 1901, the first publication written by and targeted towards people of African descent in the nation. We are exploring the Pan-African ideas surrounding the creation of these two periodicals. This synopsis compares the socio-political context of the founding of African-American newspapering with that of the Black British newspapering. It tells a 186-year portion of the history of Black media from the point of view of how it was used by Black activists and community leaders in America and in the British Isles to empower themselves and others, to support Black organizations, to speak out against racial and social injustice, and to transmit Black cultural reality. We are not doing a condensed history of Black newspapers, either in America or Britain. We are attempting a narrowly focused historical exploration of Black newspapers in America and in the British Isles by way of how they functioned as consciousness-raisers and organizers for African-American and Black British communities. It will illustrate how Blacks use media to impact the lives of people of African descent in racially divided, predominately white societies that marginalize non-white definitions of reality through a disproportionately white media. It will add to knowledge about the way in which Black newspapers can differ in focus and content, depending on geography, and give more knowledge about how Black communities developed differently around the world, using their own newspapers as their socio-politico-cultural center. Pan-African Identity in Early 19th Century America and Britain The Pan-Africanist historian John Henrik Clarke named two freedom paths chosen by African-Americans in the 19th century: slave revolts and the movements started by freemen, the small percent of free Black men (and women) in the country. …