Media, Black

Print Media

Black media ownership in the United States dates back to 1817, when the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia established the AME Book Concern, the first black-owned and black-operated publishing house. Other early black religious publishers included the AME Zion Publishing House (1841) and the National Baptist Publishing Board (1896).

Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of black political, educational, and cultural organizations began publishing scholarly and popular books and pamphlets on topics of social, economic, and political concern. These included the American Negro Academy (1897), the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (1915), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which began publishing books in 1913. Black colleges and universities also established presses and publishing imprints in the early twentieth century. These included Tuskegee Institute, which began publishing the Negro Yearbook in 1912; Hampton Institute; Fisk University; and Atlanta University.

Although a few commercial black book publishers were established beginning in the early 1900s, they tended to be short-lived enterprises. Beginning in the 1960s, however, dozens of independent commercial African American publishing houses were established with the advent of the civil rights, black consciousness, and Black Arts movements. These publishers included the Johnson Publishing Company, which began its book division in 1961; the Third World Press (1967); Africa World Press (1983); and Just Us Books (1988), a black-interest children's book publisher.

Compared with book publishing, black newspapers and magazines became more prolific. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the black newspaper press. In 1827, John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish founded Freedom's Journal, the first known black-owned newspaper. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black-owned newspapers served as activist community voices in the fight for abolition and civil rights. Among these were Frederick Douglass's North Star (1847), the New York Age (1887), the Chicago Defender (1905), the Amsterdam News (1909), and the Pittsburgh Courier (1910).

Most black periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century were scholarly journals, but the first successful black magazine in the United States was The Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP. In 1942, John H. Johnson began publishing Negro Digest, a magazine patterned after Reader's Digest that featured articles about the lives and concerns of African Americans and focused on the racial and social issues facing them.

Johnson's Negro Digest Publishing Company, now the Johnson Publishing Company, also created the lifestyle magazines Ebony (1945) and Jet (1951). These two magazines paved the way for other black consumer magazines, including Clarence Smith's magazine for black women, Essence (1970); Earl Graves's business magazine, Black Enterprise (1970); and the history and culture magazine American Legacy (1996), published by Rodney J. Reynolds. Today, there are more than 200 black newspapers and dozens of black magazines published in the United States.

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