Media, Ethnic

Historical Role of Ethnic Media in the United States

Ethnic media have played many roles for each immigrant and ethnic group since colonial times. Ethnic media have always permitted their readers, listeners, and viewers a way to stay in touch with home countries, learn about the communities in which they live, and connect with different cultures, both in the United States and around the world. They have provided a voice for social and religious concerns, effective liaisons and connectors for their constituents, and vital channels for politicians, educators, religious leaders, and health-care entities that seek to interact with their target audiences. A look at selected groups of immigrants and their early media illustrates the social and religious roles played by ethnic media, even from the 1700s.

Ethnic media most likely began in the American colonies with German-language books and newspapers. German immigrants seeking freedom from religious persecution flocked to the colonies, especially to the area around Philadelphia, in the 1700s. Bibles, catechisms, and newspapers printed in German served them. Andrew Bradford and Benjamin Franklin published a German newspaper in 1732, but it folded after two issues. In 1732, the German-language newspaper Philadelphische Zeitung was founded. The next year, the German indentured servant John Peter Zenger founded the New York Journal. Zenger made history two years later for his landmark case involving seditious libel and freedom of press. In 1739, Christopher Sauer published the first German almanac in the United States, a genre that remained very popular with the large immigrant group.

African American media started with the founding in 1828 of Freedom's Journal by John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish. Russwurm, the first African American to graduate from a university in the United States (Bowdoin in Maine) and Cornish, a militant Presbyterian minister in New York, stated their objectives prophetically for ethnic media: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentation in things which concern us dearly.” Although this publication folded by 1830, others appeared, including the North Star by abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1847 and the Anglo American Magazine in 1857. Many black newspapers arose after the Civil War and during Reconstruction, growing from 12 black newspapers in 1866 to 575 in 1890. The Great Migration of southern blacks to the north, especially Chicago and New York, were reflected in the Chicago Defender and the New York Age. The fiery journalist Ida Wells became the first African American editor of a newspaper in 1889, the Free Speech in Memphis, but was forced to move to New York to continue her antilynching journalism in the face of southern racism.

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