1824–1829
FREEDOM’S JOURNAL
Pamela Newkirk
For a quarter of a century, I have taught a course that surveys media portrayals of marginalized groups, including racial, ethnic, and religious minorities and the LGBTQI population, in film, on television, and in the popular press. Each year the course begins with an examination of Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829). It was America’s first African American–owned and –operated newspaper and, from its New York City office, it unflinchingly challenged demeaning depictions of Black people in the press. “We wish to plead our own cause,” the editors proclaimed in their first editorial on March 16, 1827. “Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the publick been deceived by misrepresentations, in things which concern us dearly. Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our Virtues are passed by unnoticed. From the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented.”
This editorial was penned by founding editors John B. Russwurm, who a year earlier had become the first African American graduate of Bowdoin College, and Samuel E. Cornish, an abolitionist and freedman who organized New York City’s first Black Presbyterian congregation. Their critique came just fifteen weeks before New York State, on July 4, effectively emancipated enslaved Blacks, and nearly four decades before the Emancipation Proclamation, followed by the Thirteenth Amendment, commenced the journey to an uncertain freedom for others.
In cataloging the derisive and destructive portrayals of Africans and their descendants, the editors extended their critique to progressive whites. “Men whom we equally love and admire have not hesitated to represent us disadvantageously, without becoming personally acquainted with the true state of things, nor discerning between virtue and vice among us.
“And what is still more lamentable,” they added, “our friends, to whom we concede all the principles of humanity and religion, from these very causes seem to have fallen into the current of popular feeling and are imperceptibly floating on the stream—actually living in the practice of prejudice, while they abjure it in theory and feel it not in their hearts.” From their Lower Manhattan office at 236 Church Street, the editors hoped to “arrest the progress of prejudice” while shielding Africans and their descendants from its wrath.
For two years the newspaper reached African Americans in eleven northern states and the District of Columbia, and it circulated as far away as Haiti, Europe, and Canada. It inspired the publication of two dozen other Black newspapers before the Civil War. Every year I hope my twenty-first-century New York University students will see the nearly two-hundred-year-old paper as little more than a significant relic of a dystopian past. However, the critique leveled in that first editorial still resonates for them. In their case studies of contemporary media portrayals, they continue to find glaring patterns of bias in the pervasive depictions of African Americans, which reserve extra scorn for Black men.
Whether analyzing news coverage in some of the nation’s most respected newspapers and magazines, or depictions of Blacks in film and on television, my students find that African Americans are too often relegated to narratives related to crime, sports, and pathology. For far too many Americans, these depictions are more authentic renderings of African American life than are the daily strivings of the actual people who evade detection: the ordinary and extraordinary fathers, brothers, mothers, and sisters who languish on the margins. It’s unlikely that the average African American is cognizant of the extent to which these portrayals shape and misshape the contours of their own lives: how the preponderance of stereotypes in film, crime shows, news stories, and music videos reduces them to specters whose walking, driving, or standing can result in a store clerk’s surveillance or a fatal encounter with police. And these images have gone far to sustain a rigid racial caste system resulting in the overpolicing and the mass incarceration of Black and Brown men, as well as a culture of exclusion in many of the most influential fields.
Despite the major strides African Americans have made since Russwurm and Cornish’s day, they remain disproportionately underrepresented in practically every influential field, including journalism: between 2002 and 2015, the number of Black journalists in mainstream newspapers actually declined from 2,951 to 1,560.
In radio, people of color, while comprising roughly 39 percent of the population, held just 14.5 percent of newsroom jobs and were only 7.2 percent of general managers and 8.2 percent of news directors, according to the 2019 annual survey conducted by the Radio Television Digital News Association. In television, people of color held about 22.8 percent of newsroom jobs at network affiliates, and were just 7.4 percent of general managers and 13.4 percent of news directors. African Americans, at 12 percent of the news staff, had achieved near proportional representation but were only 5.4 percent of news directors, down from 6.7 percent in 2018.
Meanwhile the Black press, once a staple of African American life, has become as marginalized as those it had sought to represent. As mainstream media prominently covered the civil rights movement, the reliance on Black newspapers waned. The circulation of leading newspapers including The Chicago Defender, The Pittsburgh Courier, and The Baltimore Afro-American peaked in 1945 at 257,000, 202,000, and 137,000, respectively, but by 1970 it stood at just 33,000, 20,000, and 33,000. While unfiltered Black voices can still be found offline and online in Essence, The Root, and the sprinkling of African American newspapers around the country, the centuries-long struggle to sustain a free Black press continues.
In 2019 the iconic Ebony magazine was compelled to sell its historically significant archives in a bankruptcy auction. Black Entertainment Television, founded by Robert L. Johnson, once featured news and politically oriented programming along with music videos and entertainment. However, in 2002 it shifted its focus to entertainment, and in 2005, the year it was sold to Viacom, it canceled its nightly news show. Like a number of other Black-interest outlets, it is no longer Black-owned and has drawn criticism for its programming.
Despite the fanfare over the occasional triumphs, Black voices—like those of other people of color—remain muted in film. Hollywood Diversity Report: Five Years of Progress and Missed Opportunities, a 2018 study conducted by UCLA, found that in the top two hundred theatrical releases in 2016, people of color comprised just 8 percent of screenwriters and 12.6 percent of directors.
Moreover, the kind of stereotypes condemned in Freedom’s Journal persist. A study by the University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering used artificial intelligence to analyze one thousand recent films and found that many continued to reinforce stereotypes of racial minorities, with African American characters more likely to curse.
Given the critical issues facing African Americans—including a starkly unjust criminal justice system and persistent racial disparities detected on practically every social indicator—it is clear that Black people still need to plead our own cause. While in recent decades the luster of the Black press has faded, the legacy of Freedom’s Journal can be glimpsed in the unbridled voices found on social media; in some Black-owned or -operated outlets; and in the cracks and crevices of mass media. The continuing quest by Black journalists to depict the breadth of the African American experience and to combat injustice recalls the audaciousness and valor of the trailblazing founders of Freedom’s Journal.