Mary Ann Shadd Cary was an American-Canadian anti-slavery activist, journalist, publisher, teacher, and lawyer. She was the first black woman publisher in North America and the first woman publisher in Canada. Shadd Cary edited The Provincial Freeman, established in 1853. Published weekly in southern Ontario, it advocated equality, integration and self-education for black people in Canada and the United States.
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Over the course of a lifetime dedicated to combating prejudice and violence, and the fight for African-American equality, especially that of women, Wells arguably became the most famous Black woman in America.
Mary Church Terrell was one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree, and became known as a national activist for civil rights and suffrage. She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street school —the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1896, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the Colored Women's League of Washington (1894). She helped found the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and served as its first national president, and she was a founding member of the National Association of College Women (1910).
Timothy Thomas Fortune was an American orator, civil rights leader, journalist, writer, editor and publisher. He was the highly influential editor of the nation's leading black newspaper The New York Age and was the leading economist in the black community. He was a long-time adviser to Booker T. Washington and was the editor of Washington's first autobiography, The Story of My Life and Work. Fortune’s philosophy of militant agitation on behalf of the rights of black people laid one of the foundations of the Civil Rights Movement.
Black newspapers are news publications in the United States serving African-American communities. Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm started the first African-American periodical called Freedom's Journal in 1827. During the antebellum South, other African-American newspapers sprang forth, such as The North Star founded in 1847 by Frederick Douglass.
Hallie Quinn Brown was an American educator, writer and activist.
The American Civil War bibliography comprises books that deal in large part with the American Civil War. There are over 60,000 books on the war, with more appearing each month. Authors James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier stated in 2012, "No event in American history has been so thoroughly studied, not merely by historians, but by tens of thousands of other Americans who have made the war their hobby. Perhaps a hundred thousand books have been published about the Civil War."
The Indianapolis Recorder is an American weekly newspaper, which began publishing in 1895. It is the longest-published African-American paper in Indiana and the nation's fourth-oldest-surviving African-American newspaper. The newspaper's primary readership is African-American.
The Bethel Literary and Historical Society was an organization founded in 1881 by African Methodist Episcopal Church Bishop Daniel Payne and continued at least until 1915. It represented a highly significant development in African-American society in Washington, D.C. Most of its early members were members of the Metropolitan AME Church where its meetings were held, while maintaining an open invitation for black Washingtonians from across the city. It immediately developed into the preeminent debating society and forum for racial issues in Washington, D.C. The prospect of a separation of schools for black children was heatedly debated in 1881–82 as were the ideas of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois in 1903. It was one of the stops of `Abdu'l-Bahá's journeys to the West.
The Indianapolis Freeman, first published on July 14, 1888, by Edward Elder Cooper in Indianapolis, Indiana, was the first illustrated black newspaper in the United States. Cooper sold the paper to George L. Knox in 1892; Knox shifted the paper's political allegiance from Democratic to Republican. However, the paper would shift toward the Democratic Party again in its final days due to the power of the Ku Klux Klan over the Indiana Republican Party. It was circulated nationally and considered by many the leading black newspaper in America. Hurt by the Depression and competition from the Indianapolis Recorder, the paper ceased publication in 1926.
Freeman Briley Ransom (1880–1947) was born on his family's farm in Grenada, Mississippi as one of eleven children. He became a lawyer, businessman, and civic activist practicing in Indianapolis, Indiana. From 1910 until his death he served as legal counsel to Madam C. J. Walker and the Madame C.J. Walker Manufacturing Company. He is buried in West Ridge Park Cemetery in Indianapolis. Robert Brokenburr was his law partner.
Lillian May Parker Thomas Fox was an African-American journalist, clubwoman, public speaker, and civic activist in Indianapolis, Indiana, who rose to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s as a writer for the Indianapolis Freeman, a leading national black newspaper at the time. In 1900 Fox joined the Indianapolis News, becoming the first African-American columnist to regularly write for a white newspaper in Indiana. She was inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame in 2014.
Lafayette M. Hershaw was a journalist, lawyer, and a clerk and law examiner for the General Land Office of the United States Department of the Interior. He was a key intellectual figure among African Americans in Atlanta in the 1880s and in Washington, D.C., from 1890 until his death. He was a leader of the intellectual social groups in the capital such as Bethel Literary and Historical Society and the Pen and Pencil Club. He was a strong supporter of W. E. B. Du Bois and was one of the thirteen organizers of the Niagara Movement, the forerunner to the NAACP. He was an officer of the D.C. Branch of the NAACP from its inception until 1928. He was also a founder of the Robert H. Terrell Law School and served as the school's president.
The Colored American was a weekly newspaper published in Washington, D.C., from 1893 to 1904 by Edward Elder Cooper. It frequently featured the works of journalists John Edward Bruce and Richard W. Thompson.
Richard W. Thompson was a journalist and public servant in Indiana and Washington, D.C. He was at various times an editor or managing editor of the Indianapolis Leader, the Indianapolis World, the Indianapolis Freeman and the Washington D.C. Colored American. He was published as a general correspondent in The Colored American, The Washington Post, the Indianapolis Freeman, the Indianapolis World, Atlanta Age, Baltimore Afro-American Ledger, the Cincinnati Rostrum, the Charleston West Virginia Advocate, the Philadelphia Tribune and the Chicago Monitor. His longest lasting relationship was with the Indianapolis Freeman. In 1896, the black paper, The Leavenworth Herald, edited by Blanche Ketene Bruce, called Thompson the "best newspaper correspondent on the colored press."
John A. Arneaux was a Shakespearean actor and journalist in New York City and in Paris, France. From 1884 to 1886 he was editor and owner of the New York Enterprise which had the largest circulation of any African American newspaper in the country at that time. As a journalist and a civil rights activist, he was widely respected. He was also an actor and leader of an African American theatre troupe, the Astor Place Tragedy company. Together with his friend Benjamin J. Ford, he was the leading black Shakespearean actor of his period.
Afro-American Press and Its Editors is a book published in 1891 written by Irvine Garland Penn. Penn covers African-American newspapers and magazines published between 1827 and 1891. The book covers many aspects of journalism, and devotes a chapter to black female journalists. Penn believed that the black press played a crucial role in presenting the case to the broader American population that black people were fit for the full benefits of citizenship.
The Indianapolis Leader began in August 1879 as Indianapolis' first black newspaper.
Helen Appo Cook was a wealthy, prominent African-American community activist in Washington, D.C. and a leader in the women's club movement. Cook was a founder and president of the Colored Women's League, which consolidated with another organization in 1896 to become the National Association of Colored Women (NACW), an organization still active in the 21st century. Cook supported voting rights and was a member of the Niagara Movement, which opposed racial segregation and African American disenfranchisement. In 1898, Cook publicly rebuked Susan B. Anthony, president of the National Woman's Suffrage Association, and requested she support universal suffrage following Anthony's speech at a U.S. Congress House Committee on Judiciary hearing.
William Edgar Easton was an American playwright, journalist, and political activist. He is best known for two plays about the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath: Dessalines (1893), a historical drama about Jean-Jacques Dessalines; and Christophe (1911), a drama about Henri Christophe, King of Haiti following the Revolution.
