Pacific Appeal was an African-American newspaper based in San Francisco, and published from April 1862 to June 1880. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Pacific Appeal was an African-American newspaper based in San Francisco, and published from April 1862 to June 1880. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Pacific Appeal was co-founded by Philip Alexander Bell, an African-American civil rights and antislavery activist who had established Weekly Advocate (edited by Samuel Cornish) and worked for William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, [4] and Peter Anderson, a San Francisco civil rights activist and delegate at the California Colored Citizens Convention. [5] It was the successor to the Mirror of the Times , another San Francisco-based African-American newspaper that had been established in 1855, [3] with the change of name occurring along with a change of proprietor from Judge Mifflin W. Gibbs [6] : 76 [7] : 8 to William H. Carter. [6] : 91 Its contemporaries at the time included the Anglo-African, and it was regarded as the official organ of African-Americans on the Pacific slope. [6] : 91
The paper’s motto was “He who would be free, himself must strike the blow.” [6] : 92 [3] It began publishing in April 1862. [1] [2]
Later, Bell and Anderson would split, with Bell accusing Anderson of becoming less antislavery and more accommodationist. [3]
The coverage of antislavery and civil rights issues in the first few years has been covered by historians and chroniclers of black abolitionism of the era, including in The Afro-American Press and Its Editors . [6] : 92 [8] [3]
The inaugural 1862 volume contained eight antislavery poems, including four poems by San Francisco poet James Madison Bell, writing under the initials JMB. [3]
Pacific Appeal also published some 250 proclamations by Emperor Norton, self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States, including his proposals for what would later become the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Transbay Tube. [9] [10] [11] [12]