Mary Ann Camberton 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. She was also the second black woman to attend law school in the US. Mary Shadd 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.
Samuel Eli Cornish was an American Presbyterian minister, abolitionist, publisher, and journalist. He was a leader in New York City's small free black community, where he organized the first congregation of black Presbyterians in New York. In 1827 he became one of two editors of the newly founded Freedom's Journal, the first black newspaper in the United States. In 1833 he was a founding member of the interracial American Anti-Slavery Society.
James McCune Smith was an American physician, apothecary, abolitionist and author. He was the first African American to earn a medical degree. His M.D. was awarded by the University of Glasgow in Glasgow, Scotland. After his return to the United States, he also became the first African American to run a pharmacy in the nation.
The Liberator (1831–1865) was a weekly abolitionist newspaper, printed and published in Boston by William Lloyd Garrison and, through 1839, by Isaac Knapp. Religious rather than political, it appealed to the moral conscience of its readers, urging them to demand immediate freeing of the slaves ("immediatism"). It also promoted women's rights, an issue that split the American abolitionist movement. Despite its modest circulation of 3,000, it had prominent and influential readers, including all the abolitionist leaders, among them Frederick Douglass, Beriah Green, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, and Alfred Niger. It frequently printed or reprinted letters, reports, sermons, and news stories relating to American slavery, becoming a sort of community bulletin board for the new abolitionist movement that Garrison helped foster.
Freedom's Journal was the first African American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. John Wilk and other free Black men in New York City, it was published weekly starting with the March 16, 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal was superseded in 1829 by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the former senior editor of the Journal. The View covered it as part of Black History Month in 2021.
William Whipper was a businessman and abolitionist in the United States. Whipper, an African American, advocated nonviolence and co-founded the American Moral Reform Society, an early African-American abolitionist organization. He helped found one of the first black literary societies in the U.S known as the Reading Room Society whose constitution stated that its aim was the "mental improvement of the people of color in the neighborhood of Philadelphia." William Whipper epitomized the prosperity that Northern Blacks were able to attain in the mid-19th century.
The Genius of Universal Emancipation was an abolitionist newspaper founded by Benjamin Lundy in 1821, in Mount Pleasant, Ohio.
Lewis Woodson was an educator, minister, writer, and abolitionist. He was an early leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Woodson started and helped to build other institutions within the free African-American communities in Ohio and western Pennsylvania prior to the American Civil War.
Charles Bennett Ray was a prominent African-American minister and abolitionist who owned and edited the weekly newspaper The Colored American. Born in Massachusetts, he spent most of his career and life in New York City.
Louisianian, also referred to as New Orleans Louisianian and The Louisianian was a semi-weekly newspaper published in New Orleans, Louisiana. The Louisianian was founded in 1870 by P. B. S. Pinchback (1837–1921), an African-American legislator who was elevated to governor of Louisiana in 1872. The paper's motto was “Republican at all times, and under all circumstances”. It was one of the few 19th-century African-American newspapers that sought both black and white readers.
John Pierre Burr was an American abolitionist and community leader in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, active in education and civil rights for African Americans. He was an illegitimate child of Aaron Burr, the third U.S. vice president, and Mary Emmons, a Haitian governess who may have been born in Calcutta, India.
The Colored Conventions Movement, or Black Conventions Movement, was a series of national, regional, and state conventions held irregularly during the decades preceding and following the American Civil War. The delegates who attended these conventions consisted of both free and formerly enslaved African Americans, including religious leaders, businessmen, politicians, writers, publishers, editors, and abolitionists. The conventions provided "an organizational structure through which black men could maintain a distinct black leadership and pursue black abolitionist goals." Colored conventions occurred in thirty-one states across the US and in Ontario, Canada. The movement involved more than five thousand delegates and tens of thousands of attendees.
Henrietta Green Regulus Ray (1808–1836) was an African-American female activist living in New York City who advocated for women's education and independence. She helped found the African Dorcas Association, an organization that worked to provide clothing to students of the African Free School, and she became the organization's secretary in 1828. In 1834, she married Rev. Charles B. Ray, an African-American abolitionist and owner and editor of the Colored American, a weekly newspaper. Around the same time as her marriage, she also was elected as the first president of the New York Female Literary Society, which was "formed for the purpose of acquiring literary and scientific knowledge." She died in 1836 of tuberculosis.
John C. Bowers was an African American entrepreneur, organist and vestryman at St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, and a founding member of the first Grand United Order of Odd Fellows for African Americans in Pennsylvania. He was active in the anti-slavery movement in Philadelphia, and involved in the founding of several organizations including the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society. "A fervent abolitionist and outspoken opponent of colonization, [he] was much in demand as a public speaker."
Elizabeth Ashurst Biggs was an English novelist and advocate for women's rights and anti-slavery.
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.
Philip Alexander Bell (1808–1889) was a 19th-century American newspaper editor and abolitionist. Born in New York City, he was educated at the African Free School and became politically active at the 1832 Colored Convention. He began his newspaper career with for William Lloyd Garrison's anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator and became an outspoken voice on a variety of social and political of issues of the day including abolition, suffrage, and the protection of fugitive slaves.
Pacific Appeal was an African-American newspaper based in San Francisco and published from April 1862 to June 1880.
The Elevator was a newspaper published in San Francisco from 1869 to 1874 to express the perspective of the black community. A major focus of the articles were the Fourth of July celebrations that were non-segregated as that was occasionally set aside on Independence day. The newspaper was first published under the slogan "Equality Before the Law" by Philip Alexander Bell.
The Colored Citizen was an African American newspaper founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1863. It was one of several black newspapers founded in Cincinnati during the nineteenth century, and it was one of only a few black papers in the country published during the American Civil War. The precise dates of its dissolution are not known. Only two surviving copies of the newspaper remain.
