Browse Items (37 total)

George L. Knox purchased the Indianapolis Freeman from Edward E. Cooper in 1892 and transformed the newspaper from a Democratic-leaning, independent paper into a loyal Republican Party press. Knox was well connected with the state party leadership,…

Edward E. Cooper was born in Florida in 1859. He founded short-lived Colored World in Indianapolis in 1878, which was later revived as the Indianapolis World. He founded the Indianapolis Freeman in July 1888 as a politically independent, national…

Edited jointly by Benjamin Pelham and his brother, Robert Pelham, Jr., along with William H. Anderson, Walter H. Stowers, and later Byron G. Redmond, the Plaindealer began publication in 1883. The editors sought to foster trust and promote civil…

The Cleveland Gazette was founded by journalist Harry C. Smith in 1883. Smith was a supporter of the Republican Party in Ohio, and the paper reflected his unrelenting advocacy of African American civil rights. The paper’s success was largely…

Benjamin Pelham was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1862. While working as messenger for the Detroit Post in the early 1880s, he edited and wrote articles for an amateur newspaper called The Venture. In 1883 he and his older brother, Robert Pelham, Jr.,…

More conciliatory than his other drawings, this illustration by Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell, Jr., applauded liberal whites for their efforts to thwart lynching and enforce law and order, and thereby contribute to southern economic progress.…

After the brutal lynching of a mentally disabled man, Henry Smith, this image in Detroit Plaindealer portrayed the failure of outgoing President Benjamin Harrison administration’s to condemn the lynching as a direct contrast to Abraham…

Indianapolis Freeman artists typically denounced racial discrimination and social inequality, and focused on presidential failures to stem racial violence. This frequently-repeated drawing, for example, showed an Atlas-like figure shouldering the…

In its election-eve issue in 1892, perhaps to encourage the exodus that Ida B. Wells’s campaign had begun, the Indianapolis Freeman re-printed a drawing by the late political cartoonist, Henry J. Lewis. A series of frames reminded readers that…

When six white men gang-raped an African American woman in Columbus, Ohio, the Cleveland Gazette published their profiles on its front page, providing something rarely seen in mainstream newspaper accounts of interracial rape in the 1890s—the…