Browse Items (37 total)

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…

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.…

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.,…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

Harry C. Smith founded the Cleveland Gazette in 1883, a year after he graduated from high school. Under his editorial control, the Gazette was a staunch advocate of African American civil rights. Smith was elected to the Ohio state legislature in…

Henry J. Lewis was born in slavery in Mississippi, sometime in the late 1830s (the exact year of his birth is unknown). He was severely burned as a child, which left him blind in one eye and crippled in his left hand. He lived much of his life in…

Anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells was a former Memphis schoolteacher and journalist. In 1892, as co-owner of the Memphis newspaper Free Speech, Wells exposed the lies regarding the lynching of the three African American men. She urged her readers…