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The Indianapolis Freeman was a weekly newspaper first published in 1888 by editor Edward E. Cooper. As the nation’s first illustrated African American newspaper, it was considered by the Indianapolis Journal to be the “best paper…

John Mitchell, Jr., was a newspaper editor, amateur illustrator and political leader in Richmond, Virginia in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He began his career as the Richmond correspondent for the New York Freeman, and took over…

Moses L. Tucker was an engraver, illustrator and caricaturist from Atlanta, Georgia. Little is known of his history, but in the late 1880s and early 1890s, he produced a range of satirical cartoons for the Indianapolis Freeman. The editor, Edward E…

The Northwestern Recorder (also known as the Wisconsin Afro-American) was a short-lived monthly newspaper published in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its first issue appeared in December 1892, and it ceased publication in March 1893.

In early 1895, Richmond Planet editor John Mitchell, Jr., published a series of his own drawings, beginning with this illustration “Prays for His Persecutors.” The image depicts an African American man kneeling in prayer against a…

The Richmond Planetwas founded in 1883 by thirteen former slaves, in the city of Richmond, Virginia. This four page (sometimes eight page) weekly was an independent newspaper that focused on African American civil rights in the post-Reconstruction…

During the winter of 1889–1890, the killing of prisoners by a white mob in Barnwell, South Carolina, and a “race war” in Georgia, prompted the Indianapolis Freeman to unleash a more pointed visual critique of so-called southern…