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., along with William H. Anderson, Walter H. Stowers and later Byron G. Redmond, founded the Detroit Plaindealer, to promote African American economic interests and political rights. After the paper ceased publication in 1894, Benjamin Pelham went on to hold a number of appointed government positions, and was elected auditor of Wayne Country in 1906. He was known as one of the most influential African-American leaders in Detroit during these years .
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 Pine Bluffs, Arkansas. In the 1870s he produced some engravings for Harper’s Weekly, and in the early 1880s worked as a sketch artist for the Smithsonian’s “Mound Survey” of pre-historic Native American sites in Arkansas and elsewhere. His cartoons in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1889 focused on themes of economic, social and political rights for African Americans. He died in April 1891.
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.
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 1894 and served three terms in all. As a legislator, Smith introduced civil rights legislation in 1894, and in 1896 he successfully shepherded a strict anti-lynching bill into law (the Smith Act) that served as a model for other states. Smith published the Gazette until his death in 1941.
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 due to what early journalism historian I. Garland Penn called the “vigorous and able editorial writings of Mr. Smith.” For a long time, the paper was the nation's longest-running African American weekly, published every week for nearly sixty years, earning it the nickname “Old Reliable.” The paper folded in 1945, four years after Smith’s death in 1941.
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, and under his editorship the paper fully supported Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of accommodation.