Browse Items (37 total)

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…

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…

This drawing in the Indianapolis Freeman shows Uncle Sam standing impotently before a robed figure, Ethiopia, as she gestures toward the shooting of innocent African American men and women, and a burning church. “See how my people are murdered,…

In the late summer of 1889, the Indianapolis Freemanused the figure of Uncle Sam to protest a Gouldsboro, Louisiana, massacre of African American families on an excursion, and the burning of a church, as a symbol of federal protection. In this image,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…