The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagan (review)

Benjamin Fagan has written a thorough account of five black newspapers from the early and mid-nineteenth century, devoting one chapter to each: Freedom's Journal (1827–29), the first African American newspaper, founded by Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm; Colored American (1837–41), founded by Phillip Bell; North Star (1847–51), founded and edited by Frederick Douglass; Provincial Freeman (1853–57), the Canadian paper founded by Mary Ann Shadd Cary; and Weekly Anglo-African (1859–65), founded by Thomas Hamilton. Each chapter traces the origins of a newspaper from within the social and intellectual world of its founders and editors and highlights a common theme: the idea of "black chosenness," drawn from a millennial view of history, that "black Americans would lead the world to universal emancipation" (3). Each newspaper, Fagan argues, sought to define and redefine how to promote freedom for African Americans as an oppressed nation destined for liberation. There was little consensus about this, and Fagan deftly weaves in and out of various ideological clashes, from the assimilationist position of Freedom's Journal to editors who rejected the United States and affirmed diasporic affiliations, to the vehement Anglophilia of Provincial Freeman, to the Weekly Anglo-African's embrace of enlisting in the Union army after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Fagan argues strongly that we cannot divorce the study of print from the life stories of those who surrounded the press: including writers and readers, as well as printers, editors, illustrators, correspondents, and agents for distribution. He thus links together the newspapers under consideration not only by their medium (as large-format, serially published, widely distributed, and politically engaged papers) but also by the rich social fabric of black activist and religious communities in the northern United States and Canada—many of which were connected to each other across time and geographical distance. Like Jacqueline Bacon in her groundbreaking study of Freedom's Journal (2007), Fagan shows that we need to understand the emergence of early black newspapers as a function of the beliefs, aspirations, and political strategies of the individuals who brought them into existence. In making this argument Fagan aligns himself with scholars of early African American print culture who take a social and biographical approach, as opposed to others—coming from the field of book history—who find that print's media specificity destabilizes traditional notions of authorship and racial identity. "Human relationships," Fagan writes, "knit the newspapers in this study together, and make this book as much about people as it is about print" (19). It is a methodology well suited to his goal of understanding the fraught and inspiring visions of racial solidarity and freedom black editors explored in the antebellum period.

Fagan begins in his first chapter by chronicling the "middle class" aspirations and ideologies of Freedom's Journal, which advocated "black propriety" as a strategy to convince whites that African Americans were deserving of freedom (23). While advertising a readership that stretched from Boston to England to Haiti to the southern United States, Cornish and Russwurm tried to discipline the sometimes unruly behavior of their black compatriots, convinced that conventional morals, education, respectability, piety, and righteousness were central to the priority of "acting chosen," as Fagan puts it (32). This agenda "emerged out of the contests and concerns of local black communities" (23) and was tested as black New Yorkers paraded in the street to celebrate the passage of New York's gradual emancipation law in 1827. Whites in the North had been ridiculing and violently opposing black celebratory parades since they began with the abolition of the slave trade in 1808, and elite writers like Cornish and Russwurm wanted to discontinue them—an unpopular stance that "shattered [the] illusion" that Freedom's Journal could "speak for black Americans across the country" (38). Fagan demonstrates both the limits of the paper's politics and its importance as a trailblazing publication.

Fagan begins chapter 2 by noting that before Phillip A. Bell founded...