The Colored Citizen: Collaborative Editorship in Progress

To enrich our conversation on locating editors of historical multiethnic periodicals, I introduce the Colored Citizen, a Cincinnati-based African American weekly of the 1860s, by focusing on the (re)productive nature of its collaborative editorship. Even though only two issues (November 7, 1863, and May 19, 1866) are extant, various documents—including other Black periodicals, convention proceedings, and academic studies—suggest the collaborative nature of the Colored Citizen's editorship. The very existence of the Colored Citizen reflects the dynamic communal life of Black Cincinnatians in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Black community in Cincinnati was Ohio's largest and one of its oldest.¹ It is not coincidental that, as far as we know, two Black-owned newspapers appeared in Cincinnati before the Colored Citizen, and ten more periodicals emerged by the end of the nineteenth century. While Penelope Bullock has argued that no Black periodicals established before 1865 survived the Civil War, the Colored Citizen, which declared that it would serve as the "Soldier's Organ" by exclusively reporting on Black soldiers, continued to deliver word of African Americans in and out of Ohio even after the war.² The newspaper's tenacity during the turbulent mid-1860s and early 1870s hints at its editors' effective collaboration that balanced between the newspaper as an outlet for a specific editorial voice and the newspaper as a document for active communal life.

A few charismatic individual editors and publishers dominate scholarship on early Black periodicals: Frederick Douglass of the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper, John Russwurm of Freedom's Journal, and Thomas Hamilton of the Anglo-African Magazine. Nevertheless, if we regard the Black press as heroic editors' individual achievements without acknowledging that many Black periodicals were products of multiple editors' group-work, we risk attempting to understand the Black press in the same way we analyze white-dominant journalism. The collective editorship of multiethnic periodicals can reveal how they constantly evolved and revived themselves under communal leadership, responding to the ever changing dynamics of their communities. As Benjamin Fagan puts it, "Black northerners recognized newspaper reading as a public, as well as social, endeavor."³ Likewise, Black editors considered periodicals public and social endeavors through community-based collaboration.

Scholars often assume that editorial collaboration happened when a lack of financial and other resources compelled editors to take on roles besides their editorial responsibility.⁴ In addition to having low subscription rates and scanty funds, Black periodicals were frequently charged exorbitant fees by white printers.⁵ More importantly, though, the example of the Colored Citizen suggests that editors of the Black press collaborated to reinforce their own voices in print through a multigenerational and continuous evolution of Black journalism. In its first issue the Colored Citizen introduced its editors and publishers as a collective, "the Cincinnati Young Men's Literary and Publishing Company," rather than singling out one individual as an identifiable editor. The other extant issue lists John P. Sampson as manager of the "Joint Stock Company," but still does not reveal individual editors. The 1866 Prospectus declares that the newspaper was published not for but by "an association of colored residents of Cincinnati, Louisville, Zanesville, St. Louis, Chicago, Columbus, Indianapolis, Parkersburg, and other prominent cities of the great West." This "association of colored residents" that produced the newspaper represented Black Cincinnatians of various ages, educational backgrounds, and vocations.

The editorial collective that produced the Colored Citizen included three generations of Black residents in mid-nineteenth-century Cincinnati. The two oldest members were William H. Yancy, a prosperous barber, and Reverend Thomas Woodson. Both were in their early seventies when the Colored Citizen first appeared in 1863⁶ and both were born in Virginia, indicating that they might have formerly been enslaved, like many Black leaders in Cincinnati before 1850.⁷ Yancy offered crucial help to publish the Columbus-based Palladium of Liberty, the oldest Black newspaper in Ohio, by forming its executive committee under David Jenkins's editorship in 1843.⁸ Similarly, prior to the Colored Citizen, Woodson was one of the six editors of the first Black newspaper in Cincinnati, the Disfranchised...