The Negro/National Newspaper Publishers Association and Its Dual Roles as a Trade and Advocacy Organization,1940–2020

The NNPA’s Formative Years: 1940–1944

In the early 1930s, about 150 Black newspapers, with a combined average weekly circulation of 600,000, were published in the United States. By the time the country was preparing to enter World War II, the number of weeklies increased to about 230 and circulation soared to 1.2 million. ³³ Figures rose even higher during the war, to 1.8 million. ³⁴ As many as six million people may have read Black newspapers owing to pass-on readership. The publishers of the papers with the highest circulations—the Chicago Defender, Pittsburgh Courier, Baltimore Afro-American ³⁵ —each reached a national audience, but they lacked a unified voice to address racial inequities. Therefore, John H. Sengstacke, then 27, discussed with his uncle, Defender founder and publisher Robert Sengstacke Abbott, a plan to create a national association for the Black press. Abbott was leery. He and Courier publisher Robert L. Vann competed for paid subscriptions, critical revenue at a time when advertising support was scarce. Abbott told Sengstacke he feared that his rivals would “get his most intimate secrets for success.” ³⁶ Also, Vann and Abbott were similarly “strong-willed, individualistic, self-made men who had built their newspapers from nothing over long years.” ³⁷ Sengstacke, who was described as having “the vigor of youth and the determination of a brilliant but practical mind,” nevertheless organized a conference of publishers in February 1940 “to discuss their problems, make recommendations and decide definitely to join together to promote the interests of the Negro people and their own protection.” ³⁸ The Defender published a group photograph of the men and women who represented twenty-one weekly publications—including the Courier, Afro-American, Philadelphia Tribune, Louisville Defender, and Louisiana Weekly—with the caption, “Probably the largest group of Negro publishers ever to gather at one time.” ³⁹ Chester Franklin, publisher of the Kansas City Call, and D. Arnett Murphy, vice president of the Afro-American, led discussions on how to increase national advertising, a key issue that the NNPA would explore for decades. The new trade group also agreed to conduct “an exhaustive survey of the Negro market” so details could be presented to advertising agencies. ⁴⁰

Participants at the founding meeting pledged to continue fighting to end segregation in all its forms. Over the years, however, publishers did not always agree on a collective strategy. Reasons for this included political differences, a belief in legal action rather than protest, and real or perceived pressure from government agencies. ⁴¹ For example, in January 1941, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph suggested that 10,000 Black Americans march on Washington to protest job discrimination in the defense industry and segregation in the military. ⁴² The NNPA did not endorse the protest, but some member-papers commented on the plan. An Afro-American editorial called the proposal “a good one” and a way to wake up “White America[,] so busy with its own business that it doesn’t know about ours.” ⁴³ But the Pittsburgh Courier described the march as a “crackpot” idea and noted that previous events had failed because Congress viewed them as “nuisances organized by publicity hounds, job-hunters and addlepates.” ⁴⁴ The Chicago Defender supported Randolph and the planned march in an editorial that acknowledged that “mass pressure as a means of stimulating social action” had “yielded beneficial results.” A second Defender column stated that if the march did nothing else, it would “convince white America that the American black man has decided henceforth and forever to abandon the timid role of Uncle-Tomism in his struggle for social justice, no matter what the sacrifice.” ⁴⁵ Days before the scheduled march, Randolph and NAACP Executive Director Walter White met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other senior officials to discuss discrimination in various areas. ⁴⁶ On June 25, 1941, Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in the defense industry and federal government and creating a Committee on Fair Employment Practices to investigate complaints of discrimination and take steps to redress them. ⁴⁷

Less than six months later, Roosevelt told a radio audience that Americans, along with other free people, were “fighting to maintain our right to live among our world neighbors in freedom and in common decency, without fear of assault.” ⁴⁸ But front-page editorials and articles in the Black press immediately noted the persistence of racial discrimination, despite Roosevelt’s recent executive order. The Afro-American, for example, reported plans by the War Department to continue the “jim crow [sic] policy” in the U.S. Army, and said editors had rebuked “army heads for following the Southern pattern in army training” and separating Black troops from White. ⁴⁹ In February 1942, a Pittsburgh Courier editor said Black America had to fight and win “the convulsive war abroad” and “the bloodless war at home.” The wars were “inextricably intertwined” and freedom depended on successes on foreign battlefields. ⁵⁰ Soon after, NNPA President William O. Walker issued what he regarded as “a fighting call to Negro editors throughout the United States” to attend the organization’s third annual conference. “Because of the war,” he said, “there are many problems facing our papers which no one editor can solve individually. All of us will get more respect from all sources if we have an active trade association.” Walker, the Alabama-born publisher of the Cleveland Call and Post, cited mounting pressure on smaller newspapers, and particularly those in the South, to stop playing “discordant notes”—questioning the war effort and criticizing discrimination. ⁵¹ “Unless we are well organized, we cannot properly meet this menace which may eventually threaten all of us,” he said.

The Negro papers are the front line in our fight for equality of citizenship. Those who oppose us will shudder if they see us gathered at Chicago [in June], a host of determined, militant Negro publishers, ready to do or die! ⁵²

Nearly sixty delegates representing twenty-six newspapers attended the conference and agreed to dedicate “their newspapers to the preservation of freedom and democracy for the world, and pledged their unequivocal loyalty to the United States and to President Roosevelt.” However, the group prepared a resolution to send to Roosevelt that “endorsed the crusade” to establish an interracial division of soldiers as a forerunner to complete integration of the armed forces. ⁵³

NNPA members elected Sengstacke to lead the organization for a second time in June 1943. ⁵⁴ Soon after, his Chicago Defender and other Black and White newspapers reported on a labor strike in Detroit that precipitated a deadly race riot. ⁵⁵ On behalf of the NNPA, Sengstacke telegrammed Roosevelt, urging him to broadcast a nationwide “appeal to the conscience of America for drastic action to halt [the] racial strife, rioting and killing sweeping the country like wildfire.” ⁵⁶ The violence in Detroit alarmed Roosevelt, who directed government officials to reach out to Black leaders. Eleven members of the NNPA’s executive committee met with Vice President Henry Wallace, Attorney General Francis Biddle, and other senior officials in July. The committee told Wallace the riots were prompted by “race hatreds” and asked him to condemn such attitudes in a talk he was scheduled to deliver in Detroit. The group also pressed the officials for action on a variety of issues, including ending discriminatory policies in the armed forces, working with the NNPA to improve coverage of Black servicemen in foreign theaters of war, deferring conscription of men who were vital to the newspaper industry, and admitting Black women to the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service). ⁵⁷ The NNPA later said that because it could not get a concrete answer about policies regarding integration of the WAVES, it asked the Secretary of the Navy for clarification. ⁵⁸ One important outcome of the meeting with Biddle was representation on the press advisory committee to the Office of War Information. Sengstacke, William Walker, and Atlanta World publisher C. A. Scott were among the publishers who were appointed to serve on it in September 1943. ⁵⁹

Conferences with ranking officials eventually led to an NNPA meeting with Roosevelt in February 1944. According to a contemporaneous survey of Black newspapers and periodicals, 46 newspapers—out of the 155 Black periodicals publishing at the time—belonged to the NNPA. Member-papers had a combined average net circulation of nearly 1.2 million, although actual readership was probably closer to at least four million due to subscribers’ proclivity to pass on copies to others. ⁶⁰ As the Pittsburgh Courier’s Ira Lewis told Roosevelt, “We represent here perhaps five or six million readers” who ask often about “the treatment of our boys in the armed services.” ⁶¹ It was the first time in the nation’s history, noted the Afro-American, that a sitting president had formally received representatives of an organized Black press association. The delegation of a dozen editors and publishers presented a twenty-one-point statement of “war aims and post-war aspirations” on behalf of all Black Americans; the full text was published in the Afro so readers could review the NNPA document demanding equal rights and liberties. The advocacy organization reiterated its commitment to winning “the crusade for liberty for all peoples, a better world and a better nation in which true democracy may prevail.” But it stressed as well Black Americans’ right to freedom as guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. ⁶² Louis Martin, publisher of the Michigan Chronicle who would later serve as NNPA president, recalled that he and his colleagues

left the White House walking on air with no one quite sure what grievance the president had promised to act upon. Yet there was no doubt in any of our minds, certainly none in mine, that FDR was on our side, understood our complaints, and in due time would try to do something about them. ⁶³

Although Roosevelt made no commitments that day, in February 1944, the trade periodical PEP: Negro Publisher, Editor and Printer praised the NNPA delegation for its activism. ⁶⁴ PEP subsequently listed several of the NNPA’s wartime accomplishments and observed, “We salute the Negro press for its splendid trade organization.” ⁶⁵

The NNPA held its fifth annual convention in New York City in June 1944 and established a format for future summer meetings: discussion groups led by members who were experts in advertising, circulation, business management, editorial, and promotion. ⁶⁶ The trade group also discussed raising advertising standards of member-papers by banning misleading and fraudulent ads such as those hawking nostrums, lucky charms, or magic. Attendees, likely puffing on fat cigars, ⁶⁷ listened to numerous committee reports, including one about the observance of Negro Press Week. Three half-hour broadcasts aired on the national networks—Columbia, National, and the Blue—and two programs were “shortwaved” overseas with co-operation from the War and Navy Departments and the Office of War Information. Some seventy-five million people heard a statement from President Roosevelt; chats with Black war correspondents in Italy, England, and Guadalcanal, who were patched in via “pickups”; and interviews with Black war heroes who had returned home or were still serving abroad. The content underscored the NNPA’s goal to acquaint White and Black listeners “with the patriotic efforts of the Negro and the Negro Press.” ⁶⁸

Of the NNPA’s role during World War II, John Sengstacke later described how publishers provided “real leadership for the first time.” Although his uncle, Robert Abbott, thought the plan to form a trade and advocacy organization was “too ambitious ever to yield fruitful results,” Black publishers worked together to chip away at segregation. ⁶⁹ Subsequent important successes included integrating baseball ⁷⁰ and the White House Press Corps. ⁷¹ Wartime achievements brought the fledgling association to the attention of presidents and politicians and solidly positioned the group to continue its advocacy of civil rights on behalf of its readers and all Black Americans in the postwar years.

Post-War Advocacy: 1945–1950

NNPA member-papers, including the Pittsburgh Courier and Sengstacke’s Chicago Defender, expanded in size and circulation during World War II as readers sought information about the global conflict and Blacks’ contributions to the war effort. Meanwhile, the Courier had led a growing public clamor for civil rights with its campaign for victory abroad and victory over racism at home. The so-called Double V campaign became an integral element of many NNPA member-newspapers, which printed articles, editorials, and the illustration of an eagle with outspread wings behind interlocking Vs. ⁷² At a regional meeting in New Orleans in February 1945, Sengstacke said,

While the club of discrimination and segregation fells its heaviest blow in the South, it is still a stimulation to all who love freedom to know that Negro newspapers have banded together in the fight for a common purpose—first-class citizenship for all, regardless of race, color or creed. ⁷³

He outlined short- and long-term goals that he believed would further strengthen the NNPA and ensure its ability to continue its trade and advocacy roles after the war ended. For starters, he said more members in all regions needed to actively participate in the group’s activities and share in its responsibilities. A cohesive editorial campaign also was necessary so publishers could “fight common battles of the Negro with a common philosophy.” ⁷⁴ Other topics included practical and financial issues such as developing a central purchasing system for supplies, encouraging youth to prepare for publishing-related jobs, training ad salesmen and cultivating clients, gathering market surveys and reader demographics to try to attract new national advertising accounts, and disseminating copies of newspapers and information about the Black press to Whites to develop “good will.” ⁷⁵

The latter point inspired a strategy session at which participants shared successful outreach efforts. For instance, John H. McCray and his colleagues at the Columbia, South Carolina, Lighthouse and Informer regularly “contacted liberal whites [and] white editors.” He said that as a result of that outreach, some White students in the city had subscribed to Black newspapers and republished stories in school publications. ⁷⁶ Regarding Sengstacke’s goal of training students for jobs at Black papers, concrete suggestions included adding linotyping courses to high school curricula, accepting students for apprenticeships at publications, and hosting a conference in Jackson, Mississippi, to study ways to equalize educational opportunities. The group also decided to contact the War Manpower Commission, which had managed labor needs during the war, to obtain names of men who might be eligible for newspaper work once the conflict ended. ⁷⁷

Fifteen resolutions were adopted at the close of the joint regional meeting. The motions illustrate the organization’s immediate advocacy of post-war civil rights and demonstrate the particular challenges facing Black Southerners. For example, the group especially criticized efforts by Southern lawmakers to circumvent Smith v. Allwright. In 1944, the Supreme Court held that prohibiting Blacks from voting in primary elections violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. ⁷⁸ Nevertheless, a measure to disenfranchise Black voters in Alabama was gaining statewide support. ⁷⁹ The NNPA deplored such legislative actions, urged NNPA newspapers to conduct voter-registration campaigns and renew attempts to help Black Southerners gain “their full political rights as a matter of self-defense,” and recommended abolition of the poll tax. ⁸⁰ The group subsequently assisted the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, a coalition of labor, liberal, and civil rights organizations that conducted lobbying, educational, and legislative campaigns. NNPA member-papers were encouraged to carry editorials and advertising related to the drive to abolish the taxes that disenfranchised Blacks as well as poor and working-class Whites. ⁸¹

Publishers and editors also worried about a looming lack of content for their expanded newspapers. Three regional meetings were held in 1945–1946 alone to discuss topics such as “Techniques for Gathering News,” “‘Angling’ the News Story,” and “The Press and Race Relations.” ⁸² Reports about the trade organization’s seventh annual gathering—and the first general convention since the war’s end—show a strong desire to take business to new levels. As Howard H. Murphy, the group’s longtime secretary-treasurer and an Afro-American executive, said, the NNPA had “done an excellent job of supporting activities of various organizations, [but] it was now necessary that the NNPA devote more time to its own problems.” ⁸³ Individuals representing some thirty Black newspapers—out of a membership of fifty-five publications—met in June 1946 at the new Wendell L. Willkie Memorial Building that housed the NAACP, Anti-Defamation League, and other like-minded organizations in New York City. ⁸⁴ More than a dozen committees reported on topics including ethics, public policy, membership, advertising, and circulation. Another meeting day was devoted to group discussions about content, administrative and organizational problems, sales and promotion, and other subjects. ⁸⁵

This attention to business was crucial, NNPA President Frank Stanley told attendees, because millions of readers saw “the Negro Press [as] the vehicle of victory over oppression, bigotry and discrimination.” ⁸⁶ People looked to their papers for “guidance, leadership, counsel and inspiration. . . . This greater dependence of millions of people on our [publications] places upon us a greater responsibility to publish the very best newspapers possible.” ⁸⁷ Consequently, Stanley said, the NNPA needed to become a “publishers’ business organization” that supported both the Black press as a whole and the success of individual member-papers. Managers of smaller newspapers felt that the association wasn’t helpful to them; this became a constant refrain. To realize success as a trade association, Stanley called for the creation of a central office with sufficient personnel and finances to develop and implement the NNPA’s various programs. (In the same breath, though, he acknowledged that only one-third of members paid their dues.) Stanley also suggested a significant expansion of the NNPA News Service to other U.S. cities and Europe. ⁸⁸ The organization had recently hired journalist Louis Lautier away from an administrative job at the War Department and charged him with developing a viable news bureau in Washington, D.C., and filing stories daily. ⁸⁹ But he was denied access to the all-White Senate Press Gallery and therefore was unable to cover issues “from the viewpoint of minority citizens.” ⁹⁰ The Afro-American called the segregation “a flagrant abridgement of freedom of the press.” ⁹¹ It also reported that the NNPA had waged a “long and unyielding fight” to have Lautier and other Black reporters admitted to the gallery. ⁹² He finally was allowed entrance in March 1947. The civil rights attorney and educator Charles H. Houston predicted that publishers’ ability to print current race-related news would help them attract readers, advertising, and revenue. ⁹³

The NNPA acted on other civil rights issues, particularly after some White racists “mounted a postwar campaign of terror” in a determined effort to prevent returning Black veterans from securing homes, jobs, and the franchise. The Ku Klux Klan attempted a revival in 1946; lynchings also increased during the year. ⁹⁴ Sixteen editors and publishers met with President Truman that March. He was commended for appointing Blacks to government positions and supporting permanent fair employment practices legislation. But, the group specifically asked him to abolish all voting restrictions and enforce federal laws “safeguarding the life and liberties of all American citizens”—and particularly those living in the South. Truman said the NNPA’s points aligned with his own convictions, and he restated his commitment to fighting for legislation to guarantee minorities their rights. ⁹⁵ He declared in December that mob violence was a grave threat to democracy. He established a civil rights committee to study existing civil rights measures and recommend new legislation to protect “all parts of the population.” ⁹⁶ The need for a comprehensive law became clearer in May 1947, when an all-White jury acquitted thirty-one White men of lynching a Black man in Greensville, South Carolina. Meeting in an emergency session, the NNPA Board of Directors drafted long telegrams to Truman, Attorney General Tom C. Clark, and other politicians that urged immediate passage of anti-lynching legislation. Their acquittal, the Board stated, represented “the most contemptuous disregard for moral conscious[ness] and basic social laws in the recent history of our nation.” ⁹⁷

The committee’s report, To Secure These Rights, formed the basis of Truman’s State of the Union address to Congress in January 1948. “Some of our citizens are still denied equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement, and for the expression of their views at the polls,” Truman said. “Most serious of all, some are denied equal protection under laws. Whether discrimination is based on race, or creed, or color, or land of origin, it is utterly contrary to American ideals of democracy.” ⁹⁸ Truman asked Congress to enact legislation addressing ten civil rights objectives, including establishing a permanent Commission on Civil Rights, protecting the right to vote, and prohibiting discrimination in interstate transportation facilities. ⁹⁹ The NNPA unanimously endorsed Truman’s proposals “as constituting the most vital step of this century toward eliminating the double standard of citizenship which embarrasses us before the world and imperils our national security.” ¹⁰⁰

The organization subsequently honored Truman and ten other men and organizations with its inaugural Russwurm Award in 1948. ¹⁰¹ Named for John B. Russwurm, editor of Freedom’s Journal and cofounder of the Black press in March 1827, the prize for “signal contributions to democratic principles” was thereafter presented annually during Negro Newspaper Week (Figure 1). ¹⁰² Later recipients of the award—some of whom were posthumously recognized—were champions of racial equality (Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mary Church Terrell); civil rights workers (Roy Wilkins and Florida NAACP activist Harry T. Moore); students (Autherine Lucy, Sidna Brower, Charlayne Hunter, and Hamilton Holmes); the families of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, who were murdered while registering voters in Mississippi; the Black citizens who waged the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; the Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and dozens of other individuals and organizations. ¹⁰³

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Figure 1.

Negro Press Week 1951. Since its inception, the NNPA has celebrated the March 1827 founding of the Black press. This 1951 illustration was among the promotional materials in the press kit supplied to NNPA members.

While the scope of the ninth annual convention in 1948 highlighted the NNPA’s ongoing efforts to professionalize the trade and advocacy organization, the minutes reveal tensions among members. For instance, Kansas City Call general manager Dowdal H. Davis Jr. said he and his committee were forced to eliminate or curtail some of the promotional activities for Negro Press Week due to “the pressure of work in their own plants.” ¹⁰⁴ Publishers agreed that everyone was “spread too thin.” ¹⁰⁵ The NNPA’s elected officers, and particularly the presidents, shouldered much of the responsibility for running and promoting the organization. Davis reported at the 1950 convention that he had represented the NNPA at numerous events during his tenure, including a journalism seminar at Florida A&M College, a National Urban League Annual Conference, and the Jefferson Jubilee in Chicago, where he participated in a panel discussion of civil rights. ¹⁰⁶

Thomas Young’s radio appearance in February 1949 is another example of the work that NNPA leaders did on behalf of the organization. Young, who was then president of both the NNPA and the Norfolk, Virginia, Journal and Guide, was a guest on the National Broadcasting Company’s weekly public-affairs program. ¹⁰⁷ He and Benjamin M. McKelway, editor of the Washington Star and vice president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, discussed the question, “What is the Role of the Negro Press in our Democracy?” McKelway, a White civil rights advocate, said, ¹⁰⁸ “The Negro Press has become a powerful spokesman in this country for the rights of a minority. Its influence is extending with the professional improvement of its journalism.” Young responded, “If our society were perfect, there would be no need for a Negro press—there would be none because we would be a part of the general society.” He emphasized that a chief function of the Black press was to report news about, or relevant to, the race, because much of that information was “ignored, incompletely recorded, or sometimes distorted by the general press.” Another role was “to attack, to expose, to marshal public opinion against all wrongs and injustices, all discriminations and inequalities, but especially those adversely affecting the aspirations of the Negro.” ¹⁰⁹ Young later sent NNPA members a transcript of the program with a note: “I think it is significant that within three months we have had very excellent cooperation from high officials of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the American Newspaper Publishers Association.” ¹¹⁰

This burgeoning relationship was due at least in part to the work of Ernest E. Johnson, a New York–based public-relations consultant and journalist. ¹¹¹ The NNPA hired him in June 1948 to direct “a sound program of public cultivation.” Johnson began working that August on a concerted campaign to promote the 1949 observance of Negro Newspaper Week, which had yielded the NBC invitation. He also sent three separate news releases to 185 White newspapers, prepared a suggested editorial that was distributed to 135 Black papers, and asked the governors of thirty-five states to proclaim February 27 to March 5 Negro Newspaper Week (four did so). ¹¹²

The NNPA marked the beginning of its tenth year of existence when it convened in Washington, D.C., in 1949. Young summarized what he and the NNPA’s public-relations counsel had done during his administration to bring attention to the trade and advocacy organization, including speaking engagements, appearances at public gatherings, and the NBC broadcast with McKelway. “I have been ever conscious of the wisdom first of courting a receptive attitude toward the story of the Negro press, and then to induce favorable action in our behalf,” said Young, whose father had built the Journal and Guide into one of the country’s leading Black newspapers. Young said a particularly “significant accomplishment” was an address he delivered at the sixty-second annual convention of the ANPA in 1948. ¹¹³

But he acknowledged perennial issues with cash flow and “the tug-of-war between revenue and costs.” ¹¹⁴ The situation was not unique to the Black press. The ANPA had devoted much of its recent meeting to discussing the “manifold problems of producing a newspaper”; it voted to earmark $200,000 for research into new newspaper-printing processes. ¹¹⁵ However, Black periodicals were further constrained by racism and struggles to convince advertising agencies that their readers constituted a valuable market segment. ¹¹⁶ One NNPA conference session, by the ad director of Advertising Age, offered attendees concrete information about using “market data as a tool for increasing advertising lineage.” ¹¹⁷

Yet finances worsened. By June 1950, President Dowdal Davis declared a “state of emergency” entailing “circulation losses, dwindling income, high production costs, labor difficulties and policy.” ¹¹⁸ His dire observations may also have been influenced by a decline in paying members; only eighteen newspapers had paid all or part of their dues during 1949–1950. Those in good standing included the Los Angeles Sentinel, Miami Times, Indianapolis Recorder, and the larger papers like the Afro-American and Pittsburgh Courier. Davis painted a grim picture of steep increases in production costs and an 8 percent decline in circulation, although publishers and editors at the annual convention were undoubtedly aware of the statistics. In 1948–1949, he said, circulation of the sixteen NNPA member-papers that reported figures to the Audit Bureau of Circulations was 939,510. Yet in 1949–1950, the same papers reported 871,977—a loss of about 67,500. Davis attributed the drop to competition from nationally circulated magazines as well as White dailies, some of which had begun to hire Black reporters or publish news relevant to Black readers. ¹¹⁹ While that was a positive change, he said revenue losses would be difficult to make up. ¹²⁰ Profit margins already were small for publishers due to rising production costs, and national ad sales were both dependent on audited circulation data and constrained by ad agencies’ tendency to ignore the so-called Negro market. ¹²¹ Such challenges made the work of the ten-year-old organization “vital and indispensable.” Everyone had to pitch in to meet the NNPA’s problems head on, Davis said, and develop “a new and fresh vision of the responsibilities and potentialities of a trade association designed for service to the Negro newspaper publisher.” ¹²² But implementation of innovative ideas was dependent upon the ability of members to serve and support the NNPA on top of their regular newspaper work. Lack of time and funding had already hindered creative publicity efforts, as Davis knew firsthand. In 1946, he coordinated an expanded program for Negro Newspaper Week with a budget of almost $2,500. The following year, he attempted to execute a national program with an allotment of just $500. ¹²³

The trade organization’s practical work was also interrupted by its commitment to advocacy of civil rights. Discussions at meetings about the franchise, integration, and other critical topics took time away from sessions about the day-to-day issues facing publishers. At the 1950 convention, for instance, members approved a resolution supporting the recent Supreme Court opinions in Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, which marked the end of separate but “equal” graduate and professional education, and Henderson v. United States, a landmark decision that abolished segregation in railroad dining cars. Calling the decisions “progress in our fight toward winning equal rights as citizens of the United States,” the NNPA stated,

Segregation is not a matter which can be left to work itself out; we commend the Texas leaders who are fighting first to open all state schools to all citizens without distinction as to race; second, the campaign to register and vote, all qualified citizens. ¹²⁴

NNPA members also voted to continue supporting John McCray, the editor of the Lighthouse and Informer who had participated in the NNPA strategy session in 1945. ¹²⁵ McCray was charged with violating a South Carolina statute prohibiting defamation of assault victims after he reported on a Black man sentenced to death for allegedly sexually assaulting a White teenager. ¹²⁶ President Davis, known as a champion of social and political causes, told attendees that McCray’s case “threaten[ed] the basic tenets of freedom of the press” and could make it more difficult for the Black press in the South “to bring the pressure of public opinion to bear on the many iniquities that exist in that section.” ¹²⁷

Fighting for Full Integration: 1951–1959

That focus on advocacy put the NNPA in a strong position to continue the fight for civil rights in the early 1950s, said President Davis. In his June 1951 report to members, he listed several ways he and the NNPA had promoted the Black press, the Black community, and democracy. ¹²⁸ For instance, he represented the NNPA at a 1951 meeting with President Truman and eleven other civil-rights leaders. Labor activist A. Philip Randolph had organized the conference to discuss issues including segregation in the armed forces; the United States was a year into the Korean conflict then and more than 100,000 Blacks were serving in the armed forces. The group also objected to the appointment of Millard Caldwell, a politician known for “his hardened attitudes on race and citizenship,” as the first director of the Federal Civil Defense Administration. ¹²⁹

Davis reported successful meetings with several government agencies while the NNPA Board of Directors was in Washington, D.C., for a 1951 business meeting. The Department of Defense, for example, agreed to cooperate in distributing wartime news of interest to the Black press. ¹³⁰ But board members insisted that firsthand reporting of the war from a race perspective also was important to readers. Carl Murphy, publisher of the Afro-American newspaper chain, arranged to send reporters overseas to cover Black troops; the operation was financed by a “pool arrangement” open only to NNPA members. “This program has been effectively pursued with the result that some of the best coverage of the Korean war has appeared in Negro newspapers,” Davis said, still using the long-standing term for the Black press. ¹³¹

A key outcome of the organization’s annual convention in 1951 was the decision to adopt a new name: National Newspaper Publishers Association. ¹³² Practically, the change allowed the group to continue to use its same initials—NNPA. But members may have had other reasons for changing the racial label. Most Black groups that had used “Colored” in the nineteenth century adopted “Negro” by the late 1800s. That term continued to be widely accepted by individuals and organizations into the early 1950s, particularly after the New York Times updated its style guidelines in 1930 to require capitalization of the word. ¹³³ However, the NNPA’s decision to alter its name at that time put it in the vanguard of Black organizations that decided the term “Negro” was outdated and denoted “subservience, complacency, and Uncle Tomism.” ¹³⁴ The shift in self-identification may also have signaled a desire to be known as a trade and advocacy group on a par with professional White organizations such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Davis issued a dozen recommendations to ensure that the National Newspaper Publishers Association continued to expand its role “as an organism through which can be expressed those concerns vital to the Negro newspaper and to the welfare of the nation as a whole.” ¹³⁵ His suggestions included enlarging membership by inviting smaller newspapers to join the NNPA; expanding the organization’s public-relations program; revising the budget to align better with the needs of the association and its representatives; and creating opportunities at meetings and conventions for members to visit and share experiences. ¹³⁶ These issues, coupled with the need to present a united front to achieve civil rights and combat competition for ad revenue by White publications, continued to be a focus of the trade organization throughout the decade.

Following its June 1952 convention, the NNPA launched a nationwide registration and voting campaign that was covered in the New York Times and promoted in Black papers such as the Afro-American and Chicago Defender. The goal was to double the number of registered Black voters to six million by the presidential election on November 4. ¹³⁷ Although voting rights was always central to equality, that election was particularly important because incumbent President Truman, who supported civil rights, had decided not to seek reelection. ¹³⁸ NNPA President Louis Martin, the publisher of the Michigan Chronicle who would later serve as an adviser to three Democratic presidents, ¹³⁹ described registration efforts by member-papers as “a form of community service that helps us build the prestige of the Negro Press as well as contributes to the common welfare of our country.” He particularly recognized Afro-American publisher Carl Murphy and Birmingham World editor Emory O. Jackson for their work leading voter-registration drives in Maryland and Alabama, respectively. ¹⁴⁰ Martin reported at a 1952 board meeting in Washington, D.C., that he had worked to educate the political editors of publications including Newsweek, Time, and Life about member-newspapers; the goal was to encourage the White editors of those periodicals to rely on the Black press “for factual information about the Negro electorate.” ¹⁴¹

While the NNPA board was in Washington, Murphy presented Truman with a special achievement award during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden. The plaque referred to Truman as having “awakened the conscience of America and given new strength to our democracy by his courageous efforts on behalf of freedom and equality for all citizens.” ¹⁴² When he and his colleagues drafted that wording, Murphy said they had in mind the “magnificent report” issued by the president’s Committee on Civil Rights. Truman said he “was in dead earnest in the effort to implement” the recommendations contained in To Secure These Rights. “I shall continue to work for it as long as I live, because it is part and parcel of the principles for which I have always stood.” ¹⁴³

The NNPA had high hopes for Truman’s successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower. The group sent a congratulatory telegram to the president-elect in November 1952: “We pledge ourselves to support your efforts to strengthen our democracy and build a better America for all citizens.” ¹⁴⁴ During his first Message to the Congress on the State of the Union, Eisenhower promised to use his authority to end segregation in the District of Columbia and the federal government, and enforce desegregation of the armed forces and military hospitals, bases, and schools. ¹⁴⁵

Another early sign of support was Eisenhower’s praise of the Black press during the NNPA’s March 1953 Negro Newspaper Week celebration. In a telegram to NNPA President Louis Martin, Eisenhower commended the press for “speaking for the rights of its people” and helping “to inspire the spiritual progress of the nation.” Martin read the message during a nationwide NBC broadcast that featured a panel discussion moderated by commentator Leon Pearson. Martin was joined by George S. Schuyler, associate editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, and his NNPA colleagues Frank Stanley, Dowdal Davis, and Thomas Young for an exploration of topics ranging from discrimination in employment to citizenship. ¹⁴⁶ Stanley, publisher of the Louisville Defender, said,

There is no question that first class citizenship for all Americans is inevitable. The recognizable gains that have been made are inspiring, but the need is immediate for the development and acceleration of a positive program that will destroy forever discrimination and segregation based on color, race, or creed. ¹⁴⁷

Stanley said the Black press would continue to “cast a searching spotlight on those things that we permit to weaken our democratic way of life and hamper it in the accomplishment of its responsibilities to the rest of mankind.” He added that the NNPA was in a powerful position to serve as “the voice of the conscience of our nation” because the organization’s member-papers were “read by more than a million families each week.” ¹⁴⁸

The NAACP’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, another bellwether of change, aimed to secure for people the rights guaranteed in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. Its leader, attorney Thurgood Marshall, had sought to collaborate with the NNPA as early as 1945. In one letter to Thomas Young, Marshall said he wanted to meet with publishers to develop a strategy “to bring about the maximum possibility of success in our ever-increasing number of legal cases.” Marshall mentioned pending suits involving education, housing, voting, and transportation. “If we are going to make an all-out attack [against segregation],” he told Young, “we must educate the general public with a campaign much more elaborate than in the past. I believe the job can be done jointly, and I know we can work together.” ¹⁴⁹ Nevertheless, the NNPA vacillated between supporting the civil rights group and cutting off assistance to it. In 1948, for instance, publishers voted to develop a special fundraising campaign to assist the Legal Defense and Educational Fund, then abandoned the project because they felt it would take them too “far afield of their purposes.” ¹⁵⁰

But the NNPA welcomed Marshall to its annual convention in Baltimore in June 1953. He discussed the Supreme Court’s decision earlier that month to rehear arguments in Brown v. Board of Education. Justices asked counsel to file briefs that discussed five questions pertaining to the Fourteenth Amendment. Marshall said his staff was “dig[ging] for facts and evidence,” a research process he called both daunting and expensive. The Afro-American reported that Marshall “pleaded” with attendees to use their editorial columns and news space to educate the public about the importance of the cases. The publishers “agreed to do a selling job to their readers” and also pledged “an intensive drive” to raise $32,000 for the NAACP—today’s equivalent of about $312,000. ¹⁵¹ NNPA secretary William Walker sent members a transcript of Marshall’s talk and asked them to read it “thoroughly” and to act on the urgent request promptly: “We have too much at stake to lose because of lack of sufficient money to properly finance the case.” ¹⁵² The NNPA formally launched the campaign in late July 1953. Carl Murphy encouraged member-papers to organize local mass meetings and solicit contributions from readers. He promised advertising materials and asked publishers to contribute ad revenue to the campaign: “As your new president, I earnestly request that the publishers move promptly in the raising of these needed funds for the NAACP. We either win in the Supreme Court [on October 12], or we lose another 50 years in our struggle for real freedom.” ¹⁵³

Marshall and his staff spent twenty-two “hectic weeks” preparing to file the brief with the Supreme Court. The NAACP issued a press release in November 1953 celebrating the feat. The organization also acknowledged the “invaluable” support of the NNPA and its member-papers: “In addition to running a series of thirteen advertisements calling attention to the work being done by the Legal Defense, publishers and editors, through editorials, urged readers to make contributions directly to the organization.” About $14,000 was collected as a result of the NNPA’s support (roughly $135,000 today), and the Pittsburgh Courier, Afro-American, and Birmingham World were singled out for their specific fundraising efforts. The NAACP’s Board of Directors stated, “The entire nation is indebted to these papers for contributions they made to the fight for an integrated, undivided America. In this they were living up to the highest and noblest tradition of American journalism.” ¹⁵⁴

Marshall reargued Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court in December 1953. In January, he delivered a wide-ranging public address at the NNPA’s midwinter workshop at Tuskegee Institute. He acknowledged the Black press’s vital role in disseminating NAACP news, thanked the NNPA for helping to raise funds for the school-desegregation fight, discussed some of the cases related to discrimination in higher education, and said the NAACP was committed to achieving freedom by 1963—the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. ¹⁵⁵

The momentous Brown decision was celebrated at the NNPA’s 1954 convention. Attendees congratulated Marshall, who spoke at the meeting, for “his great victory in the segregation cases.” President Murphy told colleagues,

Keep always fresh in your memory the date of May 17, a day of second emancipation and a glorious Supreme Court decision. For this you have labored and yearned. For this each of us can be thankful because, among other things, it gave us a nationwide cause for which we could fight together. ¹⁵⁶

NNPA member-papers again agreed to cooperate with Marshall to raise funds for “the complete elimination of Jim Crow schools.” The newly elected president, Louisiana Weekly publisher C. C. Dejoie Jr., told his colleagues, “Defense will need money, more money, and still more money to fight those who are determined to circumvent the May 17th decision.” Early in 1955, as Marshall and his team prepared for the third round of arguments in Brown—that time on the question of relief—the Legal Defense and Educational Fund sent NNPA member-papers a special series of advertisements. The ads had specific release dates to ensure that all participating papers printed the same message at the same time. Publishers were asked to contribute some or all of the income derived from the ad campaign. “Time is of the essence in this matter,” Dejoie wrote, “for, if funds to fight these cases to the end are not raised, we may just as well forget our whole fight for civil rights and first-class citizenship. We are counting on you. Don’t let us down.” ¹⁵⁷

On May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Brown II. The desegregation of schools was placed in the hands of local courts that had first heard the cases; officials were told to remove obstacles to admission “with all deliberate speed.” Two weeks later when the NNPA held its annual convention, a key panel discussion was “How are we fitting into the picture of a desegregated society and how can we develop more cooperation in getting the job done?” The panelists were Thurgood Marshall; Lester Granger, executive director of the National Urban League; William Trent, executive director of the United Negro College Fund; and Horace Sudduth, president of the National Negro Business League. Marshall minced no words: “Insofar as this fight for desegregation is concerned, we are still in a heck of a fix.” The court decision would not automatically eliminate segregation across the United States due to the case-by-case process of the legal system. But, Marshall said, the point of law had been settled, and that was something to celebrate. He urged the NNPA’s member-papers to cover the victories and continue to interpret setbacks for readers (Figure 2). ¹⁵⁸

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Midwinter workshop 1955. The NNPA held its three-day midwinter workshop at Hampton Institute (now University). Prominent speakers who addressed the group of about forty-five publishers included Thurgood Marshall and Richmond Times-Dispatch editor Virginius Dabney.

The NNPA otherwise had little to celebrate during the rest of 1955. The board of directors returned to Washington, D.C., in October to press Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. for justice in Mississippi. ¹⁵⁹ The killers of young Emmett Till had just been acquitted, and civil rights workers George W. Lee and Lamar Smith had been murdered there in May and August, respectively. ¹⁶⁰ The publishers asked Brownell “to break the back of terrorism” in that state and “find a way to . . . assure all citizens that these atrocities will not be repeated.” Speaking on behalf of his colleagues, publisher Carl Murphy said, “Unless equal justice under law can be carved on every courthouse of the United States, and especially in Mississippi and other southern states, it has no meaning for colored citizens who reside in those areas.” The publishers specifically asked Brownell to investigate the White Citizens Councils (WCC), formed by segregationists in the wake of the Brown decision; prosecute those responsible for the murders of Lee and Smith; and support legislation to strengthen federal civil rights statutes. According to news accounts and meeting minutes, Brownell promised to promptly consider the group’s requests, and he assured board members that the government “would do everything possible to see that law and order was observed not only in Mississippi, but throughout the South.” He also expressed interest in “working closely” with the NNPA “on race problems.” The Board asked Murphy, whose office was in nearby Baltimore, to liaise with Brownell and his staff. ¹⁶¹ President Dejoie subsequently reported that the annual fall board meeting would henceforth be held in Washington, D.C., because discussions with politicians and appointed officials were so important to the NNPA’s advocacy of civil rights. ¹⁶²

Dejoie also advocated freedom of the press. It “continues to be the principal guardian of our liberties,” he said in 1956, but “only when the press strives to serve the best interest of all the people.” ¹⁶³ That was not the case for many of the daily newspapers in the South, which frequently gave “negative and reactionary views” on integration and citizenship rights. The New Orleans–based Dejoie said “the open and avowed hostility” of several Southern states to the NAACP “imposes an additional responsibility” upon the Black press. He likely had in mind Alabama, where the civil rights group had just been barred from operating. ¹⁶⁴ Dejoie urged the NNPA’s member-papers to continue to publicize court decisions on segregation and analyze them “in terms of human rights and human relations both at home and abroad”; cover stories about voluntary measures to implement school segregation in the wake of the Brown opinions; and encourage voter-registration and voting. ¹⁶⁵ Arnold de Mille, director of press relations for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, told those at the June 1956 convention, “Your role in our work and aims has been, and is, just as important to us as the dollars contributed by our friends and those who believe in justice and fair play.” He added,

While we have cried for justice under law in the courts of the land, you—the Negro press—have become the uncompromising voice shouting loud and firm for freedom and the end of second-class citizenship. You have made our people conscious of our aims, and have presented our case justly to the world. ¹⁶⁶

The NNPA took its advocacy of equal rights to a new level in May 1958, when it organized the Summit Conference on Negro Leadership. The two-day meeting in Washington, D.C., was the brainchild of President William Walker, publisher of the Cleveland Call and Post; he later said the summit was “visible evidence of the leadership role of the black press” and a key part of the NNPA’s work as a “civil rights wedge” during the 1940s and 1950s. ¹⁶⁷ He told the Washington Post the goal was to “‘work out a program of co-operative and unified action’ to raise the status of Negroes and assure their exercise of full civil rights.” ¹⁶⁸ The list of men and women who attended represented the leading Black newspapers, universities, churches, civil rights groups, and government agencies: Clarence Mitchell, Dorothy Height, Benjamin F. Mays, Jackie Robinson, Adam Clayton Powell, Thurgood Marshall, Charles Diggs, and dozens more. ¹⁶⁹ Walker welcomed attendees on behalf of the NNPA.

We [meet] here today as courageous men and women, recognizing that we do have problems; that we must assume our full share of responsibilities as American citizens; and, that the first step toward correcting our faults and, improving our conditions, rest squarely upon our shoulders. We are the ones who must make the first move. ¹⁷⁰

The purpose of the meeting was to think about, study, and discuss eleven topics—including civil rights, business and industry, employment and labor, education, and voting and citizenship—in workshops led by individuals who were “qualified by experience and equipped with training to give real leadership to the deliberations.” ¹⁷¹ Walker summarized reasons why the topical discussions were imperative. Regarding civil rights, for example, he said people were still awaiting a clear definition of the Supreme Court’s vague order in Brown II to desegregate schools with “all deliberate speed.” And throughout the South, Walker said, “vicious economic sanctions” had been imposed on Blacks who took “any steps toward getting their Civil Rights.” ¹⁷² He asked workshop participants “to tackle” those issues as well as “all the other problems involved in our fight for Civil Rights.” ¹⁷³ Each of the eleven groups was charged with developing specific recommendations, suggestions, and/or policies. ¹⁷⁴

About 350 attendees also heard from President Eisenhower. ¹⁷⁵ Speaking extemporaneously on the “special problem of civil rights,” he urged patience. “There are no revolutionary cures for racial discrimination in the United States,” Eisenhower said, because, as a problem “buried in the human heart,” it was not easily solved by reasoning. However, he did get “prolonged” applause when he asserted that “every American must have respect for the courts . . . [and] for others.” ¹⁷⁶ Walker presented Eisenhower with a special citation for using the power of his office “to uphold orderly judicial process,” a reference to the actions the president took in 1957 to enforce school integration in Little Rock. ¹⁷⁷ Walker subsequently told the New York Times that Eisenhower’s counsel to be patient was “the kind of advice” Black Americans had been hearing since the 1954 Brown decision. ¹⁷⁸ The Washington Post reported “a sharp reaction” from the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins. “We respectfully differ with the President of the United States. We have been patient and moderate and all we get for it is a kick in the teeth,” he said. ¹⁷⁹ The NNPA later listed the critical reactions to Eisenhower’s comments in its year-end summary of race-related news that was published in the Afro-American. ¹⁸⁰

The proceedings of the civil rights workshop consisted of nearly 140 single-spaced pages of reports, speeches, and recommendations. Walker sought to push ahead with suggestions in the fall of 1958. ¹⁸¹ But little organizing appears to have occurred until the NNPA met in Cincinnati for its midwinter workshop in 1959. The Chicago Defender reported that nearly fifty women and men who had attended the initial meeting converged at the conference hotel to continue working on civil rights issues including economics and voting. Walker charged the attendees, who represented the “most powerful” Black organizations in the country, “with deciding various facets of the Negro problems.” He said future action of the Summit Conference on Negro Leadership would be based on their findings. ¹⁸²

Despite growing support for the NNPA’s—and Walker’s—plan to unite leadership and address some of the issues facing Black Americans, the group was in trouble. Elected officers and rank-and-file members discussed throughout the 1950s ways to cut costs, strengthen business practices, use new equipment, and attract readers and advertising through marketing research and other means. ¹⁸³ Escalating newsprint prices further affected the trade organization. Publishers and editors at the 1952 convention agreed to push Congress for help with encouraging domestic newsprint production and pressing the Canadian government to hold down the cost of its printing paper. ¹⁸⁴ After an increase of $10 per ton, NNPA President Frank Stanley telegraphed the director of the Office of Price Stabilization:

The increase threatens the very existence of the Negro press and most of the small newspapers of the country. . . . We urge your office to call as soon as possible a joint conference of United States and Canadian government and industry officials to work out a more equitable price policy. ¹⁸⁵

In 1959, the NNPA discussed how a proposed increase in second-class mailing rates might affect the Black press. ¹⁸⁶ William Walker, who was completing his second year as president, issued some dire warnings. The summit had cost much more than he and other planners had anticipated and revenue was down as a result of nonpayment of dues, a perennial problem for the trade and advocacy organization. “We can’t have a program of action unless we have a dues-paying membership,” Walker said. ¹⁸⁷ Budgets had been slashed accordingly. For example, the Public Relations Committee received one-third of its usual allocation. The three members decided to focus their efforts solely on the NNPA’s prize programs: the Russwurm Award, then in its twelfth year; the Merit Awards, established in 1950 to recognize members’ journalistic work; and the Distinguished Editor Awards, which honored one Black and one White editor who had “made the greatest contribution to the advancement of Civil Rights.” ¹⁸⁸ However, as the committee pointed out to the NNPA,

Public Relations, like charity, begins at home. Nothing we do as an Association can get the proper acceptance without a good [PR] program. Public relations in [the] NNPA should be regarded as an inexpensive business insurance by which the best programs of our Association can be maintained. ¹⁸⁹

The committee also bluntly observed, “The Negro Press is in a death struggle for existence.” ¹⁹⁰ Circulation at leading newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, had plummeted since 1947, ¹⁹¹ and the press as a whole was increasingly facing competition from other media—radio, television, magazines, and White newspapers—and experiencing labor issues. ¹⁹² The PR Committee recommended that the NNPA “not be penny-wise and pound foolish in budgetary allocations for the ensuing year,” adding, “When business is bad: advertise—promote—keep your name and services before the public. Offer something different or better than anyone else. We need to heed our own advice.” ¹⁹³

Advancing the Cause of Civil Rights: 1960–1969

The NNPA found it particularly difficult to juggle its trade and advocacy roles during the 1960s. The twenty-year-old organization scrambled to keep up with the Civil Rights Movement as it expanded and swelled. During a conference session aptly titled “Our News Gathering Problem,” Afro-American editor Chuck Stone said pointedly that the Black press has been “caught unprepared and unaware of the changing mood of the Negro as shown by the sit-ins” and other activities. ¹⁹⁴ Meetings were opportunities to learn about “New Techniques in Civil Rights Reporting” ¹⁹⁵ and hear from veteran journalists such as Jimmy Hicks, a senior editor at the New York Amsterdam News who covered the 1957 desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, and would soon report the violent showdown between state and federal authorities at the University of Mississippi in 1962. ¹⁹⁶ Conferences were a chance, too, for the trade and advocacy organization to try to help Black newspapers in the South that faced problems, including economic intimidation by White Citizens Councils (WCC). ¹⁹⁷ The NNPA had fewer members in the South, but President Walker—who was born in Selma, Alabama—believed that “a strong, well-functioning” press there was “the only hope we have in winning our fight . . . for full civil rights and first-class citizenship.” He invited eighty-two publications in the Deep South to a 1960 session that sought “to catalogue the major problems . . . and then bring the combined thinking of the Association to help find practical solutions.” ¹⁹⁸ Only three non-member publishers accepted Walker’s invitation; the rest may not have had sufficient resources to travel to Washington, D.C., or perhaps they feared pressure from the WCC. “Still,” wrote board member Emory O. Jackson, “there was a free-for-all discussion and a number of helpful ideas were provoked. Best of all, it seems, was the spirit of assistance and cooperation voiced by the stronger newspaper publishers outside the Hard-Core South.” ¹⁹⁹

In addition, during the early 1960s, NNPA workshops and conferences featured reports from attorneys and activists who were integral to the Civil Rights Movement. For example, Thurgood Marshall and Marvin Rich, the White community relations director of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), discussed the spread of Southern sit-ins with the NNPA in June 1960. ²⁰⁰ In the few months after four Black freshmen had taken seats at Woolworth’s segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, the sit-in movement had spread to more than 100 Southern towns and cities. ²⁰¹ John Sengstacke, who hosted that conference, admonished attendees “to see that the protest against racial discrimination never dies.” Sengstacke, then 47, added, “We must retrieve the leadership which we have forfeited to the younger generation. We are not merely after the right to be served at a lunch counter, we are not merely after the right to vote or attend racially mixed schools. We want all the rights which are enjoyed by other Americans.” ²⁰²

Delegates acted. In the closing session of the conference, they adopted civil rights resolutions calling on Eisenhower, Congress, and the Justice Department to eliminate discrimination in places of public accommodation and declare a Tennessee county a disaster area in the wake of an economic boycott directed at Blacks who sought to vote. Another resolution urged Republicans and Democrats to adopt a civil-rights plank in their 1960 campaign platforms. ²⁰³ The Black press subsequently celebrated with bold banner headlines when the Democratic National Convention voted in July to include “the strongest civil rights plank in the party’s history” in its statement of principles for the upcoming election campaign. ²⁰⁴ The Afro-American called the 775-word declaration “positive, honest and unequivocal.” ²⁰⁵

Thurgood Marshall gave a “stirring speech” to some 300 NNPA members and guests at the 1961 convention. According to the Afro-American, he “declared that colored patience is at an end” and said the NAACP planned to work against Jim Crow in Northern cities. Marshall praised the Black press “as a strong factor in the struggle for freedom” and said, “We need [the press] . . . now, more than ever, for its contrasting role of bringing out the truth instead of the slanted information that comes out of the South today.” Conference resolutions commended the Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who challenged local Jim Crow laws and customs by riding interstate buses through the South, and praised President John F. Kennedy’s actions following violent attacks on bus passengers. However, the NNPA also demanded that the president take “even stronger, more meaningful” steps to protect people and advance civil rights. ²⁰⁶

NNPA leaders met with Kennedy at least twice to press for legislative changes. A delegation led by John Sengstacke “had an excellent off-the-record conference” with the president-elect at his New York City headquarters in January 1961, just fifteen days before his inauguration. ²⁰⁷ During a subsequent meeting at the White House, Sengstacke and fellow publishers recalled Kennedy’s pledge to place Blacks in various government positions, as well as comments he had made while campaigning about the chief executive’s power to “correct many of the inequities suffered by minorities.” Sengstacke urged Kennedy to continue pushing his proposal for a Department of Urban Affairs, in part because the president was considering appointing a Black man to lead it. The publishers told Kennedy the NNPA would proceed with the voter-registration drive it had launched in 1960 and they promised to help him eliminate the poll tax that prevented many individuals from voting. Kennedy “assured the group that additional civil rights legislation was in the offing” and said he had “high hopes that much of it would be enacted into law.” ²⁰⁸

But the NNPA later censured President Kennedy for failing to “secure strong and meaningful civil rights legislation” during his administration. The organization expanded on its previous demands for action and enjoined him to dedicate as much attention to equal rights as he had to space exploration and national defense, which the organization viewed as “far less critical to the maintenance of international leadership than the eradication of segregation and discrimination against America’s largest and most loyal minority.” ²⁰⁹ The NNPA also supported the administration’s nomination of Thurgood Marshall for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. His appointment had been delayed by the Senate subcommittee charged with holding confirmation hearings. The NNPA unanimously voted to inform the Judiciary Committee that further delays in approving Marshall would “do irreparable damage to the improving picture of racial relations in the nation, and serve to further imperil [our] position as leaders of the free world.” ²¹⁰ The committee finally confirmed his nomination in September 1962, after almost a full year of political wrangling. ²¹¹

Correspondence between Philadelphia Tribune publisher E. Washington Rhodes and Birmingham World editor Emory O. Jackson through the fall and winter of 1963 reveals problems with identifying sites for workshops and publishers to serve as local hosts; both Wilmington, North Carolina, and Atlanta were considered but ruled out due to civil rights activities in those cities. ²¹² But a decision to locate the midwinter 1964 workshop in Washington, D.C., was quickly made after Kennedy’s assassination. Rhodes, who was reelected president for 1963–1964, proactively informed NNPA members: “The time has arrived when the whole world should be made aware of what we are thinking—and our opinions and advice sought during these days of racial tension and unrest. This means that we must project a forceful image of ourselves, as an Association, to the people of the United States and to the peoples of the world, NOW!” ²¹³

Rhodes and some twenty-three NNPA officers and executive board members met with President Lyndon Johnson at the White House in January 1964. ²¹⁴ Rhodes gave him a chronological list of the NNPA’s accomplishments since its founding and a three-page typed statement that underscored the Black press’s historic role in the civil rights struggle as both a forceful advocate for Black Americans and “a faithful mirror of their educational, social, political and religious thinking and aspirations.” ²¹⁵ During a “frank and open discussion” that lasted for more than an hour, Johnson said he was ready to appoint qualified Blacks to government jobs as well as his cabinet and the U.S. Supreme Court. He mentioned his recent nomination of Carl T. Rowan to be director of the U.S. Information Agency. That role made Rowan, a crusading journalist who had worked as deputy assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy Administration, the highest-ranking Black man in government. ²¹⁶ In the end, Johnson told the delegation to use the power of the press to help his administration secure “long overdue personal freedoms for colored people,” including passage of the civil rights bill then pending in Congress. ²¹⁷ The Afro-American, for one, published editorials about the bill. ²¹⁸ Rhodes told reporters after the meeting that he could not remember any president making “a more forthright statement” about civil rights. ²¹⁹

The NNPA unanimously selected Johnson as a recipient of its annual Russwurm Award in March 1965, citing his “great moral leadership in the field of human rights” and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ²²⁰ About twenty NNPA editors and publishers presented the award to him during a long meeting at the White House. But Frank Stanley told Johnson how “shocked and grieved” the organization was by the recent violence in Selma, Alabama, that “symbolize[d] the total struggle of recalcitrant Americans to deny ‘freedom to the free.’” ²²¹ Voting-rights activists had just begun a trek to the capitol in Montgomery on March 7 when state troopers attacked the crowd crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge. ²²² Stanley urged Johnson to use the power of his office to safeguard the constitutional rights of American citizens. ²²³ During the meeting, the NNPA asked Johnson to appoint Blacks to regulatory agencies so they could participate in the daily process of formulating federal policies; appoint a Black man to fill the next vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court; and ensure that the Economic Opportunity Act (EOA), passed by Congress in 1964, had sufficient funding and support to have a noticeable impact on the so-called War on Poverty. ²²⁴

Johnson had declared an “all-out war on human poverty and unemployment” in the United States during his January 1964 State of the Union address. ²²⁵ While all Americans stood to benefit from such a domestic agenda, the Council of Economic Advisers observed then that a program to end racial discrimination against non-Whites—Blacks, Native Americans, and other minorities—would “open additional exits from poverty.” Racism limited an individual’s educational achievement and employment opportunities; it also affected the nation’s economy by denying citizens the ability to use their “potential talents.” The council reported that about half of non-White Americans were poor in 1964. ²²⁶ The EOA, which was central to the president’s program, created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to coordinate federal anti-poverty initiatives and empower poor people to transform their own communities. ²²⁷ The NNPA pledged its support of Johnson’s War on Poverty after meeting with OEO Director Sargent Shriver in Washington, D.C. Shriver wanted the NNPA to publicize the Job Corps, a program that provided young men and women with free education and vocational training. NNPA President Stanley called the War on Poverty “equally, if not more important,” than the civil rights legislation that Johnson had just signed into law because it aimed to “provide an escape from poverty for poor people of all races.” Stanley told Shriver the trade and advocacy organization saw the program as “another area in which the Negro press can give leadership.” ²²⁸ In fact, poverty and related issues of unemployment, education, and social welfare would remain priorities for the NNPA for the next twenty years.

Editors and publishers had numerous opportunities during the second half of the 1960s to continue discussing these key issues with government officials, whether at midwinter workshops, summer conventions, or meetings in Washington, D.C. In January 1966, for example, Vice President Hubert Humphrey addressed the importance of the ballot, first-class citizenship, and the economy with about fifty-five NNPA members. Suffrage was a battle that had seemingly been won with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, who also spoke at that workshop, said voter-registration in the Deep South had increased by about 35 percent in the five months since Johnson signed it into law. Katzenbach added that he was well aware of the work the Black press had done long before passage of the legislation to encourage people to register to vote and cast their ballots. ²²⁹

Humphrey subsequently elaborated on suffrage and other topics in a talk at the organization’s June 1966 convention, declaring “‘Freedom Now’ is not a catchword for a minority of Americans [but] a moral imperative for all Americans.” ²³⁰ In September, Humphrey—who was earlier named a Russwurm Award recipient—hosted the board of directors at a breakfast meeting to discuss the War on Poverty and other issues related to the economy. He intended that forum to be the first of several such meetings with the small group to “better acquaint them with the functioning of the federal government.” ²³¹ Humphrey kept this promise at least through 1967. That April, a committee conferred with him about funding for the War on Poverty and met with officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. NNPA President Stanley said “the challenge of America’s social ills, both white and Negro, is of great concern to the Negro Press.” ²³² Humphrey invited the board back to the capital in the fall for “frank and free discussions” with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. The group talked about promotion policies within the civilian and military branches of the department, the status of Black servicemen in Vietnam, implementation of directives barring discrimination in off-base housing, and other topics that were reminiscent of those raised by the NNPA during World War II. Ethel Payne, who had recently returned from a nine-week reporting trip to Vietnam at John Sengstacke’s behest, wrote in the Chicago Daily Defender that McNamara “promise[d] to give serious attention to their suggestions and the group left with the feeling that the conversation had been useful.” ²³³

The NNPA presented President Johnson with a special citation in 1967 for his “courage in the pursuit of justice and freedom for all men regardless of station in life” and ongoing commitment to the “ideal of equality and dignity of the individual, both economically and politically.” ²³⁴ The Senate had earlier delivered “a stunning setback” to the administration and the Civil Rights Movement when it killed the Civil Rights Act of 1966 due to opposition to an open-housing provision. Its defeat signaled an attitudinal shift in the very same Congress that had passed the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965. The NNPA was loud in its condemnation of the Senate. ²³⁵ “Failure of the Senate to enact [it] will serve only to increase the frustrations which are the root of current racial disorders,” the group stated, while noting that it did not condone violence to “redress [Blacks’] grievances” or “thwart [their] demands.” ²³⁶ The trade and advocacy organization likely had in mind incidents including the riots over integration of public schools in Grenada, Mississippi, and the days-long riots in Cleveland in 1966 that were sparked by poverty, racial discrimination, and substandard housing. ²³⁷

In June 1967, the NNPA celebrated with Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, and other civil rights leaders the news that President Johnson had named Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. A story in the Defender described the NNPA as “jubilant” over the appointment. Frank Stanley said, “We initiated this with President Johnson in March 1965 and have urged it at each of our three subsequent White House conferences” with him. ²³⁸ Speaking soon after that nomination at the NNPA’s annual convention in Cleveland, King lambasted Black Power groups who fomented violence, saying that “such tactics . . . can only lead to disaster for Negroes.” ²³⁹ Ethel Payne speculated that he was referring to Stokely Carmichael, who had only recently marched with King in New York City to protest the Vietnam War. ²⁴⁰ However, King may also have had in mind the Cleveland riots that were initially blamed on Black nationalist organizations. ²⁴¹ King told the NNPA the war in Southeast Asia “was hurting the civil rights movement” by siphoning money from the War on Poverty. “It is a cruel thing to tell a man to lift himself by his bootstraps when he has no boots to lift,” he said during the group’s luncheon meeting. ²⁴² Appearing at that same convention, Wilkins, a former journalist himself, focused on the continuing role of the Black press as “a crusader for human dignity.” It “must instruct and guide the people on what is happening and how to work for objectives in the civil rights struggle,” he said. ²⁴³

Johnson invited an NNPA delegation to Washington, D.C., to discuss the Civil Rights Act of 1968 with him that March. It aimed to provide federal protection to civil rights workers and to prohibit housing discrimination based on race, religion, and national origin. He said his administration was prepared to “battle to the end” for “open and decent housing for all Americans”; opposition to an open-housing provision had killed the Civil Rights Act of 1966. “We face a tense moment in our history,” he said during the ninety-minute meeting. “I am trying to be a president to all the people, but I need all the help I can get.” Johnson called on the delegation to press elected officials to support the measure. ²⁴⁴ Having asked a panel chaired by Illinois Governor Otto Kerner to investigate reasons for urban riots in cities across the country and recommend strategies and programs to prevent future unrest, Johnson also discussed the just-released Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. He called it “the most important report” to be released during his presidency, and said he had ordered copies to be sent to mayors, governors, and key federal officials with a request to “read the document carefully.” ²⁴⁵ King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, about a week after the NNPA’s meeting with Johnson. The president saw the Civil Rights Act of 1968 as an apt memorial to King, who had advocated for Black Americans’ right to buy a home wherever they wished. Johnson signed the act on April 11. ²⁴⁶

By the end of the tumultuous decade, the NNPA was positioned to continue into the 1970s its support of the War on Poverty, economic and educational justice, and voting rights. Regular meetings with leaders including John and Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey had helped to solidify the organization’s national identity as an advocacy organization. And discussions with senior officials at annual workshops and conferences enabled attendees to gather information for their publications and recommit to a civil rights agenda. For example, attorney Wiley Branton, the Johnson Administration’s pick to help the Department of Justice implement the Voting Rights Act, discussed in 1967 the progress that had been made since its passage and urged member-papers to continue their support of voter-registration. ²⁴⁷ The NNPA declared that “the evils of racial prejudice must be attacked with renewed vigor and determination” and repeated its support of anti-poverty programs and employment opportunities. ²⁴⁸ Senator Eugene McCarthy told about fifty editors and publishers at the 1968 New York meeting that “a more equitable distribution of power and responsibility” was requisite for ending racism and poverty. ²⁴⁹ McCarthy, then a contender for the Democratic nomination for president, “drew only moderate applause” for a talk that some felt hadn’t been “specific enough about how problems could be solved.” ²⁵⁰ The other leading candidates—Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon—addressed the NNPA too, even though the organization said it would not endorse anyone. ²⁵¹

Conference attendees then traveled to Jackie Robinson’s spacious Stamford, Connecticut, estate. He was a recipient of the NNPA’s inaugural Russwurm Award in 1948, and years later he wrote to the organization that helped him break Major League Baseball’s color barrier: “I shall never forget what the Negro press of this country meant to me during my days of baseball and all the co-operation I have received from your newspapers during the period following my baseball career.” Robinson was then working as an aide to New York Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who flew by helicopter to have brunch with the publishers and editors. Rockefeller, campaigning to be the Republican presidential nominee, declared that “the problems in the great cities—poverty in the slums, injustice—are intolerable and can be dealt with.” ²⁵² Robinson told the publishers, “If Nixon gets the nomination we’re going backwards. . . . If Nixon is nominated, the Republican party would be saying ‘we don’t want the Negro vote.’” ²⁵³ Five months later, Nixon defeated the Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Humphrey, who had long supported civil rights.

The NNPA’s identity as a trade group also improved during the 1960s due to a focus on growth. President E. Washington Rhodes told the organization—which counted just forty-six publications in 1962—that every member had a duty to contact publishers in his (or her) area. He suggested that the self-promotion entail details about NNPA workshops and conventions to illustrate how speakers and sessions addressed the common problems facing the Black press and its readers. ²⁵⁴ Among the useful sessions that Philadelphia Tribune publisher Rhodes highlighted were those on training, retaining, and compensating salesmen; increasing classified lineage; cost-saving measures; planning and promoting special editions; distributing newspapers efficiently; and competing with radio. ²⁵⁵ Conferences hosted by the bigger publications included opportunities to see demonstrations of new equipment, such as the offset printing presses at William Walker’s Cleveland Call and Post ²⁵⁶ and at Carl Murphy’s Afro-American plant, where as many as thirteen editions of the newspaper were printed at one point for circulation across the country. ²⁵⁷ Echoing the reasons for forming the organization in the first place, Rhodes said, “The survival of the Negro press in America during these critical times depends upon a strong, active organization wherein all the components work in unity for the good of the whole.” ²⁵⁸ By 1967, the NNPA reported 138 member-papers. One journalist who attended the midwinter workshop hosted that January by the Miami Times said the meeting “marked a new high in the establishment of coordinated efforts to pool resource material and combine ideas for improved images, increasing circulation, building classified sections and central plant development.” ²⁵⁹ In addition, the NNPA celebrated itself and the journalism of member-papers and their staff. In 1968, for instance, the organization marked its seventeenth competition for Merit Awards by bestowing thirty-three prizes in eleven different reporting and advertising categories at its annual convention. ²⁶⁰

Growth was boosted too by the establishment in July 1963 of a national office for the NNPA in New York City and appointment of an executive director: Franklin H. Whittaker, formerly with the Pittsburgh Courier but then with the federal government. ²⁶¹ The trade organization had discussed this plan as early as 1946 but had never had sufficient resources to carry it out. ²⁶² Reasons included overdue membership fees and a lack of dues-paying members. ²⁶³ NNPA officers and board members consequently were overburdened, as secretary/treasurer William Walker observed in 1950: “The work of all officers of the Association is a labor of love and most serve at a sacrifice of their time and money.” ²⁶⁴ Having an office and a full-time employee would enable the NNPA to finally “become the vital, aggressive association it was meant to be.” ²⁶⁵ Whittaker said a physical location was a requisite for “establishing the identity of any trade, business or professional association.” ²⁶⁶ He added,

To be an association in name only with a program that calls attention to its activities two or three times a year is at best “no service to its membership” and at worst a “disservice to its membership.” To perform in the effective manner of trade, business and professional associations requires a day-to-day continuity of activity designed to provide the services each member has a right to expect and receive. ²⁶⁷

In a press release discussing the headquarters and the NNPA’s dual roles as trade and advocacy organization, Rhodes said,

We feel that the Negro Press has been the one consistently effective force that has focused public attention on the injustices and indignities that have been the lot of the American Negro, and we must now exercise our efforts to accomplish full economic participation of the Negro in our National Life. ²⁶⁸

NNPA headquarters shifted in 1970 to Washington, D.C., with former journalist Sherman Briscoe as the organization’s executive director. ²⁶⁹

Negro Newspaper Week, held each year in March, continued to bring recognition to the Black press and the NNPA, with people such as President Kennedy, New York Governor Rockefeller, and Illinois Governor Kerner paying tribute. ²⁷⁰ Themes reflected the organization’s advocacy during the decade. In 1961, for example, “The Role of the American Minority Press in a World of Unrest” highlighted the organization’s part in the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement. ²⁷¹ The 1966 observance, “The Negro Press: The Light of Freedom,” paid tribute to the critical roles Black newspapers had traditionally served in communities. Committee chairman Emory O. Jackson told members, “Make the real importance of the Negro Newspaper Press felt. Recount the battles fought and won. List anew the goals yet to be attained. Re-inspire, re-assure, re-inform! Remember, no other medium will tell the story of the Negro Newspaper as it should be told.” ²⁷²

The NNPA published a twenty-page booklet in March 1965 in conjunction with its celebration of Negro Newspaper Week and the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding (Figure 3). It featured photos and short biographies of twenty-nine editors and publishers and quotes by some of them regarding the role and power of the Black press. For example, P. Bernard Young Jr., who drafted the “Credo for the Negro Press” in 1944, said, “The Negro Press is not only the Voice, it is the Pulse of the American Negro. It, more than anything else, reflects the true thinking of Negroes today.” ²⁷³ NNPA President Frank Stanley acknowledged the anniversary and founder John Sengstacke, whose idea it was to share collective responsibility for the success of the Black press. “The professional need was readily apparent, if Negro newspapers were to make a united thrust in their services to Democracy, advertisers and subscribers,” Stanley wrote. The NNPA had met with sitting presidents since its inception and “persistently promoted” advocacy of civil rights measures. “Long before the sit-ins and marches of the sixties—in the forties and fifties to be exact—NNPA was frequenting the White House, the US Congress and other Government agencies in quest of full opportunity for all Americans,” Stanley wrote in the booklet. ²⁷⁴

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Figure 3.

NNPA Black press information handbook. The National Newspaper Publishers Association issued this booklet in 1965 in conjunction with the twenty-fifth anniversary of its founding. It featured photos and short biographies of twenty-nine editors and publishers, as well as quotes regarding the role and power of the Black press.

The booklet also promoted the Black press as an effective medium for advertising. Nationally, some 169 newspapers claimed a combined circulation in excess of two million copies each week, and a readership of about ten million. ²⁷⁵ Of particular importance to the NNPA was the establishment in 1961 of Consolidated Publishers Inc. after two years of negotiations between Sengstacke, working for the NNPA, and representatives of three existing ad firms. The merger of those companies was called “one of the most significant steps in the 125-year-old history of the Negro press.” Consolidated represented about 150 Black periodicals, or roughly 96 percent of the Black press in the United States. ²⁷⁶ It aimed to make it easy for White clients to reach an untapped consumer market with $22 billion to spend. By November 1962, the renamed Amalgamated Publishers Inc. (API) was placing full-page ads in publications such as Printers’ Ink in an all-out “effort to sell the function of Negro newspapers in the Negro market to national advertisers and their agencies.” ²⁷⁷ API began conducting market and readership surveys in 1966. The first study showed among other things that 28 percent of the entire Black market—some 3.8 million people over the age of twelve—were regular readers of Black newspapers. Sengstacke, president of the seven-member board of directors consisting of NNPA members, said the research “should go a long way in helping advertisers to understand more fully the role of Negro-oriented newspapers, who reads them and why, and what these readers buy and how they spend their money.” ²⁷⁸

However, the NNPA had long relied on support from two industries—cigarette and alcohol. Tobacco companies began advertising in Black newspapers in the 1930s; corporations such as R. J. Reynolds and Philip Morris saw a burgeoning consumer market and publishers needed the advertising revenue in the decades when national advertising accounts were difficult if not impossible to obtain. ²⁷⁹ Similarly, Pabst Beer and Seagram’s Whiskey were among the alcoholic beverages advertised regularly in the Black press. ²⁸⁰ R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company announced a major ad campaign in 1969 during the NNPA’s midwinter conference that aimed to use the Black press to familiarize consumers with the company and “its products, policies, personnel and its corporate citizenship.” ²⁸¹ Accounts of an earlier workshop in Miami demonstrate the trade organization’s reliance on revenue from cigarette and alcohol ads. ²⁸² Social events during that 1967 meeting included a cocktail party hosted by Philip Morris; moreover, the company flew five East Coast publishers to the conference in its private plane. Seagram’s hosted a luncheon for NNPA attendees and guests in the Biscayne Terrace Hotel’s rooftop restaurant. ²⁸³ Meanwhile, other major firms that had long ignored Black newspapers were finally trying to figure out how to gain a foothold in the lucrative consumer market. ²⁸⁴

Racial Discrimination in America: 1970–1979

The 1970s began with uncertainty. Still fresh in the minds of many people, whether Black or White, were the tumultuous 1960s and momentous events including the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, urban riots, Black Power salutes at the 1968 Summer Olympics, Arthur Ashe’s victory at the U.S. Open, Shirley Chisholm’s historic election to the U.S. House of Representatives, the successful Apollo 11 program, and the demonstration by hundreds of members of the Poor People’s Campaign at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s represented steps forward in the long freedom struggle, but the Kerner Commission called out White racism and pointed to ongoing and pervasive discrimination in employment, education, and housing. “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black one white—separate and unequal,” the 1968 report famously stated. ²⁸⁵ The NNPA saw its work as a trade and advocacy organization continuing against this backdrop.

The theme of the 1972 conference, “How the Black Press Can Help Improve the Economic Status of Black Americans,” exemplified the NNPA’s thrust during the 1970s. Speakers from organizations including the National Business League, Small Business Administration, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and National Urban League shared information about federal aid programs with attendees, who were asked to convey details to readers. ²⁸⁶ After hearing Rev. Jesse Jackson, president of the newly organized People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), discuss politics and economic wealth, the NNPA committed to working with PUSH to register some seven million eligible Black voters. ²⁸⁷ Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Hubert Humphrey also addressed the NNPA. He pledged to improve social and economic conditions for Blacks and enlarge the Neighborhood Youth Corps, a central program of the War on Poverty that helped youth from poor families gain work experience and earn income while completing high school. Humphrey told enthusiastic attendees, “This nation must march again to end once and for all every last vestige of racism and hate that pervade American life.” ²⁸⁸

NNPA president and Miami Times publisher Garth C. Reeves subsequently led a September 1972 meeting with Senator George McGovern, who had earlier won the Democratic presidential nomination. ²⁸⁹ Reeves reminded McGovern that the trade and advocacy organization represented 113 different Black-owned newspapers with a readership in excess of three million. ²⁹⁰ McGovern assured the NNPA that he “recognized the necessity of the meeting, as the group represents the ‘heartbeat of the nation’s black communities.’” ²⁹¹ The senator was questioned for more than an hour about his views on Black appointments, economic priorities, health care, and other issues. McGovern blamed President Nixon for waging “a senseless and wasteful war in Southeast Asia . . . at the expense of providing vital humanitarian services to our poor and economically disadvantaged here at home.” McGovern said money should instead go to fighting unemployment—which was particularly high for Black veterans—and providing equal educational opportunities to youth. Nevertheless, according to the Chicago Defender, the senator spent more time lambasting the incumbent president than offering concrete suggestions for tackling domestic issues. Publisher Carlton Goodlett pointedly told McGovern, “Even though blacks have been very articulate in describing their own specific problems, in too many instances they have been ignored by public office holders who have no interest in these problems.” The Defender reported that the NNPA “appeared pleased” with the discussion. ²⁹² A campaign press release issued after the meeting declared that NNPA President Reeves was “glad to see McGovern prove that blacks are a priority in his campaign.” ²⁹³

Goodlett, who held doctoral and medical degrees and owned the San Francisco–based Reporting Publishing Co., went on to lead the NNPA for most of the decade—first as vice president and then as president. ²⁹⁴ The midwinter workshop in 1974, which focused on “The Black Press—Catalyst for Economic Change,” was a showcase for Goodlett’s formidable rhetoric. In his presidential address, he said the Black press had “always been a catalytic agent, working to ameliorate the effects of racial discrimination and delineate the means by which Black America and White America would achieve a society devoid of racism.” Moreover, he said its mission was “to articulate the demand for economic justice in a society which denies Black America full economic participation because of the imposed psychosis of racism by White America.” ²⁹⁵ The NNPA had been pushing lawmakers for fair housing and equal employment opportunities for years, but Goodlett challenged the organization to use the press to “speak clearly, forcefully and objectively about the true nature of the black crisis in America: economic discrimination.” ²⁹⁶ The Black unemployment rate averaged 8.9 percent in 1973, more than twice the rate for White workers. ²⁹⁷ He cited the oil embargo and soaring gas prices as well as an economy mired in “stagflation,” the simultaneous appearance of inflation and recession. ²⁹⁸ Goodlett said the outlook for Black Americans was bleak, although that was hardly news for those who had “lived on the brink of economic disaster” for decades. ²⁹⁹ He called on the publishers and editors to join hands. “I cannot emphasize too dramatically the importance of organized strength as opposed to individual publishers trying to make it alone,” he said, evoking the genesis of the NNPA in 1940. “Then we shall become an irresistible force, challenging all who would deny to Black America its full and complete democratic rights, even in a racist nation.” ³⁰⁰ Even so, one contemporaneous researcher faulted the NNPA for failing to achieve the sort of strength in numbers that Goodlett and his predecessors sought. “Except during crisis periods, such as the fight for school integration or equality in the armed forces,” wrote Henry LaBrie III, “black newspapers have operated almost as autonomous entities in relationship to one another.” Given the common goals of equal rights, he said “one would think that more dialogue and policy making would occur among black publishers.” ³⁰¹

Goodlett hosted the thirty-fifth annual convention in June 1975. In response to a discussion about the alarming unemployment rate among Blacks, 15 percent compared with 8.1 percent for Whites, attendees voted to ask President Gerald R. Ford to declare any community with a rate above 10 percent a disaster area. ³⁰² The NNPA hoped he would be responsive to the request; during a previous White House briefing, Ford had told about 200 members that he was well aware of the many problems facing Americans, from unemployment to unequal education, and he acknowledged that Blacks were often disproportionately affected by socioeconomic issues. ³⁰³

That was an understatement. The National Urban League reported in January 1976 that no year had “been more destructive to the progress of blacks than 1975.” ³⁰⁴ Gains that had been made over the previous decade in education, housing, health, and employment “were either wiped out or badly eroded” during 1975. ³⁰⁵ The Urban League cited growing poverty, record-high unemployment, and ongoing racial and sexual discrimination in all areas that underscored failures of public policies and policy-makers to correct “problems that years of racism have created.” ³⁰⁶ In sum, the report observed, “In this Bicentennial year, it is a sad commentary upon a nation celebrating a revolution fought on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal.’” ³⁰⁷ It also was an election year. The Urban League wanted all presidential candidates to read its report, pledge “to discuss openly and honestly” with Americans the “critical issues” outlined in the twenty-eight-page document, and offer concrete ideas for addressing the country’s future. ³⁰⁸

The NNPA focused on “The Unfinished American Revolution” when it met for its annual convention in Philadelphia, shortly before the city observed the nation’s bicentennial with a ceremony on Independence Mall and a five-hour parade. ³⁰⁹ Goodlett, elected to an unprecedented fourth term as NNPA president, called on Black politicians to stop toeing the party line and instead “work for the good of the black masses who have lost faith in our economic system.” He exhorted them to “agitate, agitate, agitate,” using the words Frederick Douglass said in 1894 to a young man who asked the statesman for advice. ³¹⁰ Philadelphia civil rights icon C. DeLores Tucker, who was the first Black woman to serve as Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, urged publishers and editors to “help America complete the revolution of the ’60s.” Some twenty-five million Blacks had been “forgotten” during the 1970s, she said, owing to unemployment and the economy. ³¹¹ And former Vice President Humphrey declared, “People want paychecks, not welfare checks.” He told the NNPA that full employment was the base on which to build progress, and he asked member-papers to support the Humphrey–Hawkins Bill. That legislation aimed to augment the Employment Act of 1946 by more explicitly enumerating employment goals and requiring the government to provide jobs to people if those goals were not met. ³¹² President Jimmy Carter signed the bill into law in October 1978, with Coretta Scott King and others in attendance. ³¹³

John Sengstacke was elected to a two-year term as NNPA’s president in June 1978. But the sixty-five-year-old was frustrated with the organization and its 142 dues-paying newspapers. ³¹⁴ “The NNPA is in trouble,” he told an interviewer later that year, citing finances and young publishers’ lack of interest in the press group and commitment to their newspapers.

It’s really a sad situation . . . that they [members] couldn’t come up with anybody else in the association to take it over and carry it on. . . . You know, if they can’t carry this thing on and I’m the only one who can save it then, hell, it may as well die. ³¹⁵

Sengstacke nevertheless was hopeful that he could offer “some direction to the organization and put it back on a sound footing.” ³¹⁶ He aimed to cultivate younger members who would “carry on the tradition” of the old guard, redesign conference programming to address problems within the industry, and expand the NNPA’s focus by adding new committees on governmental affairs and international relations. ³¹⁷ The NNPA also had recently approved a constitutional change that provided for the election of two vice presidents, a plan that soon helped with succession and eased some of the administrative burdens that previous officers had discussed among themselves. ³¹⁸

Sengstacke’s 1979 presidential address was both a tribute to the organization he founded nearly four decades earlier and a call for action in the coming decade. “I would like to think that we have come a long way since those days of petty warfare, when black publishers were hurling brickbats and slinging mud at one another,” he said, recalling the animosity between his own uncle, Robert S. Abbott, and Pittsburgh Courier publisher Robert Vann, and between other men who then published the leading Black papers and competed for subscribers and advertising dollars. Surveying the room of NNPA members, he added, “We have accomplished the impossible. The evidence is visible here this morning.” By working together, he said, the fledgling group had helped to integrate Major League Baseball, install a Black reporter in the U.S. Senate Press Gallery, abolish segregation in the military, and eliminate racial covenants. “Yes, we have a glorious legacy,” Sengstacke said, “The black media was born out of the necessity to crusade for a holy cause: freedom. It was not founded as a commercial enterprise. Justice, in a society that declared that all men are created equal, was its principal objective.” ³¹⁹

At the same time, he urged members to prepare for a challenging new decade. “We have allowed the white press to elbow us into the back seat and muffle our voices,” Sengstacke said. He likely was referring here to competition by White-owned metropolitan newspapers, which had been both publishing more content relevant to Black readers since the 1960s, and “siphoning off” experienced Black reporters. ³²⁰ He called on NNPA papers to increase their coverage of international news, offer better analysis of domestic and foreign affairs, and investigate issues relevant to readers. “Our circulation will increase in direct ratio to the energy devoted in uncovering the news and in the manner we treat it,” he said, while also acknowledging the ever-present need for sufficient advertising to pay skilled reporters to “do the vigilant job that lays before us.” Sengstacke issued a clarion call to members to recommit to the fight for justice and equity: “But unless we stir the fires in journalism we will lose the position that history has ordained for us. . . . We must sharpen our tools and advance our cause conscientiously and methodically. . . . March On, Black Press, March On!” ³²¹

A Struggle to Survive: 1980–2000

The NNPA honored the renowned historian Carter G. Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History as well as the Negro History Week observance, ³²² with a posthumous citation in 1950. ³²³ In 1927, Woodson had established the celebration “to invite attention to the achievements of the Negro” and highlight how Blacks have “influenced the development of civilization.” ³²⁴ But in 1980, the New Pittsburgh Courier published an editorial about Black History Month—the relatively new name for the observance—that reassessed the status of African American history. The Courier editorial lamented the lack of research on Blacks by Blacks, and urged people to begin documenting details about “the great black individuals, institutions and organizations that currently enrich our lives and will be a part of our history tomorrow.” The editorial particularly mentioned longtime journalist John Sengstacke, owner of the newspaper chain that included the Pittsburgh Courier: “There needs to be a book on him, or by him, on the NNPA, his life or the inner working of the Black press as a whole.” ³²⁵

But newspaper coverage of the NNPA’s activities during the 1980s is lacking, even in Sengstacke’s own chain. A reason for this may be the trade organization’s focus on the difficulties facing most member-papers: dramatic drops in circulation, declines in advertising revenue, a pressing need to cover community issues, and a shortage of skilled Black reporters. Conference themes—“The Editorial Challenge of the ’80s” and “The Survival of the Black Press in the 1980s”—underscore these business concerns. ³²⁶ In a keynote speech for the NNPA’s fortieth anniversary, Sengstacke said, “In order to survive, [newspapers] must keep the best of the old as well as not be afraid to explore new ideas and methods of doing things.” But he also stressed that the press had to continue “to be a leader in the fight for all rights for Black people and all people.” ³²⁷

And so as the National Newspaper Publishers Association moved into the 1980s, it stepped up its criticism of the Reagan Administration for its slow pace of Black appointments. Cleveland Call and Post owner William O. Walker, co-chair of the Black Advisory Committee to the Bush–Reagan Campaign, met with NNPA members at the 1981 midwinter conference. Although Walker was among the few Black publishers still supporting Republican candidates, he admitted that “efforts to establish meaningful contacts with members of the Reagan team have been most discouraging. They neither return phone calls nor answer letters.” ³²⁸ This was no surprise to others, as Reagan had demonstrated little interest in connecting with the Black community during the campaign. ³²⁹ Three years into his presidency and against the backdrop of Reaganomics—economic policies that included reduced social spending—Reagan grumbled that he was having trouble convincing Black Americans that he cared about civil rights. ³³⁰ Black publishers and media executives reached out to the White House to set up interviews with the president, but got little response. They complained that it was difficult to advocate on behalf of their communities when there was no line of communication with the president or his officials. ³³¹

During the 1981 annual conference, NNPA President John Procope, publisher of the New York Amsterdam News, implored the 250 member-papers to come together to “meet the challenges and frustrations” ahead. ³³² He asked the group to “become vocally forceful against the Reaganomics of budget cutbacks” that affected communities, and to end the animosity between the NNPA and Black Media, Inc. (BMI), which was founded in the mid-1970s by Washington Informer publisher Calvin W. Rolark to provide news and advertisements to small Black newspapers that were not members of the NNPA. BMI promoted Black empowerment, which had been a major focus of the NNPA in its early years. But during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the NNPA courted major White companies—particularly big tobacco, beer, and liquor distributors, and department stores. The 110 BMI member-papers agreed to partner with major advertisers, but they wanted the companies to also agree to invest in Black communities. ³³³ BMI celebrated those that did. Chrysler, for example, was presented an award for its “commendable role in black community economic development.” ³³⁴

Adding to the friction between the groups, BMI filed suit against the NNPA and its directors and officers in 1977, alleging that statements by President Carlton Goodlett “constituted wrongful acts that defamed” BMI and interfered with its “existing and prospective contract rights with its customers.” ³³⁵ Eventually, several Black newspapers were members of both groups. NNPA leaders, always mindful of membership and dues, feared that BMI would siphon members. In an effort to “mend fences,” President Procope initiated a “‘new unity’ drive” at the annual conference, which “marked the return to the folds of Black Media Inc.” It was reported that “the new togetherness [would] increase the active membership of NNPA to over 200, and give it . . . ‘The necessary muscle to help ease the weight of the yoke on the backs of Black Americans.’” ³³⁶ Rolark was elected first vice president of the NNPA in 1981. ³³⁷ His daughter, Denise Rolark Barnes, became publisher of the newspaper after his death in 1994; in 2015, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the NNPA, she was elected chair (formerly the role of president) at its annual convention featuring the theme “Empowering a New Generation of Leadership.” ³³⁸

Black publishers had been criticized for decades for their close ties to corporations that heavily advertised and distributed beer and liquor in Black communities. ³³⁹ The NNPA’s affiliation with R. J. Reynolds Tobacco included a scholarship program for students interested in majoring in journalism. ³⁴⁰ And Miller Brewing, Falstaff Brewing, and Philip Morris were among the firms that contributed thousands of dollars for journalism and advertising prizes that were presented at the NNPA’s annual conventions. ³⁴¹ Despite the criticism and even when the national anti-smoking campaign made such partnerships unpopular, NNPA leaders worked tirelessly throughout the 1980s and 1990s to maintain relationships with longtime advertisers. In return, publishers received not only advertising revenue, but also free trips to the Caribbean for NNPA meetings and continuing sponsorship of cocktail receptions and banquets at the annual conventions. ³⁴² Ninety-three publishers met with corporate officials in November 1985 for a two-day Philip Morris Media/Business Conference “to assess their mutual concerns for the excesses of anti-smoking campaigns aimed at destroying the tobacco industry.” Stanley S. Scott, a former journalist who was at one time the highest-ranking Black official in the White House, greeted the group. “Philip Morris is proud and happy to count [the Black press] as a friend,” said Scott, who was the company’s vice president of corporate affairs. ³⁴³ He may have had in mind the lavish “Salute to the Black Media” his company hosted for 300 guests at a prestigious New York club in 1983, when awards were presented to past and current NNPA presidents. ³⁴⁴

Another executive at the conference said Philip Morris had been the first national advertiser in Black newspapers and was “an early supporter of national civil rights organizations, despite the outcries and boycotts of some angry whites.” The implication was that Philip Morris had stood by the Black press for decades, and now it was time for publishers to reaffirm their commitment to one of their main advertisers. Several publishers said tobacco companies and the press needed to continue to discuss ways to be of mutual assistance. William Lee, owner of the Sacramento Observer and NNPA first vice president, pressed industry officials to increase their ad buys in Black publications. ³⁴⁵ He and other members of NNPA’s advertising committee subsequently presented “facts and figures” to show why Philip Morris should increase its ad budget for Black newspapers. Scott announced in February 1986 that the “well-organized presentation” convinced the company to increase its budget by $1 million. ³⁴⁶

Tobacco advertising did increase in Black newspapers between 1988 and 1991, then fell off in 1992. That year, Philip Morris committed about $3 million in advertising, but the economy and the continuing assault against smoking led it to decrease the budgeted amount to about $1 million. Philip Morris officials met with NNPA president and Philadelphia Tribune publisher Robert Bogle several times in 1991–1992. He reminded them of the company’s commitment to increase advertising in the Black press. ³⁴⁷ While tobacco support dwindled in the late 1990s as attitudes about smoking began to change in Black communities, a 1997 letter from a PR firm to an executive at R. J. Reynolds shows a desire to continue working with the Black press. One suggestion was to take advantage of “editorial adjacency”: essentially, free editorial space commensurate with the amount of paid advertising inches. The idea was for R. J. Reynolds to contribute feature stories on Black employees who were civically involved and had achieved “significant professional accomplishments.” ³⁴⁸

Newspapers faced a new challenge in the late 1990s. Just as radio and television had done in previous decades, the Internet drew ever more readers away from Black papers and the industry was slow to adapt to the changing habits of its audiences. The NNPA News Service, which mailed its product to members, had become irrelevant. In response, NNPA Executive Director Benjamin Todd Jealous and News Service Editor Raoul Dennis launched BlackPressUSA.com in 2001. The website allowed members to access news and feature stories more quickly; member-papers also were able to link their websites to the NNPA site. Jealous and Dennis hired two full-time reporters for the service, something the organization had not had since the mid-1980s. ³⁴⁹

In March 1997, the Black press observed the 170th anniversary of its founding. Two months later, on May 28, Chicago Defender publisher John H. Sengstacke died at the age of 84. More than 200 people attended his funeral at a Chicago church. ³⁵⁰ Obituaries called him “visionary,” “immensely powerful,” and “the Charles Foster Kane of the Negro press,” a reference to the William Randolph Hearst-like character in the 1941 film Citizen Kane. ³⁵¹ President Bill Clinton posthumously awarded Sengstacke the Presidential Citizens Medal. The citation called him “a lifetime crusader for equal opportunity for African Americans” and credited him with using “the power of the press to bring our nation closer to its ideals.” ³⁵² Sengstacke’s death heralded a changing of the guard at the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the organization he had founded. But its work as a trade and advocacy group continued. In 1999, at the last convention of the twentieth century, in New York City, the NNPA recommitted itself “to fighting for the rights of Blacks in America and all over the globe,” and outgoing president Dorothy R. Leavell told the 200-member organization, “We are needed just as much today as we were when John Russwurm and Sam Cornish started” the first newspaper for Black Americans in 1827. Attendees visited the site of Freedom’s Journal to pay tribute to those trailblazers, as members had done in 1965 for the 138th anniversary of the Black press. ³⁵³

Epilogue: Challenges and Lessons

Three women were present at the founding of the NNPA in February 1940: Fannie McConnell, an occasional Chicago Defender columnist and theater director who recorded the meeting minutes; Marian Downer, a reporter and the manager of the Pittsburgh Courier’s Chicago office; and Eloise LaStaff, who was described as a home economist in the caption to the group photo published in the Chicago Defender. ³⁵⁴ Jesse Vann, who ran the Courier after her husband’s death, was an active member of the NNPA. So, too, was Nannie Mitchell-Turner, publisher of the St. Louis Argus. ³⁵⁵ But the organization as a whole paid little attention to women as editors and publishers until the early 1970s, when generational shifts and a push for women’s rights stirred the trade and advocacy group. As Birmingham World editor Emory O. Jackson told Sengstacke following the January 1971 workshop in Cincinnati, “It appears to me that . . . we made a necessary and vital step toward the involvement of our women and younger members of NNPA into the structure, leadership and visibility of the NNPA.” ³⁵⁶ Among other individuals, Jackson had in mind Cincinnati Herald owner Marjorie Parham, with whom he would work to establish NNPA’s Black Press Archives and Gallery of Distinguished Newspaper Publishers at Howard University. ³⁵⁷ The organization presented its Legacy Award to her during its annual convention in June 2019. ³⁵⁸

So it was newsworthy when three women publishers were elected to the NNPA’s highest office, that of chair, in early decades of the twenty-first century: ³⁵⁹ Denise Rolark Barnes of the Washington Informer; Dorothy Leavell, with the Crusader Newspaper Group, who had previously served as president from 1995–1999; and Karen Carter Richards, owner of the Houston Forward Times. Black press historian Clint Wilson said in 2017 that the candidacy then of Barnes and Leavell indicated progress in the organization, which had just celebrated the 190th anniversary of Freedom’s Journal and its male founders. The 2017 election was important, too, because the NNPA was grappling with issues including staffing, infrastructure, national advertising, digital growth, and cuts to the NNPA news service. Leavell, who represented the old guard, was elected chair in 2017 but was defeated in 2019, when the younger Carter Richards won a decisive victory that signaled a mandate for change and new ways of connecting with readers. ³⁶⁰ Carter Richards, who received the NNPA’s 2018 Publisher of the Year Award, ³⁶¹ pledged to “work to move the storied association forward, help to continue to provide Black America with critical news and information, and bridge any divides that might exist between members.” ³⁶² Her comments echoed Sengstacke when he invited his colleagues to set aside differences and form the organization in 1940.

Advertising remains a perennial problem for the Washington, D.C.,-based NNPA. In 2004, Chair Sonceria “Sonny” Messiah Jiles signed a $4.1-million deal with The Home Depot that brought much needed revenue to members. Los Angeles Sentinel publisher Danny Bakewell Sr., who served as chair from 2009 to 2011, worked to gain multiyear commitments from companies like General Motors. The goal was to move away from short-term contracts that in the past had left the NNPA on shaky financial ground. ³⁶³ Even though it increased the number of companies providing national advertising, the NNPA continued to highlight that the numbers were low relative to Black America’s economic power. In fact, the organization has advocated for decades that Black Americans’ economic contributions have been taken for granted. At every opportunity, NNPA leaders point out that their member-papers and online operations reach fifteen million Blacks with relevant news and information. If corporations want to reach that audience, they need to partner with the NNPA. ³⁶⁴ In 2018, the Government Accounting Office reported that of the $1 billion spent annually on advertising contracts by the federal government between 2013 and 2017, only $327 million went to minority-owned businesses. Of that amount, just $51 million went to Black-owned businesses. NNPA President and CEO Benjamin Chavis Jr. demanded that minority-owned businesses be treated equitably; he called on federal officials to end the systemic racial discrimination. ³⁶⁵ That was a constant refrain of Sengstacke and his NNPA colleagues.

Chavis was elected during the NNPA’s 2014 conference with the expectation that the civil rights worker would use his leadership skills and contacts “to make an immediate impact” on the trade and advocacy organization. ³⁶⁶ In 2017, he secured a $1.5-million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support a three-year, multimedia public-awareness campaign about the Every Student Succeeds Act. The 211 member-papers across the country were called on to inform readers about the program that replaced No Child Left Behind, and “focus on efforts and policies aimed at closing the achievement gaps for students of color and low-income students,” Chavis said. ³⁶⁷ The NNPA’s current advocacy of educational opportunities as a means to escape poverty and attain well-paying jobs mirrors the group’s sustained participation in the War on Poverty. Similarly, the NNPA launched in 2018 a campaign emphasizing the importance of voter-registration in the Black community. It sought to encourage five million Blacks to register to vote and go to the polls that November. ³⁶⁸ In 1952, the trade and advocacy organization worked to double the number of registered Black voters to six million by the fall presidential election. ³⁶⁹

Chavis signed a memorandum of understanding with the NAACP in June 2018, an interesting development considering the NNPA’s historical relationship with that group and its leaders. ³⁷⁰ The NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall had sought to collaborate with the NNPA as early as 1945, but through the 1950s, the trade organization had vacillated between supporting the civil rights group and cutting off aid to it. ³⁷¹ Chavis said, “We’re going to work together to increase the membership of the NAACP and we are going to work together to strengthen the Black press of America.” ³⁷² But Chavis and NNPA publishers were not invited to participate in an NAACP-hosted virtual forum on Black media in May 2020. He said the exclusion went “beyond a mere oversight” and warranted conversation as part of the “ongoing strategic alliance” between the two organizations. Denise Rolark Barnes wrote the NAACP, “Understandably, we are all bewildered about why the nation’s oldest civil rights organization would allow a discussion [about] Black media ownership without having someone from the nation’s oldest black media ownership organization—the NNPA—at the table. This happens all too often, and I join my colleagues in expressing my disgust.” ³⁷³

The NNPA significantly boosted its news operations when it announced in 2019 a partnership with the new Black News Channel (BNC). The cable network, based in Florida and backed by business mogul Shad Khan, is the nation’s first 24/7 “venue for the African American community to have a dialogue to talk about news, education and cultural things,” said former U.S. Congressman J. C. Watts Jr., BNC chairman. He added that it is “especially important to have the Black press of America” join the venture because the NNPA’s member-papers will provide content along with BNC’s reporters. The network’s website currently displays a header, “NNPA Newswire,” and items including an op-ed by Chavis about a Washington, D.C., re-entry center for former prisoners, a profile of longtime columnist Lucius Gantt, and a story about Chavis moderating a forum on racial equality. The NNPA president called the alliance with BNC “a profound win-win for Black America,” and he described the programming, which debuted in select markets in February 2020, as a continuation of Blacks telling their own story. BNC’s goals reflect those that the Black press and the NNPA have emphasized for decades: provide relevant news, celebrate Black history, showcase achievements and create positive role models for Black youth, and recruit and train aspiring Black journalists. ³⁷⁴

The NNPA’s early members, including the Kansas City Call’s Dowdal H. Davis and Cleveland Call and Post publisher William O. Walker, worried often about the viability of both the Black press and the trade and advocacy organization. The twenty-first century has been challenging. ³⁷⁵ The legendary Chicago Defender printed its last copy in July 2019, although the digital operation is continuing for now. ³⁷⁶ The venerable Jet magazine published its final print issue in June 2014. ³⁷⁷ Yet the Los Angeles Wave, which has won multiple NNPA Merit Awards for quality journalism, currently has the highest circulation of any Black paper in the United States at 1.2 million weekly readers. ³⁷⁸ Still to be determined is the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on ethnic and mainstream newspapers. ³⁷⁹ The NNPA had envisioned 2020 as “a banner year” for the “storied organization,” particularly in the light of the group’s eightieth anniversary. Chair Karen Carter Richards earlier promised a rebranding of the NNPA: “After so much that we’ve been through to this point, we want us to all be of one accord and come together and identify, understand, and come up with solutions to address the needs of the member publishers.” ³⁸⁰

The group had planned to focus on increasing revenue for member-papers through innovation and digital upgrades like monetizing the use of mobile devices. ³⁸¹ But COVID-19 forced the association again to focus on civil rights activism: in March 2020, it formed the NNPA Coronavirus Task Force and Resource Center, comprised of publishers, editors, physicians, and corporate partners, to provide “timely and accurate information to stakeholders and the African American community” who account for a disproportionate number of diagnoses and deaths. The NNPA urged federal, state, and local public health officials to immediately increase their outreach to Black America via NNPA member publications. Chavis said, “The Black Press of America has always taken a frontline position during a time of crisis to keep Black America informed about the truth and facts.” But he stressed the toll of the pandemic: “Our member newspapers are still printing, and our online and digital distributions of vital life-saving accurate information on COVID-19 are all being done responsibly and effectively. Yet, many of our newspapers are facing a reduction in advertising at a time during this crisis when our news businesses are crucially needed.” ³⁸²

In 2020, the NNPA launched a series of national livestream broadcasts on Facebook with publishers and editors of member-papers. ³⁸³ Discussions focused on the practicalities of doing business during the pandemic as well as specific topics such as fundraising efforts, shifting to nonprofit status, creative strategies for soliciting advertising, and strides toward digital publishing and connecting with audiences via social media and mobile apps. ³⁸⁴ Coincidentally, Facebook awarded fifteen NNPA member-papers nearly $1.3 million as part of its relief fund for local news. The Afro received $100,000. Frances Murphy Draper said the grant would enable her “to expand . . . human and technological resources” at the newspaper and thus continue to provide critical news to her community. Washington Informer publisher Rolark Barnes said the $100,000 “couldn’t have arrived at a better time. . . . The grant helps us to continue telling our stories and significantly assists our efforts to innovate at the same time.” ³⁸⁵

Past chairs have discussed the need to preserve the NNPA’s history and lead it “beyond stagnation [and] into a new era of solvency [and] productivity.” ³⁸⁶ The National Newspaper Publishers Association can, and should, use its history of advocacy for equal rights to connect with a new generation of media consumers and supporters. “The challenge is not just to celebrate what has gone before, to celebrate that legacy, but to actually do something to make sure that the Black press is known by the younger generation, embraced by the next generation, and eventually taken over by the next generation,” noted the journalist-scholar E. R. Shipp on the NNPA’s seventy-fifth anniversary. ³⁸⁷ At least two of the organization’s live Facebook broadcasts departed from the focus on “iconic publishers” to feature a few of the younger people involved in the Black press, such as Savannah Wood, archives director at the Afro; Celeste Kearney, daughter of the Cincinnati Herald publisher; and Lafayette Barnes IV, publisher of the Washington Informer Bridge and son of Denise Rolark Barnes. ³⁸⁸

Business historians say that “when the history of an organization does come up, it’s usually in connection with an anniversary—just part of the ‘balloons and fireworks.’” ³⁸⁹ That was the case with the NNPA’s 2015 milestone, and for decades, the trade group has linked its history with the annual March observance of Negro/Black Press Week. Such celebrations are important. Yet business historians write that a more “sophisticated understanding of the past is one of the most powerful tools we have for shaping the future.” ³⁹⁰ NNPA’s leaders may take some comfort in knowing that current problems with circulation, revenue, readership, and relevance were also discussed at every one of the group’s meetings for years, but this research suggests that the leadership team would do well to study past practices to rework outdated business models. A name change may be in order, too; dropping “newspaper” might allow the organization to become more inclusive and powerful, with members representing radio and other Black-owned media concerns. Moreover, the website needs regular updating and additional content, such as convention programs, news releases, and its leadership team roster. This will boost its presence and help it write its organizational history. The Facebook broadcasts are a useful record of members’ business practices and thoughts during a difficult—and perhaps promising—moment. They should be prominently linked from the NNPA website and not simply stored on the Facebook platform.

The pandemic necessitated a virtual celebration of the NNPA’s eightieth anniversary. As disappointing as this was, the virtual convention likely appealed to many individuals, especially because in-person gatherings have historically been difficult for members due to money and time constraints. The 2020 meeting focused on the Black press as a “vital voice of Black America” and the theme, “Trust, Hope & Resilience: Overcoming COVID-19.” ³⁹¹ “Voice” has been central to Black newspapers since Freedom’s Journal was founded in 1827. In 1944, the press’s “Credo” stated, “The Negro Press is not only the Voice, it is the Pulse of the American Negro. It, more than anything else, reflects the true thinking of Negroes today.” ³⁹² And in 2015, the NNPA celebrated its work and that of its members with the Twitter campaign #OurVoice75. Similarly, it was a theme that connected the NNPA’s Facebook broadcasts. For instance, Al McFarlane, editor-in-chief of the Minneapolis Insight News, said, “Our job is to make sure that all of our voices are heard and that no decision is made without our interest being considered.” Orlando (Florida) Advocate publisher Kevin Seraaj added, “I think we also have an obligation to have an editorial voice that speaks to matters in a way that perhaps mainstream media will never speak to them.” ³⁹³ Lindi Vilakazi, a young Washington Informer reporter, said the narrative of the racial-justice protests in the capital “is not necessarily communicated on our [White] mainstream platforms.” Another young editor, Micha Green, has participated in and reported on the demonstrations for the Afro. ³⁹⁴ This is what Chicago Defender publisher John Sengstacke meant when he challenged members in 1979 to recommit to the fight for justice and equity and “march on.” ³⁹⁵

Since its founding, the NNPA has sought to give its members a collective voice in the media landscape. As a trade organization, it has celebrated the Black press and its founders, the legacy papers still publishing, and the multigenerational families that provide hyperlocal news in print and digital form. It has convened regular workshops and conventions and offered opportunities for journalists to learn from one another and hear from politicians, government officials, and civil rights leaders. Eighty years on, the NNPA’s advocacy of equal rights has assumed a new sense of urgency, owing to the pandemic, over-policing, the May 2020 murder of George Floyd and resultant protests, and discussions surrounding systemic racism. The organization’s continuing work on behalf of its members enables publishers to focus on their mission of informing and educating their communities, a job that Sengstacke said was imbued with “awesome responsibility.” The press “feeds the spirit of our people with hopes of a new day,” he said. “I encourage you in your task.” ³⁹⁶