JANS – On March 14, 2024, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) and the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) will host a celebration in honor of Black Press Day, the celebration of the birth of the Black Press in the United States. 2024 marks the 197th year of the Black Press of America, with the first Black newspaper being published in 1827 called Freedom’s Journal.
Hosted by MSRC, a research center that has been preserving the Black experience since 1914 and is home to the largest private collection of global Black Press archives, the event serves to highlight the rich history and impactful contributions of the Black Press and celebrate the significant milestones achieved. The celebration will include an overview and tour of MSRC’s Black Press Archives Digitization Project, which aims to preserve and digitize a collection of over 100,00 individual newspapers by Black journalists, editors, and publishers from the United States, Africa, and the African Diaspora, donated to Howard University by the NNPA.
“The goal of Black Press Day is to celebrate and recognize the significant contributions of the Black Press in journalism, storytelling, and cultural representation. We want our students to see firsthand the importance of the Black Press in telling our stories across centuries and nations, and the continued importance of the Black Press in the digital age,” said Dr. Benjamin Talton, Director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University.
Dr. Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., President and CEO of the NNPA, emphasized, “We acknowledge our long-term partnership with the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. We are grateful that on the campus of the historic Howard University through the Center’s library, we continue to support the Black Press Gallery of Distinguished Publishers. This year in particular highlights the digital innovation and progress of the Black Press archives and the Gallery of Distinguished Publishers.”
Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and the National Newspaper Publishers Association have a long history of partnership, as the Black Press Archives Digitization Project began as a joint project between the two in 1973. Google recently awarded the Black Press Archives Digitization Project a $760,000 grant to support and continue the project’s work in digitizing and preserving the collections of the Black Press Archives, which includes over 2,847 reels of microfilm representing more than 2,000 newspaper titles and over 100,000 individual newspaper issues. These newspapers span the United States, Africa, and the African Diaspora, demonstrating the truly global reach of the Black Press. Google’s grant follows a $2M grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation, which enabled the establishment of the Project.
“This grant will go a long way towards ensuring that the contributions made by the Black Press are not only well preserved and maintained, but also made accessible to anyone interested in viewing our collection, from anywhere in the world. The Black Press Archives is truly a global project, telling the stories of the Black experience across the African Diaspora, so we want to ensure that the archives are readily accessible online,” said Brandon Nightingale, Project Manager for the Black Press Archives Digitization Project.
Karen Carter Richards, Chair of the NNPA Fund, remarked, “As we celebrate 197 years of the Black Press, Google’s grant for the digitization of the Black Press is a commendable initiative that recognizes the importance of preserving and making accessible the historical archives of Black-owned newspapers. Digitization efforts not only ensure the preservation of valuable historical records but also make them more readily available for researchers, scholars, and the general public.”
The celebration will open with a ceremonial drum performance by Sadiki Lancaster, followed by remarks from the NNPA leadership. Brandon Nightingale will provide a detailed update on the state of the Black Archives Digitization Project, after which attendees will have the opportunity to tour the gallery of Black publishers as well as the University’s archival spaces, led by the MSRC’s student archivists.
