HARLEM COMMUNITY NEWSPAPERS
BLACK NEWSPAPERS DRUM OUR STORY By Hazel Rosetta Smith
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journalism. The name was changed to National Newspapers Publishers Association in 1956. At this present time, membership of the NNPA includes more than 200 black newspapers with a readership of 15 million throughout the United States and the Virgin Islands. Justifiably, America was forced to acknowledge a new movement with a bold declaration - BLACK LIVES MATTER. I submit that we add to that emphasis, BLACK NEWSPAPERS MATTER. It is not a decision to replace or dismiss White newspapers by exclusion, but rather to sustain a platform of all inclusion. Black newspapers publish news about we, the people. Some black newspapers may place
an emphasis on uplifting, positivity and celebration of our unsung heroes and sheroes; others chose to inform daily issues of crime, disparities, and political chaos, while others focus on social, church and community works. The mindset must be one of room for it all, because all aspects of our journey is important and
worthy of noting in all media. We can choose to read the Black Press, choose to subscribe, but most of all, understand when we choose to advertise in a black newspaper, we are participating in the concept of the African drum that is the heritage of a proud culture. We can choose to spread good news you can use, the motto of this 25-
year Harlem Community Newspaper. [Hazel Rosetta Smith is a journalist, playwright, and artistic director of Help Somebody Theatrical Ministries; retired former Managing Editor and Woman’s Editor of the New York Beacon; and current columnist for Harlem Community News, Inc. Contact: misshazel@twc.com]
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Harlem Community Newspapers | February 25. 2021
frican drums are more than musical instruments for entertainment. The drum has carried Africa’s rich history as a sacred source of spreading important and often urgent communication. African drumming revealed the hope and despair of a people that had to persevere in the face of Europeans. Information was its prime purpose to organize and keep spirits high through various beats that meant different things discernable to tribes across the continent. Drums played an important role in the history of slavery. It did not take long to discover that the slaves used drums for communication, especially in the Caribbean. British, Dutch, and French slavers, suspicious about any form of communication between slaves, soon forbid drumming to curtail their fear of uprisings. It is recorded that by 1776, some slaves had learned to read and write. In 1872, Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm printed the first African-American periodical called Freedom’s Journal in New York. African Americans migrated around the country and it
opened the door for numerous newspapers to publish information to the rising Black population in every city. Black newspapers in a manner of speaking, began drumming our stories across the nation. Such popular papers included: Philip Alexander Bell’s Colored American (1837– 41), the North Star (1847– 60), the National Era, The Frederick Douglass Paper (1851–63), the Douglass Monthly (1859–63), The Christian Recorder (1861–1902) and Daniel Rudd’s Ohio Tribune (later renamed to American Catholic Tribune, 18851897). Communities depended on black newspapers to keep them abreast of political meanderings that controlled their lives and livelihood. Racist discrimination and disparities in the North; ongoing lynching in the South, meager business opportunities and sometimes acknowledgements of the so-called new negroes who refused to be held back were the highlights of daily editorials and rehashed on opinion pages. In 1940, John H. Sengstacke founded the National Negro Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) when he was Vice President and General Manager of the Chicago Defender, the largest black newspaper in the United States at that time. It began as a conference Sengstacke hosted of 20 Black publishers of commercial newspapers with a purpose to collaborate on providing higher levels of excellence in African American
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