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2:12 PM
Page 204
UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
911814 Summer 09 pp 108-189
Julius F.Taylor and the Broad Ax of Salt Lake City BY MICHAEL S. SWEENEY
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eldom has a newspaper editor been so much of an outsider. Julius F. Taylor, who single-handedly produced the four-page, tabloid weekly The Broad Ax from 1895 to 1899 in Salt Lake City before moving the paper to Chicago, was a minority voice in a multitude of ways. He was an iconoclastic Democrat in a state known for its conservative traditions and respect for authority. He was a self-described “heathen” in a land where religion was one of life’s main organizing principles — a non-believer in Mormon territory. Furthermore, his black skin not only made him a second-class citizen of the United States in the segregationist era of the Supreme Court’s segregationist Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, but also ensured he would have to fight particularly hard for status in his territory and state. The numbers were stacked against him: the1890 census counted only 588 African Americans in Utah. Many of them scrambled to make a living as porters, cooks, waiters, barbers, and in other low-prestige jobs, making the expense of a newspaper subscription a disproportionately large percentage of income. The vast majority, like African Americans throughout the United The first issue of the Broad Ax, States, supported the Republican Party August 31, 1895. Michael S. Sweeney is a professor of journalism and communication at Utah State University
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