This chapter analyzes Black writing from the leadup to the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century, works that shored up the literate voice long denied to enslaved people, and explores how the pre-emancipation essay served to determine freedom. The century’s standout Black orator, Frederick Douglass, became a print phenomenon, advancing a strong first-person voice that spoke for the conscience of the nation. However, it was left to younger writers to tackle the meaning of freedom at a time when emancipation seemed like a hollow promise. The works of activist journalist Ida B. Wells highlight the synergy between investigative reporting and essay writing during the period. The chapter concludes by comparing the prose works of two towering figures: Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. The ideological split in their views on civil rights is registered in their different writing styles, with Washington stressing action and advocacy and Du Bois embracing introspection and contemplation. Between them, these figures register the suite of oratorical, journalistic, and literary resources that will be bequeathed to twentieth-century practitioners of the African American essay.

Later stories about Raúl claimed that his sad destiny was the result of his situation as the only son of a father who died prematurely. In sync with broader racial narratives of Black disappearance, the stories used the trope of orphandom to cast Raúl’s father as the dying Afro-Argentine community and Raúl as its last straggling offshoot. My story, by contrast, zeroes in on Raúl’s father Estanislao, who did not die young; in fact, in the 1880s and 1890s he was at the helm of his own large family in the Grigeras’ ancestral home. Estanislao was a member of the elite or “high life” of the city’s Afrodescendant community. He was a trained pianist, church organist, and classical composer who carried on, but also transformed, his male ancestors’ involvement with candombe into something more refined and acceptable. Although he did not write for the Black press that surged in Buenos Aires in these decades, he appears constantly in its pages in the company of many other Afro-Argentines, famous and unknown. Against the grain of contemporaneous narratives of near complete Black disappearance and later stories about Raúl, “Community” tells a rich story of a Black community at its peak: its newspapers, social organizations, Carnival bands, constant dance parties, courtship and romantic intrigue, and anti-racist activism. Reconstructing Estanislao’s life within this energetic community allows me to imagine the kinds of lessons about politics, masculinity, comportment, fashion, music, and revelry the young Raúl would have absorbed in his parents’ home. I also narrate the strains on this family as they, like their predecessors, struggled with disease, infant mortality, and racism. The chapter’s main theme is the role of elite Black cultural producers and intellectuals, like Raúl’s father, in bringing about the “disappearance” or invisibility of Afro-Argentines through their attempts to conform to cultural norms and avoid racial stereotypes and stories about “buffoonish” or “barbaric” Black people. Estanislao’s generation is key to understanding how the lines of race were redrawn between 1880 and 1900 – at the height of an extremely conservative form of liberalism – to produce a seemingly homogeneous, yet internally stratified, White nation. It was their politics of Black respectability and assimilation, in concert with broader social transformations, that laid the groundwork for Raúl to appear in later stories as a forlorn anomaly. Raúl rejected these politics of respectability, leading to conflict with his father.

This chapter explores the four periodicals edited by Frederick Douglass. Made possible through the contributions of various and sundry staff members and filled with pieces from a diverse range of writers, Douglass’s newspapers were collaborative productions that he not only contributed to as a writer but, more centrally, oversaw as an editor. Douglass’s newspapers were wide-ranging, diverse publications that resist any easy summary. But considering Douglass within the context of his four periodicals offers a particularly vivid example of his interest in and use of international networks and affairs. Throughout his nearly three-decade career as an editor, Douglass used his newspapers to relate the cause of black liberation in the United States to freedom struggles abroad. This chapter looks closely at the ways in which this international focus was reflected not only in the content of Douglass’s newspapers, but also in their financing, staff, and readership.

The complex interaction between the visual and print culture is central to transitions in definitions and perceptions of Black personhood and mid-century African American literature. Marshaled by race science and criminology, and underwriting the emergence of the periodical as media form in the United States through its advertisements for fugitives and enslaved Africans for sale, visuality was imbricated with print. Autumn Womack approaches visuality in the Anglo-African Magazine through its statistical essays in order to contend that the magazine was brokering a transition from a text-based articulation of Black freedom to one figured in and through visuality. The “visual grammar” that resulted, she argues, presented Black freedom as accomplished and aspirational. Womack thus further elaborates the scholarly contention that Black American practitioners of visuality ranged beyond those using photography, such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth, to those debating the visual’s affordances in written texts, including Martin Delany, William J. Wilson, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Louisa Picquet, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. She argues that the Anglo-African Magazine explored and reframed the conceptual and visual dimensions of Black freedom by pursuing what optic strategies and practices it both demanded and engendered.

The Black periodical is important in its materiality, circulation, and the serial possibilities it affords. This chapter asks us to think about the periodical not only as where mid-century Black literature can be found but also as a media technology that uniquely facilitated a “transition from a transnationalism routed through a white transatlantic sensibility to one grounded in a Black hemispheric imaginary” through serialization. The political import of serializing novels in the Black press from the early 1850s to early 1860s is explored, including Dickens’s Bleak House in 1853 in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Martin Delany’s Blake in the Weekly Anglo-African from 1861 to 1862. This chapter argues that these papers used serialization “to teach their readers how to relate the fight for Black freedom in the United States to transnational liberation movements.” While Bleak House taught readers not to be distracted by distant suffering, Blake’s serialization taught them that the Civil War was but one front of a Black hemispheric revolution. Haiti is located in an African American literary and political imaginary that was also mobilizing the Hungarian Revolution through serialized publication, meaning the political struggles at these sites could not be readily divorced from those of African Americans.

This chapter examines the print culture that emerged from successes in black entrepreneurship in early nineteenth-century Brooklyn, New York. Through a close analysis of a newspaper notice, a city directory advertisement, and a patent, the author considers how three free Black men determined their own modes of political, economic, and cultural self-expression in spite of their oppression. Moreover, the chapter situates their economic protests into a larger contextual struggle. In the antebellum decades, Brooklynites, like many other early free Black communities across the North, pursued a variety of ways to secure their humanity. In Brooklyn, residents built their communities by establishing schools, churches, mutual aid societies, and businesses. Their activism resulted in vibrant and mobilized communities in areas known today as downtown Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, and Weeksville, New York (the second largest free Black community in pre-Civil War America).

One year into the Civil War, New Orleans fell to Union forces. A few months later, French-speaking Creoles of color published the first edition of L’Union. This chapter considers this as a key transitional moment for French-speaking Creoles of color in New Orleans writing at a time when the city’s old racial order of white, free, and enslaved was in transition. The Creole-of-color poetry L’Union published was positioned not only alongside news items but also with an excerpt of the US Constitution, translated into French, and a reprint of a letter Victor Hugo wrote to Haiti referencing John Brown. By returning to consider that literary production in the space of the newspaper, rather than as it is encountered now in anthologies, we can learn much more about the “hybrid spaces” these writers negotiated with “a multiplicity of voices and discursive strategies.” Returning to this publication history, when highly literate Creoles of color long shut out of publishing opportunities embarked on their own in L’Union and its successor the Tribune, also returns us to the ignored history of Creole identity and activism behind such central events as Homer Plessy’s challenge to the legality of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.

From their initial explosion, African American women’s literary societies would go on to outnumber men’s organizations from the 1830s through the 1850s. Literary societies were also sites for the imbrication of oratory and print, since they included not only reading but also listening to texts read aloud, so that members of literary societies need not have been textually literate. Taking Maria Stewart’s first letters to the editor, in Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and The Liberator in 1832, this chapter will argue that the social gospel that would go on to define her career includes a prototypical Black feminist politics that we see emerging in the interconnected female-dominated Black literary societies and fledgling Black press around this time and reaching into the decades that follow. Stewart saw reading newspapers as essential to responsible citizenship for Black women, and understood both literary societies and newspapers as ways to forward her radical politics.