One of the most powerful enslavers in the United States penned a confidential letter on June 4, 1821, to the publisher of the National Intelligencer. Everyone who intimately knew American politics in 1821 knew all about the writer and recipient of the confidential letter.
Joseph Gales Jr. has published his newspaper as a daily for almost a decade while also serving as the official printer to Congress along with his business partner, William Winston Seaton. At the time, the National Intelligencer was the most influential newspaper in the nation’s capital and one of America’s leading periodicals, even more powerful than The Washington Post today. As many as 600 papers across the country relied on the National Intelligencer’s reports on congressional happenings and debates.
Three months before writing to Gales, Charles Pinckney Jr. finished his term as a South Carolina congressman. Since the 1780s, Pinckney had ferociously defended the “rights” and “freedoms” of enslavers as a signer of the U.S. Constitution, as a state legislator, as governor, and as a U.S. senator. He enslaved more than 200 Black people across several slavery camps. The Pinckney family likely enslaved thousands of Black people over the years.
On Feb. 8, 1821, Pinckney gave a speech in support of Missouri’s new state constitution, which, according to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, permitted slavery and required congressional approval. Pinckney asked Gales to print his pro-slavery speech in the National Intelligencer.
On June 13, 1821, Pinckney’s speech appeared in the National Intelligencer. Pinckney expressed support for Missouri’s new pro-slavery constitution that instructed the state legislature to pass a law prohibiting Black citizens and free citizens of color from other states from settling in Missouri. From this clause erupted a second and lesser-known Missouri Compromise debate in Congress.
Opponents argued that the exclusion of the other states’ citizens violated the U.S. Constitution. Pinckney invoked his presence at the federal Constitutional Convention in the 1780s to argue that Missouri’s racist policy was constitutional. At “the time,” he said, “I perfectly knew that there did not then exist such a thing in the Union as a black or colored citizen … nor … do I now believe one does exist in it.” Because “Africans” were “created with less intellectual powers than the whites, and were most probably intended to serve them.”
In printing Pinckney’s propaganda, a major American publisher accommodated to the wishes of racist enslavers. A regular occurrence in the 1820s on the eve of the 50th birthday of the United States. A regular occurrence that created a need for an antislavery newspaper.
The need is great two centuries later — on the eve of the 250th birthday of the U.S. — for an antiracist newsroom like The Emancipator. For a similar reason. A major American media organization accommodating to the wishes of racist authoritarians. A regular occurrence in our time.
Like CBS accommodating to the wishes of Donald Trump and his authoritarian allies.
Like ABC News “bending the knee” to the administration.
Like Sinclair local television stations fearmongering racist ideas nightly about dangerous peoples of color destroying America’s cities.
Like the owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, announcing last year that the Opinion section will effectively reinforce the status quo of inequality through “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”
Like choosing to use the imprecise C words (“conservative” and “centrist”) instead of precise R words (“racist” and “racism”).
Like legacy media organizations circulating the government propaganda of U.S. allies like Israel while censoring and silencing Palestinian perspectives.
Like mainstream media organizations appeasing racist forces through hiring executives whose ideas and actions conserve racism, through unraveling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, through driving out antiracist journalists and journalists of color in droves, through stories problematizing antiracist movements and leaders, through censoring reporting on racism.
People like me are being driven away from journalism in this age. Which means people like me need to take paths back to journalism in this age. The urgency is here.
As the new Editor-In-Chief of The Emancipator, I have reconnected to my original career path as a journalist. I was trained to be a journalist, earned a journalism degree, and worked at a number of publications before taking another career path: academia.
Then again, I never really left the path of the journalist. I studied racist propagandists who stand in opposition to journalists. I have sought as a scholar to engross people so thoroughly in the antiracist facts that they become inoculated to racist propaganda. I kept contributing research-based op-eds year after year to newspapers and magazines. I leaned on my journalism training to ensure my academically researched books were written in a highly accessible manner.
Today feels like a full-circle moment for me as we relaunch The Emancipator. My full circle moment is America’s full circle moment. As much as abolitionist Americans of the 1820s would hardly recognize much of anything about the United States at the 250th anniversary, there may be a few elements they recognize. They may recognize the actions and inaction of the mainstream media in maintaining the status quo of racism as it did slavery in their day.
They may recognize the antiracist journalist as the rebirth of the antislavery journalist. They may recognize the need yet again for The Emancipator.
As conflicts over slavery deepened in the 1820s and beyond, many publishers were like Joseph Gales Jr. at the National Intelligencer. They portrayed themselves and their newspapers as neutral while running advertisements for runaways, and for institutions financing slavery, and for slavery-made goods. These newspaper publishers imagined they could be neutral on slavery in the way many media executives claim their organizations can be neutral today on race.
In fact, the National Intelligencer and many of the nation’s most powerful Northern and Southern newspapers in the 1820s and beyond were among the principal spreaders of pro-slavery propaganda while aggressively censuring antislavery ideas. The New York Herald, under the leadership of James Gordon Bennett, defended the personal liberties of enslavers and Southern states and pillaged the character of African Americans and White abolitionists. Even when editors opposed slavery, they usually bitterly opposed abolitionists, like the New York Sun’s Benjamin Henry Day and Hezekiah Niles, the publisher of Baltimore’s Niles’ Weekly Register. At the National Intelligencer, Gales urged Northern abolitionists to moderate their views and leave solutions to Southern enslavers.
All this pro-slavery and anti-abolitionist propaganda masked as news. Newspapers operating as papers of recording the status quo.
It was in this environment that the antislavery newspaper came to life. The Emancipator first appeared in Jonesborough, Tennessee, in 1820. Quaker Benjamin Lundy purchased The Emancipator in 1821 and transformed it into the Genius of Universal Emancipation. Free Black men founded the Freedom’s Journal in 1827 to combat the racist, pro-slavery press in New York, with John Brown Russwurm and Samuel Cornish serving as the first publishers. Lundy’s mentee, William Lloyd Garrison, founded The Liberator in Boston in 1831.
The editors and publishers of the earliest antislavery newspapers ended up being, in many ways, the nation’s first true cadre of journalists. They exposed the pro-slavery propaganda. They held the most powerful in society accountable: enslavers and their financiers. These journalists investigated and courageously reported the plunder. They examined and platformed antislavery solutions. They based their coverage on the facts — like the fact of racial equality. These early antislavery journalists remained independent of enslavers and their major political parties.
Their antislavery journalism is now our antiracist journalism. The Emancipator is nonpartisan and independent. We are the watchdogs for the victims of racism, who are usually watched as if they are the problem when we must be doggedly watching the structural problem of racism.
We base our coverage on the facts and the truths, as revealed by lived experience and academic studies on racism. We examine and platform research-based antiracist solutions. We investigate and courageously report the plunder of racial inequity and injustice.
We are the new emancipators. And you can be too. Read us. View us. Support us.
