Early black newspapers helped to solidify black identity at a time when that identity was being attacked in the cruelest, most violent ways.
Benjamin P. Fagan
Benjamin Fagan is Assistant Professor of English at Auburn University. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and in 2016 was the Fulbright Visiting Professor in American Studies at the University of Graz, Austria. His work has been in African American Review, Legacy, Comparative American Studies, and American Periodicals. His first book, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Georgia, 2016), examines how the institutional and material forms of black newspapers helped shape ideas of black chosenness in the decades before the Civil War. He is also a member of the Black Press Research Collective, a group of scholars dedicated to making primary and secondary materials related to black newspapers more widely accessible.
