Today we’re looking at an issue of The Southern Workman, a monthly journal published from 1812–1939 by Virginia’s Hampton Institute Press. Founded shortly after the Civil War as the Hampton Agricultural and Industrial School, the Hampton Institute trained Black and Indigenous students to become teachers and community leaders, as well as offering vocational skills that would enable them to support themselves in the impoverished South. One of their most famous alumni was Booker T. Washington, who returned to teach at the school before moving on to the Tuskegee Institute. Interest in Black history-related books and ephemera is growing, and items like this—undervalued for too long—are waiting to be archived, studied, and discovered by collectors.
Brattlecast #112 - African American Periodicals
Today we’re talking about historic African American periodicals. These newspapers and magazines often had smaller circulations than their white, mainstream counterparts, making them harder to find and more collectible today. It’s a broad and varied field, which includes the abolitionist newspapers of the early 1800s like Freedom’s Journal and The North Star, the literary journals of the Harlem Renaissance, and more recent lifestyle magazines like Ebony and Jet. These periodicals were influential in promoting the social movements of their times and can provide an important parallel history directly from the Black voices that were all too often excluded from and ignored by the mainstream American press.