Jonathan Logan Family Foundation

T he Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University is home to the Black Press Archives, a collection of more than 2,000 newspaper titles from the United States, Africa and the African Diaspora. The collection has more than 2,847 microfilm reels of newspapers, totaling over 100,000 individual issues of newspapers and includes complete files of Black papers as well as the records of Black editors, publishers and journalists. The Jonathan Logan Family Foundation provided a grant to support the preservation and digitization of the Black Press Archives, which will make this rich collection available to researchers around the world and will particularly benefit students of other historically Black colleges and universities.

Founded in 1867, Howard University is one of the top research universities in the United States and produces more on-campus African American Ph.D. recipients than any other university in the nation. The digitization of the Black Press Archives is a key part of the vision for Howard’s new Center for Journalism and Democracy, which was founded by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author and the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications.

I have relied regularly on this archive for my own scholarship, and I intend to center an important part of my teaching around engaging students with the study of the role the Black press played in the fight for democracy in America, as well as showing student journalists how to do their own archival research. My intent is to not just have the stories in the archives told, but to create a new generation of storytellers dedicated to this work. – Nikole Hannah-Jones

To learn more, read the press release, check out this coverage by Howard University’s The Hilltop and see the video below.