The New York City Tenement Museum used historic Black newspapers to create its latest exhibit

Still, there’s no coherent record of The Weekly Anglo-African. My engagement with this source required a piecemeal method because most repositories holding The Weekly Anglo-African on either microfilm or digitally scanned have different issues of the paper. I primarily view the paper on microfilm, available at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and Northwestern University. I used Ancestry.com and Readex, a newspaper database, to view the digitized copies of the paper.

Other 19th-century Black newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass’ Paper, The Colored American, and Freedom’s Journal, were also involved in developing the archive for this exhibit. These papers are through the Accessible Archives database, which I have access to as a Northwestern graduate student.

Those same patrons also intensely debated various issues, ranging from the benefits of leaving the U.S. and migrating to Haiti or Liberia to the limitations of city living versus moving to the countryside. These stories and debates illuminate both the complexity and diversity of thought among Black New Yorkers in precarious moments fraught by the strengthening of laws that undermined the freedom and rights of free people of color.

Although the Black press offers valuable information, there are silences, too. There is a masculine undertone present in much of the 19th-century Black press. Women are seldom discussed as social and political equals of men. Women of extraordinary achievement and those connected to some existing structure within the Black community, like churches and schools, appear in the Black press. That framing has made locating ordinary working-class Black women, like Rachel [in the exhibit], a challenge.

However, in a serialized set of articles about working-class Black New Yorkers, one centers on a washerwoman residing in a tenement apartment in New York City. Dr. James McCune Smith, New York City’s first Black physician, authored the articles. Smith’s article on the washerwoman was an indispensable source for the Museum and our interpretation of the parlor space in Joseph and Rachel’s apartment.

Also, these papers focused almost exclusively on the positive elements of Black life. To this extent, Black newspaper editors were highly intentional about the stories they would share and those they would not openly discuss. In The Weekly Anglo-African, there was ample coverage of respectable forms of leisure, such as church concerts, meetings among Black political leaders, and lyceums at Black public schools. The Black press did not report on saloons and dance halls, which were essential sites for working-class Black New York life.

The strategy of respectability that Black newspaper editors engaged in was informed by the mainstream press’s hyperfocus and sensationalist reporting of news involving Black people. The mainstream press’s emphasis on crime, squalor, and morbidity among Black people prompted Black journalists to respond and chart a vibrant moral geography of Black New York.

Newspaper articles also do a good job of capturing complexity. For “Union of Hope,” we used two newspaper articles focusing on Black New Yorkers’ responses to the passage of the 15th Amendment in the mainstream press. An article published by the Commercial Advertiser in May 1870 mentions the celebration held among Black residents of the Eighth Ward after the passage of the 15th Amendment. The excitement of newly enfranchised Black men and their community exudes from the page of the Commercial Advertiser.

We juxtapose that article with a portion of a sermon by Rev. William F. Butler, a Black pastor at St. Marks M.E. Church, reprinted in The New York Times. Butler cautioned Black Americans to consider universal suffrage for Black men as just one step in a much broader project of attaining civil liberties and equality for Black people in the United States. Pairing these two sources complicates Reconstruction in critical ways for our visitors.

News sites that do not properly archive their work might one day be lost to us, which is concerning. The closure of media spaces reminds us that archiving materials still matters even in our digital age, primarily if the stories you explore provide a counter-narrative to the dominant society.

Hamilton’s words emphasize the urgency of Black people to be at the forefront of telling their own stories against the widespread use of degenerating depictions of Black people in the mainstream white press. Without papers like The Weekly Anglo-African, the Tenement Museum would have even fewer sources that illustrate lower Manhattan’s Eighth Ward — the community that Joseph and Rachel Moore called home — and its residents beyond the focus on crime and vice that mainstream papers like The New York Times and New York Daily Herald often deferred to in writing about this community.

Over 160 years later, Robert Hamilton’s words continue to ring true. Within our current political moment, the aversion to promoting stories and histories that illuminate slavery’s legacy is strong. With the impulse to defund DEI initiatives, ban books, and attempt to delegitimize critical race theory, few institutions, journalists, and news companies will maintain their commitment to sharing this true but challenging history.