By Adrian A. Council

Happy New Year! We truly wish the blessings of health, peace, goodwill and prosperity for all. Our special thanks to Herb Boyd of tbwt.com (The Black World Today) and Playthell Benjamin for facilitating our feature "In This House On This Morning." These gentlemen are a part of the Black Press tradition, an American institution now in its 180th year.

Since the first newspaper, the Freedom Journal, began publishing from Five Varick Street in New York City, black newspapers and journalists have been crucial in the shaping of the African American group personality. The Black Press has traditionally served as the voice, ears and collective vision of the people. The Black Press is a living institution connecting family, church and communities with each other and the world.

Famous names in Negro history such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Elijah Muhammad, to name a few, were publishers and editors. In the early 1900s the three most important chroniclers of the black experience in the 20th Century were born—the Chicago Defender (1905), Pittsburgh Courier (1907), and New York Amsterdam News (1909), along with the NAACP's Crisis magazine, edited by Du Bois (1910).

These publications were distributed across the U.S. through an intricate network of Pullman porters who worked on the, railroad from small towns to majors cities—North, East, South and West. The news of two world wars, the Great Depression, the struggle for equality, entertainers, athletes, society, political and church leadership, and other aspects of black life—good and bad— traveled with them in these publications.

It was the Black Press that inspired the mass migration from the Jim Crow South into the industrialized northern cities of opportunity. If one wanted to know the real deal about the Civil Rights Movement, it was to be found in the Negro Press. Progress in black life and culture in the 50s and 60s was measured in the pages of John H. Johnson’s Ebony and Jet magazines. Duke Ellington, Joe Louis, Sammy Davis Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Home, James Brown, Jackie Robinson, Malcolm X and many, many others paid particular attention to what was being said about them in the black newspapers.

Today in a media dominated society, the communications company with the most money gets to speak for and launch trends and fashions for a community, and indeed a generation. The survival of black-owned media outlets is threatened like never before. We encourage you to buy black-owned newspapers, magazines and periodicals and support the businesses and corporations that advertise in them. Buy an Amsterdam News, Daily Challenge, New York Beacon, Carib News or Christian Times. See your community through your eyes.

We owe a debt of gratitude to our great traditional media institution—the Black Press.