Brandon Nightingale walks over to the stacks in the Founders Library basement and opens a cardboard box. Inside is the treasure they were so afraid to lose: the North Star. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass, for whom a hall on the Howard University campus is named, founded an anti-slavery newspaper in 1847. He named it after the star behind which enslaved people followed to freedom.
Last year, during a move, workers discovered two entire boxes of newspaper from the first year of publication.
“When they came and said, ‘Hey, we found it. What do you want to do with it? “We were stunned,” recalls Mr. Nightingale, a senior digitization project manager for the Black Press Archive, who works in the library's basement.
Why did we write this
Across the United States, scholars are working to preserve the history of the black press before its fragile pages are lost forever. Treasures were discovered in the basement of Howard University, including Frederick Douglass's newspaper, The North Star.
The papers have not yet been inventoried.
“We don’t even know everything we have,” marvels Mr. Nightingale.
The basement contains a treasure trove of artifacts, including old editions of black-owned newspapers that chronicle the lives of black Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Articles focus on slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and the civil rights era. The archival project, which is part of the university's Moorland-Spingarn Research Centre, brings to life the faces of yesterday, connecting them with the digital world of today. This way, it is hoped that they will never get lost again.
This is just one of many efforts across the country to preserve the history of the black press. Earlier this year, the Amsterdam News launched 115 years ago in New York City. announced that much of the Harlem building would be converted into a museum and public space. African American Newspapers, which publishes articles and photographs spanning more than 100 years, also has an extensive archival collection in Baltimore.
“America cannot fully account for itself without a historical black press,” says Nicole Carrauthor, investigative journalist and professor at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
“I argued that the black press democratized America,” says Professor Carr, who received the 2025 American Society of Journalists and Writers Award for her dissertation. She says the pages of the black press, especially before newsrooms were largely integrated into the civil rights era, told unvarnished stories of work, resilience and fortitude. These articles explored topics that can serve as beacons for journalism in a democracy.
“We know it's protected”
There may be another prize yet to be found in Howard: the library is rumored to have an original copy of Liberty's Journal, the nation's first black newspaper, published in 1827. The Library of Congress has asked to see a copy when the center finds it.
Mr. Nightingale and his staff say it is not lost on them that their work to give new life to black American history takes place just a few miles from the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Last summer, President Donald Trump complained that the museum was focusing too much on history's negatives and commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution conduct a review to ensure the exhibits meet the White House definition of patriotism.
“It's something special that it's here, we know it's protected. We know no one is going to come through these doors and take it away from Howard,” Mr. Nightingale says.
He and his staff of about 11 people, including students, have created a digital collection of thousands of pages of black press. Some of them were preserved digitally before the fragile pages of the original sheets on which they were printed disappeared forever from history.
The project began in 2021 with a $2 million grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation. This was done in conjunction with the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade organization of more than 200 black-owned newspapers. Google also donated $760,000. Mr Nightingale hopes the center will become part of Moorland-Spingarn's 2027 budget. So far, it has received $1.3 million from OpenAI, the Ford Foundation and the Marguerite Casey Foundation for its continuation.
The project digitizes American newspapers 95 years old and older that are in the public domain. The Center also has permission to post online some newspapers that are still under copyright. Moorland-Spingarn has international black documents from the Caribbean and Africa, but they will not be digitized. However, they are available for researchers to visit and read, as are American articles that are not yet in the public domain.
“When we think about our journalism and consider its evolution, too often the black press is not taken into account – or it is fed to those of us who are descendants of the diaspora or part of it, but not to everyone else,” says Professor Carr. People treat the black press as if it's something special, rather than scouring its pages for instructions, she adds.
She applauds the move by Howard and other grassroots organizations to preserve the legacy of the black press. This should be shared with the entire community, she said.
“You really want people to feel welcome.”
In Flint, Michigan, where black people live. 57% of the population“Black newspapers can provide important insight into a city's complex history,” says Callum Carr, an associate archivist at the University of Michigan-Flint, who is no relation to the Morehouse professor. They add that preserving these newspapers is also a matter of respecting the community and accurately representing history.
“When you serve a community like Flint, which is so diverse and so black, you really want people to feel welcome in this archive and to feel represented and represented appropriately,” Carr says.
Last year, Carr led the launch of a collection of newspapers, Black Community Newspapers, for precisely this purpose. It's a partnership between the University of Michigan, the Genesee Historical Collections Center and the Gloria Coles Flint Public Library that has been working for years to digitize the Black newspapers that covered Flint for much of its history.
Currently the project has archived three articles: Bronze Reporter, Flint-Brownsville News and Flint Spokesman – covering the period from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. They chronicle everything related to black life, from sketchy stories about local vacations to more serious topics including police brutality and Jim Crow.
Carr is currently working on archiving the second edition of The Representative, which was suspended in publication in the 1950s. During its second run, from 1971 to 1978, the document covered urban renewal programs—federal initiatives aimed at solving a range of perceived urban problems. These include unsanitary and unsafe housing, high crime rates and decaying infrastructure.
Such programs are often destroyed by Black neighborhoods in the name of eliminating blight. In Flint, programs targeted neighborhoods like Floral Park, which, as a result of redlining, became one of the few places in the city where black people could own property. Municipal neglect has led to the degradation of these neighborhoods. The construction of a transport interchange in the 1970s forced residents of Flower Park and nearby communities to leave their homes and destroyed sections of neighborhoods.
The goal of the archive, Carr said, is not only to remind residents of that history—and how it can impact today—but also of the vibrancy of Flint communities.
“There was a targeted erasure of the black community in the '70s, and reminding people of that community and showing what it could look like is a huge task,” Carr says. “I hope we can learn from these newspapers… Maybe watching this story and seeing it still happening will inspire some change.”
