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Between 1877 and 1900, about 150 black newspapers came into being to protest mob violence, lynchings, the total abrogation of the 14th and 15th amendments and only half observance of the 13th.

Still Going
The leading black papers of this dark period were: The Washington Bee, established in 1879 by Attorney William Calvin Chase; the Cleveland Gazette, launched in 1883 by Harry C. Smith; the Philadelphia Tribune, founded by Chris J. Perry, a successful realtor, in 1884. This 88-year-old paper, now under the leadership of the able Eustace Gay, is one of five that still survive from the 19th century.
Other outstanding papers of the era were: Timothy Thomas Fortune's New York Age, John Mitchell's Richmond Planet, Sol Johnson's Savannah Tribune, Phillip Bell and W. J. Powell's San Francisco Elevator, Nick Chiles' Topeka Plaindealer, John Murphy's Afro-American which, along with the Indianapolis Recorder, the New Iowa Bystander, and the Houston Informer and Texas Freeman, are the other four that are still going.
Harvard-educated William Monroe Trotter practically opened the 20th century with his Boston Guardian. Much like Rev. T. J. Smith's Pittsburgh Broad-Axe, it let the chips fall where they may.
The Guardian was soon followed by Robert Sengstacke Abbott's Chicago Defender in 1905, P. B. Young's Norfolk Journal and Guide, James Anderson's Amsterdam News, Robert L. Vann's Pittsburgh Courier, Roscoe Dungee's Oklahoma Black Dispatch, and Joseph and William Mitchell's St. Louis Argus.
With the departure of George White of North Carolina from the Congress in 1901, the long night of disenfranchisement, nurtured by the Ku Klux Klan and grandfather clauses in state constitutions, set in for 27 years.

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