This fascinating book fits into the current historiography of slavery in giving agency to the African American community, treating it not as a monolithic entity merely reacting to white culture, but rather as a complex and diverse proactive society. Bacon explores the Freedom Journal, a short-lived but influential African American newspaper that was forerunner to the abolitionist press of the 1830s.
In the early nineteenth century, despite slavery being abolished throughout the North, blacks were still suffering prejudice because racial attitudes were hardening as the sectional crisis deepened. But, as Bacon skilfully shows, resistance was growing in the African American community, and Freedom's Journal was part of that resistance. However, simultaneously, other marginalized groups such as working-class whites were beginning to realize the power of print culture and establishing their own newspapers.
Bacon shows herself to be up to date with the latest developments in the scholarship of the history of print, too. She asserts that despite the journal's authorship being middle-class free blacks based in the northern states, readers came from all classes and regions of the US. She also argues that illiterate or partly literate readers had access to the contents of the journal because it was read aloud in household and community groups.
The editors' aims were to provide information to enable African Americans to mobilize and develop a sense of community and identity. Slavery and other forms of aggression towards black people were of course a central focus and the journal carried the first known newspaper report of a lynching in Alabama in August 1827. But it also reported achievements of African Americans and it highlighted and challenged errors appearing in white newspapers, while providing a forum for black writers who found it difficult to have their work disseminated in mainstream publications.
Towards the end of its run the then editor of the journal became convinced that emigration to Liberia was the only option for African Americans who wanted to improve their lot. This alienated many of the journal's contributors and readers, who felt that this approach gave the impression that the situation within America was hopeless. It was the decision of Russwurm to move to Liberia in 1829 that effectively ended the journal's run, although if I have one criticism of Bacon's account it is that she does not clearly explain why such an influential publication was allowed to wither and die and why no similar effort appeared for another decade. Overall, though, this is a tremendously readable and useful book for scholars of both the development of African American identity and abolitionism in the early nineteenth century and also of the history of American print culture.
