Benjamin Fagan. The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation.

Abstract

Benjamin Fagan bases The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation on the primary narrative thread of black chosenness. He defines and defends this premise as a connecting theme present in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American newspapers. Working from this standpoint, Fagan pinpoints black newspaper publishers, several of whom were ministers, as the proponents of his black chosenness argument. The author also advances a secondary theme, arguing that a black nation existed within the American nation through the auspices of black newspaper articles and editorials. According to Fagan, the black chosen nation was alternately the New Israel, Babylon, or the wilderness, depending on the timing of the Civil War years (before, during, and after) and the readership of the individual black newspapers. Fagan’s unique text, which includes comparative American literature excerpts and biblical illustrations, primarily focuses on five African American periodicals, four printed in New York and one published in Canada. The author begins his study of black newspapers and black newspapermen by looking at Freedom’s Journal, America’s original African American paper, and its co-founders, the Reverend Samuel Cornish and the abolitionist John Brown Russworm. Fagan argues that the goal of their newspaper was to bring the Lord’s word to black readers by educating them in the social proprieties of white elite society. The author interprets Cornish’s didactic editorials as tutorials on “how to act chosen” (22). Expounding on this idea, Fagan uses biblical passages to suggest that Frederick Douglass’s North Star newspaper had the same intent: promotion of the black chosen nation. The author cites Douglass’s reporting of the French Revolution of 1848 as an example of the renowned abolitionist disagreeing with American exceptionalism but still supporting black chosenness. Fagan deduces that the North Star offered proof of the chosen black prophecy of deliverance, similar to the Israelites fighting against their Egyptian oppressors. The author insists that the North Star showed an interest in successful European revolutionary strategies in France and the British West Indies because it wanted to imitate these uprisings in slave-owning oppressive America. Fagan makes transnational connections throughout the pages of the North Star, including the formatting of newspaper columns and the ancestry of Douglass’s Scottish printer. The author, clarifying his black nation theme with examples of scripture, determines that the North Star had “uncoupled the promise of black chosenness from American identity” (94). Fagan could have strengthened this engaging historical position by situating the North Star’s Rochester newspaper office inside its western New York burned-over district. Free Soil Party newspapers, such as the Seneca County Courier, a paper Douglass supported because of its antislavery, temperance, and pro–woman’s rights stance, could have offered further contemporary interpretations of black chosenness.