Today, March 16, is recognized in the United States as Black Press Day. It marks the anniversary of the first issue of New York’s Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper in the nation to be owned and operated by African Americans. That first issue appeared on March 16, 1827.

Wanting to know more about the history of Black Press Day itself, I learned this afternoon of President Jimmy Carter’s proclamation establishing Black Press Day in 1977, which marked the 150th anniversary of Freedom’s Journal. But I was initially puzzled that Carter’s proclamation was made not in March, but in June.

That could be because the National Newspaper Publishers Association (formerly the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association) held its thirty-seventh annual conference that June in St. Louis. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on June 17, 1977, two representatives of the Carter Administration, Martha (Bunny) Mitchell and General Daniel “Chappie” James, spoke at a conference luncheon about the president’s proclamation.

Founded in 1940, the NNPA had been holding its annual conferences regularly in June for years by then. On June 10, 1943, for example, Elmer Davis (the director of the Office of War Information during World War 2) recorded a radio spot praising the organization’s meeting and pointing to “the Negro press” as “One of the things we are fighting this war for.” According to Davis,

There are many countries in the world right now in which the mere existence of newspapers representing a racial minority, or any other minority, would not be tolerated. In those countries, a meeting like the one now going on in Louisville, could only be held in secret and anyone taking part would risk his life. In those countries, the minority press, the religious, racial and labor papers, which dared to speak for justice for all segments of the population; those papers were the first to be snuffed out because dictatorship cannot permit minorities to have a voice. But democracy cannot exist without full and free expression of all varieties of opinion.

Yet before Black Press Day in 1977, before the establishment of the NNPA in 1940, and even before the start of World War 2, there was National Negro Newspaper Week. Apparently first celebrated in 1939, it was then reprised from March 10-16, 1940, as “Bigger and Better Negro Newspaper Week.” And it was the brainchild of a recent Morehouse College graduate named Moss Hyles Kendrix.

Working under the auspices of Delta Phi Delta, a journalistic honor society formed around the same time at Morehouse, Kendrix and his fellow promoters of National Negro Newspaper Week continued to publicize the anniversary for several years. In 1942, Kendrix wrote to W. E. B. DuBois requesting that he write an article about plans for the fourth anniversary. And DuBois apparently did.

That same year, Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier began to publicize the “Double V” campaign connecting victory over the Axis abroad with victory over Jim Crow and racism at home. The NNPA took up the observance of the Negro Newspaper Week in 1942 as well. The NNPA also began using the week to announce the winners of the Russwurm Awards in honor of John B. Russwurm, publisher of Freedom’s Journal. President Roosevelt gave a press conference to NNPA reporters in 1944. And both he and President Truman wrote public letters to the NNPA marking Negro Newspaper Week.

The federal government’s wartime relationship with the Black Press was far more conflicted than such public statements let on. Outwardly, OWI propagandists like Davis praised the press and commissioned celebratory drawings by Black artists like Charles Alston. But Black publishers also had to contend with government officials and white newspapers who criticized their forthright coverage of racism in the United States.

Today’s Black Press Day thus owes much to the courageous wartime efforts of African American newspaper publishers to mobilize in defense of democracy and against anti-Black racism. And it all began, apparently, at Morehouse and with Kendrix. Below is a picture of him in the Atlanta World on February 6, 1940, with an article announcing the second annual Negro Newspaper Week that would conclude on March 16.