The African American press served as a mobilizing force during and after the Civil War
By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire
Thursday February 19, 2026
African American History Month, Series No. 5
In late April of 1862, the capture of New Orleans by the Union army proved to be a turning point in the Civil War.
With the Union taking control of the ports of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi River would severely damage the capacity of the Confederate States of America (CSA) to carry out the consolidation of their secessionist project.
The city of New Orleans had a different origin and character than most other southern municipalities. France had taken control of the area as early as the 1680s while maintaining control until the 1700s when it largely ceded control of the territory to the Spanish Crown.
After arriving in Louisiana, which under France extended from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, they enslaved the Indigenous people. Later in the early decades of the 18th century, thousands of West Africans were kidnapped and imported into the territory of New France.
Prior to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 precipitated by the Haitian Revolution, France had regained full control of the area. The then United States President Thomas Jefferson acquired Louisiana, enhancing the geographic area of the country substantially.
By 1861, when the Civil War erupted, the pro-slavery economic elites engineered the secession of Louisiana which joined the CSA. Nonetheless, New Orleans and other areas of the state were difficult to defend due to its topography and climate which left it prone to flooding along with infectious disease outbreaks.
After the recapture of New Orleans in May 1862, the state would have a military governor who set out to crush any sympathies among the population with the Confederate cause. New Orleans was the most populous southern city at the time. Its demographic makeup was much more diverse.
There were free and enslaved Africans along with mixed race groupings and poor whites. The enthusiasm for secession obviously did not penetrate deep into the white population.
Union Military General and Governor of Louisiana, Benjamin Butler, has been credited with imposing the concept of enslaved Africans as “contraband” during the Civil War. Those runaway Africans on Union-captured plantations were utilized as workers as well as militia to sustain the gains of the U.S. forces.
In 1861 and 1862, the U.S. Congress passed Confiscation Acts which deemed that property taken by the Union forces from the Confederacy was not subject to return, including their enslaved African population. This law was designed to nullify the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 which mandated the return of runaway Africans from bondage.
Eventually, regulations were enacted which authorized pay for Africans working within the Union military structures. These events provided even more incentives for people to flee the plantations and join the Union forces. The Confiscation Acts would lead to the conscription of Africans into the Union military beginning in 1863.
Confederate generals and officials felt the impact of Union victories on the plantation agricultural system. Many Africans ran away to the Union military camps in 1861-62 therefore depriving the plantations of workers while its former slaves could serve as sources of intelligence related to the Southern planters and their politicians in the Confederate government.
The New Orleans Union and Tribune (1862-1868)
After the capture of New Orleans by the Union forces, African Americans made their voices heard through the founding of two newspapers. The motivating personality for the founding of these publications, The Union and later The Tribune, was Dr. Louis Charles Roudanez. Dr. Roudanez was joined by Paul Trevigne and Jean Baptiste Roudanez.
Dr. Roudanez’s parents came to Louisiana after the beginning of the Haitian Revolution in August 1791. He was able to attend medical school in France and later returned for further studies in the U.S.
These newspapers published in both English and French. Many African Americans had been in Louisiana for decades and centuries.
Reports on his life indicate that he was heavily influenced by the Haitian Revolution and the French Uprising of 1848. After the establishment of a military government in Louisiana in 1862, Roudanez and his comrades would become an organized grouping which demanded full emancipation for African Americans. (https://roudanez.com/)
The Union newspaper lasted for two years and would be transformed into the Tribune. In a report on the role of the Tribune, it notes that:
“The New Orleans Tribune debuted on July 21, 1864. Publishing over 1,000 issues in the six years of its existence, the newspaper concentrated on matters of central importance to all Blacks: suffrage; an equitable labor and land system to replace slavery; the situation of the freedmen; the creation of integrated public transportation and school systems; the Black military; Union policies of accommodation with planters; Louisiana’s constitutional conventions; local and national elections; Reconstruction politics and legislation; and much more. The Tribune was instrumental in the creation of the Freedmen’s Aid Association, the local branch of the National Equal Rights League, the Friends of Universal Suffrage, and ultimately, the Louisiana Republican Party.” (https://roudanez.com/the-new-orleans-tribune/)
This paper is recognized as the first Black-owned newspaper in the South. When the publication began it was a tri-weekly. After acquiring printing presses from New York City, The Tribune would become a daily, the first Black daily in the U.S.
This same source went on to explain how The Tribune served as a forum for political education and electoral campaigns. It engaged in efforts to refute the notions of Black inferiority and the promotion of self-organization and emancipation.
According to the same above-quoted website:
“The newspaper actively participated in all the major political debates and played a key role in the creation of the 1868 Louisiana state constitution, the most radical in Reconstruction history. Always an advocate of racially proportional representation, the journal helped many Blacks win seats in the 1868 legislature, and campaigning arduously, almost succeeded in electing Francis Dumas as the state’s first Afro-Creole governor. Ultimately overpowered by conservative Republicans, the Tribune by and large suspended operation in the spring of 1868.”
Just two years earlier, there was a massacre of African Americans and progressive forces in 1866 in New Orleans. After the conclusion of the Civil War, a pro-confederate mayor was put in office leading to protracted and violent conflicts over the future of the city and state.
The New Orleans massacre took place just months after a similar situation in Memphis which began on May 1, 1866. In response to armed African American militia units formed during the Civil War, white police, many of whom were in agreement with the defeated Confederacy, engaged in mass assaults, rapes and killings of African Americans in Memphis.
Later in 1874, pro-Confederate militia known as the White League would invade the Capitol in New Orleans in an attempted coup against a multiracial state government. After three days, then President Ulysses S. Grant would deploy federal troops to reverse the putsch.
These incidents in 1866 and 1874 were indicative of the racist resistance to Federal Reconstruction. By 1877, Federal support for Reconstruction would be withdrawn after the contentious 1876 elections. Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the White League would terrorize African Americans and their allies in order to reassert racial supremacy over the formerly enslaved relegating them to exploitative socioeconomic relations such as sharecropping, tenant farming, peonage and forced prison labor.
The Role of African American Journalists and News Publications During Reconstruction and Jim Crow
Although the dawn of African writing, publishing and journalism began during the colonial and antebellum periods, later during Reconstruction and the imposition of Jim Crow, there was a flowering of literary and news platforms which paralleled the work of the New Orleans Union and Tribune. These newspapers, journals and pamphlets served as mechanisms to disprove the false propaganda, omissions and erasure of African American life, culture and political aspirations.
Therefore, many of these newspapers faced violent opposition. During the 1890s, Ms. Ida B. Wells was exiled from Memphis because her newspaper, the Free Speech and Headlight, waged a protracted national and international campaign against lynching and legalized discrimination.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries there were hundreds of African American newspapers and magazines created. Many were unable to sustain themselves over long periods of time. However, others such as the Atlanta Daily World, Nashville Globe, Chicago Daily Defender, Memphis World, Baltimore Afro-American, Pittsburgh Courier, New York Age, Amsterdam News, etc., would continue for decades. (https://niemanreports.org/timeline-of-the-black-press/)
The African American press covered lynching, the imposition of Jim Crow laws and the campaigns to resist these reactionary policies. During the Great Migration of the early to mid-20th century, newspapers such as the Chicago Daily Defender spread news throughout the South of economic and housing opportunities available in Northern and Western cities.
These journalistic, literary and political contributions of earlier times must be studied by people in the 21st century. Today African Americans are compelled to engage in similar efforts to overthrow the attempts to reimpose legalized segregation and modern-day Jim Crow legislation and presidential executive orders.
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