Rifling through the pages of the Age, however, one is struck by how much more advanced it was even in 1938 in comparison to the quotidian production of most 21st century standard bearers. Blacks in the greater New York City area, the primary reach of the paper, knew that their trials and triumphs were part of a global narrative. From the serious to the salacious, news of the diaspora was everyday conversation – on the famous soapboxes favored by Harlem’s street corner scholars, as well as in meeting halls, in pulpits and in robust commentary in newspapers like the Age and the younger, ascendant Amsterdam News.
This was three years after a race riot forced New York officials to begin to address the plight of blacks and two years after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was re-elected in a landslide with a mandate from his new black supporters to include them in the prosperity he promised the nation. While some publishers boasted of their role in delivering black votes to Roosevelt in 1936, the Age, like The Philadelphia Tribune among others, was still pretty much in the Republican camp. In an Oct. 24, 1936, editorial, the Age excoriated other black newspapers “busy leaning over backward in their defense of the Roosevelt mis-administration and espousing the cause of the Democratic Party.” That editorial ended with the pronouncement that “[t]he only safe way for the Negro is to vote Republican.” The following week the paper offered a lengthy editorial under the heading, “The Case Against President Roosevelt.” A year later, its managing editor and future publisher, Ludlow Werner – a grandson of Fred R. Moore – managed a local campaign for district attorney by Thomas E. Dewey, the Republican who in 1948 so famously did not defeat Harry S. Truman.
Moore, a businessman, civic leader, politician and founding member of the National Urban League, led the Age until his death at age 85 in 1943. As The Pittsburgh Courier noted in an editorial upon his death, “his journalism was distinguished by careful avoidance of hysteria and demagogy, by thoughtful appraisal of the passing scene and by consistent and forceful support of everything making for wholesomeness in the community and in the nation.” His newspaper, the Courier observed, “was never one which a colored reader need be ashamed to open in public.” Befitting an éminence grise, his funeral was widely reported in black newspapers via the Associated Negro Press. 6
As elsewhere, black newspapers in New York trod stony paths. Finances at the Age, always shaky, were dire by the end of 1947, when the increasingly thin paper failed to appear on Harlem newsstands and its top editors began to jump ship. Enter a wealthy white Englishman who bought the paper from Moore’s family for $120,000 as a gift for his black wife.7 But the Age continued to lose money, even as the more liberal Amsterdam News established itself as the leading voice for and about blacks in the greater New York City area. In 1952, John Sengstacke, the Chicago-based media mogul, added the faltering Age to an empire that already included The Chicago Defender, The Louisville Defender, The Memphis Tri-State Defender and The Michigan Chronicle. (He later added The New Pittsburgh Courier.) That arrangement lasted until 1957, when S. B. Fuller, a Chicago cosmetics manufacturer, purchased it – and kept losing money, apparently some $300,000 in a couple of years. When the Age published its last edition on Feb. 27, 1960, it was considered the oldest of the black newspapers in the U.S.8
But back on April 23, 1938, the Age was still a force. Blacks were engaged in a Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaign begun five years earlier with the strong support of the Age. Opinion leaders still wrote vigorous editorials and letters to the editor. And the Age could still offer a stentorian defense of the black press in seemingly progressive times. On Page 6, under the headline, “Why The Negro Press?” the editorial writer took issue with a recent story in the “powerful” and “liberal” World-Telegram that “deliberately insulted its thousands of Negro readers.” A headline apparently intended to express disdain for a wealthy white man – the former head of the New York Stock Exchange – did so by emphasizing that he had been manacled to a “Negro convict” en route to serve his own prison term for embezzling millions of dollars.
“This callous indifference to the feelings of its Negro readers on the part of the paper which published such an insulting headline only goes to show that the dailies are by no means as friendly towards the Negroes as they sometimes appear,” the Age editorialized. “They continue to exaggerate criminal stories about Negroes although many of them have stopped emphasizing the race of a criminal in their headlines. Neither do they go to the front to point out and mould public opinion against the unequal justice meted out to Negro offenders, as compared to that given the more influential of the white race…. We might cite other instances of bias on the part of the daily press but this should suffice to show that the Negro still needs his own racial organs in his fight for a square deal in this country.”
PostScript: That Morgan College building under construction opened as the Soper Library in 1939. When a more modern facility was erected at what was then Morgan State College in 1974, the old structure was rechristened Banneker Hall and, as a communications center, later became home to public radio station WEAA as well as to academic departments. Now 75 years after it opened, the building is home to the School of Education and Urban Studies. In the fall of 2013, another building was dedicated as the Communication Center, home of both WEAA and the new School of Global Journalism and Communication at what is now Morgan State University.
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