‘An urgent moment’: Why The Boston Globe and BU resurrected the abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator

The first abolitionist newspaper in the United States is getting a new life. More than 200 years ago, The Emancipator was founded here in Boston. Today, the newspaper is being resurrected and reimagined in collaboration with the Boston Globe and Boston University's Center for Anti-Racist Research. Editors Deborah Douglas and Amber Payne joined GBH Morning Edition hosts Paris Alston and Jeremy Siegel to talk about their vision. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Jeremy Siegel: So, Deborah, tell us a bit about what The Emancipator was in its original form and what it meant when it was founded back in the 1800s.

Deborah Douglas: I love talking about this. The original Emancipator was founded in 1820 in Jonesboro, Tennessee by an abolitionist by the name of Elihu Embree. It was a short-lived publication, but the point of the original Emancipator was to advocate for the end of Black enslavement. Immediately, he was radical in his call and his focus for the newspaper to only focus on emancipation. There's another publication called The Philanthropist that was published earlier. Sometimes we get pushback from people who say, "oh, well, you know, they advocated for abolition, too." Well, they advocated for lots of different things. And some abolitionists embraced a gradualist approach. But Elihu Embree was buck wild in his call for the end of Black enslavement.

Paris Alston: So, Amber, you all launched a recreated, reimagined Emancipator this week. What can people expect from it?

Amber Payne: We hope that people will take a look. This week we launched with a series about solving the racial wealth gap. One thing we know, though, is that this anti-Blackness, America's tendency toward anti-Blackness, really impacts us all and that compels us to dissect and decode the underpinnings of white supremacy. So whether someone is Asian, Latino, Native American, Black or white, when the nation's pressed to live up to its ideals by addressing people underserved and abused by social policy and laws — history shows everyone benefits. So what we're hoping to do is through evidence-based commentary, solutions, journalism. We have a lot of different formats. We have a comic that we did on someone's student debt journey. We really want to meet people where they are and start new conversations and talk about progress on racial justice. Why talk about just the problems when you can't talk about the big ideas and the solutions?

Siegel: And Amber, why was it important for you all to do this now and what went into that decision of launching The Emancipator this week? What fueled the decision to recreate this and do it at this moment?

Payne: Well, it's such an urgent moment. And this conversation really began in the summer of 2020. What were we all doing right at that moment? We were being overwhelmed with the pandemic and really having it in our faces, the racial inequities and disparities. Those stories were finally getting told. Those are stories that many of us have been trying to tell and have known or have lived for years. And then the killing of George Floyd, that also made some more aware, I don't want to say opened people's eyes, but some began talking about it and having real conversations. I was having conversations and hearing from friends who wanted to talk about bias in policing and racial inequality and what do we do about it.

So this has been really two years in the making. And it's the end of April. It's the end of Financial Literacy Month, which is part of why we wanted to really get into this Black wealth gap story, because it's really a great example of a topic that has a true through line. You know, think about wealth inequality and it kind of gets a little bit written and maybe a little bit generic, like, "well, because of slavery, you know, there's inequality." Well, if you take a look and you trace through history, it's not just slavery that set Black America back. Of course it did. But if you look at through the years, postbellum landowning restrictions, redlining, gerrymandering, there's a through line and a consistent pattern of historical exclusion of people from landowning and wealth attainment. So that's what we really wanted to show with this series. We thought it was a great way to start and to launch The Emancipator, but there's so much more to come.

Alston: So, Deborah, we mentioned that this is a partnership between the Globe and the Center for Anti-Racist Research Research at B.U. And this is also a journalism endeavor that's focusing on anti-racism and not just reporting about racism. And I'm thinking about, you know, things like abolition being radical for the time that The Emancipator was launched. I'm thinking about the backlash to Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project and The New York Times and the heated debate that we've been seeing on the national stage over anti-racist teaching, like critical race theory, things of that nature. Have you all received any pushback to this effort so far? And if so, how are you confronting that or are you preparing yourselves for that?

Douglas: I can say we're preparing ourselves for it because we've all covered these issues before. So we know what the full universe of audience members looks like. We haven't received any pushback so far. I would say that people have been waiting in anticipation for a one-stop shop that engages with these issues every day on purpose.

Siegel: And before we let you go, Amber and Deborah, I'm curious. Who do you see as your audience with this publication? What do you hope they gain from it?

Payne: We like to say that we believe our audience is, you know, anyone who was convicted and wanted to be part of social change, for starters.

Douglas: Very specifically, we're looking at a primary audience of people ages 20 to 45 who are socially conscious and who are looking for a community to engage in dialog and ideas in action. But that secondary audience is that audience that Amber talked about, and those are people who were moved by the events of 2020, everything from George Floyd to the revelations to some of the disparate impacts, learning that Black and brown people and other underrepresented people do have a different kind of lived experience in the United States. And some data that we have suggests that those people want to know more, do more and be better about how they engage in the American project.