How Black Journalists in Detroit and Canada Have Passed their Pens Along the River

On any given day, it wouldn't be surprising to see Orlando Bailey knocking on people's doors as he navigates Detroit's neighborhoods.

As the former director of engagement for BridgeDetroit - a digital, nonprofit news site - he was conversing with Detroiters about what they want to see covered in the media. It's an approach that was born partly out of exasperation: BridgeDetroit's founders desired media coverage that reflected the city's demographics and residents' priorities. So, they built a predominantly Black and Latine newsroom and started asking residents what kinds of coverage were important to them.

"We're not telling Detroiters what's news. We're going to Detroiters to ascertain what the news should be to ascertain what the questions should be and search out real solutions and bring it back to the residents," Bailey said.

It's an approach that could not have come at a more pertinent time. BridgeDetroit was founded on May 18 2020. Seven days later, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. People took to the streets across the country to protest the murder. Although this was not the first time, although the kindling of injustice had been laid over and over, although countless Black people - including Breonna Taylor and Trayvon Martin - were killed by racist forces in America, a spark caught this time. America was set ablaze.

Between 15 million to 26 million people participated in the protests nationally. In Detroit, there were 11 straight days of marching. The movement crossed the border into Canada as well, then expanded across the globe. Yet much of the national media coverage of these events fed into racial stereotyping condemning and conflating protestors, looters, and the most damning term: rioters. These journalists saw the country on fire and - not understanding the torches they carried - fanned the flames.

"Our team knew intrinsically that the city needed a hyper-local public record of all the things happening in Detroit by reporters who have skin in the game as residents," Bailey wrote in BridgeDetroit's 2020 Community Priorities Model progress report.

This locally focused, minority-led model of journalism has an extensive history on both sides of the Detroit River: starting with Canada's first Black-owned abolitionist publications, The Voice of the Fugitive and The Provincial Freeman, which emerged in the 1850s. Detroit would see its first Black-owned publication The Plaindealer emerge soon after.

To best understand how Black-led newsrooms in the Detroit River region can lead us to a brighter future, we must examine the legacies they inherit - of journalists passing their pen along and across our shared waterway to this day.

The Black Abolitionist Press in Detroit and Canada

When Henry Bibb made his countless escape attempts from slavery from 1835 to 1842, he found himself thwarted again and again by the Ohio River. The waterway - one mile long at its widest, average depth of 24 feet - was the final border blocking him from reaching freedom in Canada. He thought it would be nearly impossible to cross, he wrote in his "Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave." For him, the waterway represented bondage.

But rivers could be catalysts for freedom, too.

In 1850, Bibb found himself at another waterway -the Detroit River - this time as a free man in Michigan. When he decided to cross it into Sandwich, Canada, he escaped the newly passed Fugitive Slave Act, which incentivized federal commissioners and private citizens to capture and return those who had escaped slavery to Southern slaveholders.

Bibb encouraged other Black people to cross the river as well, guarding their freedom. In 1851, with the help of his

second wife Mary, he founded The Voice of the Fugitive, Canada's first Black-owned, abolitionist newspaper. Soon after, another woman, Mary Ann Shad Cary, became the first Black woman to independently publish a newspaper in Canada and North America. Her publication, The Provincial Freeman, got its start in 1854.

"It was partly over differences in philosophy. [Cary] was all about self-reliance and independence. [The Bibbs] were more about raising funds to provide services for enslaved people; they were both right in a way," said Irene Moore-Davis, president of the Essex County Black Historical Research Society.

Moore-Davis's relationship to Shad Cary runs deeper than recognition of her accomplishments: "Mary Ann Shad Cary was my great-great-great aunt and she is also the great-great-great aunt of many other Shad descendants in southwestern Ontario, southeastern Michigan, and beyond," she explained.

Both The Voice of the Fugitive and The Provincial Freeman sold to subscribers in Canada and Detroit. Distributing papers across bodies of water was a common strategy for abolitionist publications. They wanted to build support for their cause internationally. Fredrick Douglass' The North Star distributed in the United States, Europe and the West Indies.

"It's about building and extending a community, reporting the issues and conditions that are making it hard for people, but also reporting inspiring and aspirational stories - actually helping to forge networks and build collaborations so that people can thrive together as a larger community of people of African descent," Moore-Davis said.

In the case of Canada's first two Black-owned, abolitionist newspapers, the reasons were practical as well as idealistic. They needed financial support; there weren't enough Black Canadians to build a robust subscriber base, Moore-Davis explained.

Cross-river distribution allowed the publications to both support abolitionists and build community. The Bibbs updated family members separated by the Fugitive Slave Act of their now-Canadian relatives' well-being, and offered guidance to Underground Railroad agents on the best escape routes to Canada, according to historian Dr. Afua Cooper. She wrote about the Bibbs in her 2016 article, "The Voice of the Fugitive: A Transnational Abolitionist Organ," published in the book A Fluid Frontier: Slavery Resistance and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland.

They also countered negative stereotypes in white-owned newspapers, which "reported the news on Blacks in a pejorative manner, constructing a negative image of Blacks," Cooper wrote, and stood in opposition to "African-American migration to the province."

"We need a press that may be independent of those who have always oppressed us," reads the resolution passed at the Sandwich Colored Convention of November 1850 that led to the establishment of The Voice of the Fugitive, and is printed, in part, in Cooper's chapter. "We need a press that we may hang our banners on the outer wall, that all who pass by may read why we struggle and what we struggle for."

After a fire damaged the Bibbs' printing office in 1853, The Voice of the Fugitive had to shut down. The Provincial Freeman did the same in 1857. Twenty-six years later - 18 years after the Civil War ended - brothers Benjamin and Robert Pelham Jr. as well as Walter H. Stowers and W.H. Anderson took up the pen by founding The Plaindealer in 1883. Like The Voice of the Fugitive and The Provincial Freeman before it, The Plaindealer voyaged along the river, through Southeast Michigan, and likely to Windsor as reported by Detroit-based journalist David Sands in the HuffPost.

Just like the publications that came before, cross-river distribution was both activist and economical. The African American population in Detroit was small; the 1880 census reported only 2,821 people. The Plaindealer's founders all worked other full-time jobs during its publication, according to Sands.

The Plaindealer was also born to combat narratives about Black people in white publications. While Library of Congress archives don't contain its issues from before 1889, the 1891 book The Afro-American Press and Its Editors by Irvine Garland Penn includes this excerpt from The Plaindealer's May 1888 anniversary issue: "Afro-American newspapers have for their raison d'etre other motives higher than money-making or notoriety ... The Plaindealer is an impartial advocate of everything for the welfare of Afro-Americans."

Fighting for Equality, Building Community

In addition to advocating for equality on both sides of the Detroit River and beyond, The Voice of the Fugitive, The Provincial Freeman and The Plaindealer all strived to connect Black communities that lived along the river. The Voice of the Fugitive promoted a celebration of British Emancipation on Aug. 1, 1851 -held in Sandwich, Canada - that included ferries to shuttle people over from Detroit. The Plaindealer also actively shed light on Canadian news, including school reports from Windsor and one on seal fishing in the September, 20, 1889 issue.

The Plaindealer was shuttered in 1894 from a lack of funding. After that, Library of Congress records show that a number of Black-owned papers in Detroit passed their pens among themselves, sometimes in rather rapid succession: the American Catholic Tribune moved from Cincinnati to Detroit in 1894 and quickly folded; The Detroit Advocate and Black Alleged News rose in the early 1900s, but vanished with little historical trace; The Detroit Herald appeared in 1916 and closed down quickly after; The Detroit Contender was established then dissolved in the 1920s.

In this vacuum, negative narratives about Black communities could spread along the Detroit River without extinguishment, especially in historically segregated communities Downriver. Jakki Malnar is Bacon Memorial District Library's local history librarian. She explained how Wyandotte's sole newspaper - which has been published since the 1800s - covered issues of racial unrest in the town.

"There's a very guarded language that is used. For instance, there was a race riot here in 1917. If you look at the way local media described it, it makes it seem as if the white men were justified in running African-Americans out of Wyandotte," Malnar said. "There's a large stratification between downriver and other Wayne County communities." She drew the boundaries of this segregation at the Ecorse river, one of the tributaries of the Detroit River.

"The further downriver, the more homogenous it becomes," Malnar said. "Detroit and River Rouge have predominantly Black communities. There has been Black journalism there."

In 1936, The Michigan Chronicle took up the pen in Detroit and has persisted to this day. It was joined by The Ecorse Telegram in 1944, which started in Ecorse. Other Black-owned newspapers have commenced and ceased publication since then, but these are the two longest, continuously published, Black-owned papers.

Gina Wilson Steward is the current owner of the Telegram News. She traced its history: "The first publisher [Mr. Wall] published it for over 50 years in the city of Ecorse," she said."The second publisher - Mr. Wade - bought the paper after Mr. Wall ... He made a promise to Mr. Wall to not let his little paper die. He had it for 8 years."

Wilson Steward would join in 2004. "I came to work with him, helping him out because he was a one-man show - and then he wanted to sell," she said. "By then I had learned the business, so in 2006 I bought the paper from him."

The Black Press Today

Today, Black-owned and Black-led media outlets along the Detroit River carry the pens passed by the foundational publications The Voice of the Fugitive, The Provincial Freeman and The Plaindealer. Many continue their legacies by ensuring equitable stories are told about communities along the river. In 2023, 57% of Black Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that the news only covers certain stories about Black people. Another 43% said the coverage stereotypes Black Americans.

The Detroit metro era has seven Black-owned media outlets per a map created by the Black Media Initiative at CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, encompassing three of the four media types the map measures: newspapers, digital outlets and magazines.

Compared to other parts of the country and state, that's robust. The rest of Michigan is served by only six outlets - scattered across Jackson, Lansing, Flint, Grand Rapids and Lake City. Neighboring Wisconsin has seven outlets total. The Windsor Star is the only remaining newspaper that serves Windsor, Canada. It is owned by the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management.

Black-owned papers have flowed down the Detroit River in the absence of local journalism. When Wilson Steward bought The Telegram News she started expanding its reach Downriver as local papers shuttered.

"Ecorse had a paper. It was The Ecorse Advertiser. River Rouge had a paper: It was The River Rule. But those papers have been out of business, so the only paper left in this area is The Telegram. It used to be the Ecorse Telegram, but I dropped Ecorse when I bought it, because I knew we were going to get bigger," Wilson Steward said.

The Telegram News would expand into Canada to accommodate a single subscriber. "One of our residents moved to Canada wanted to have The Telegram," she said. "It didn't pan out. We tried for maybe a year or so."

BridgeDetroit does not actively cover news in Canada - they want to remain hyperlocal, Bailey said. But they have embraced a digital-first model that allows their coverage to reach readers across and along the river. They focus on promoting the work of individual reporters, featuring images of them on their website and curating newsletters based on different writers. That way, journalists "can't hide behind the byline," Bailey said. They have to be a visible part of the community. They carry on the pens of the region's first Black journalists by writing about Detroit and Canada's history.

"I say to our members and our residents who continue to come to our stuff, 'You're going to get tired of me,'" Bailey said. "We've got to keep walking the streets. We literally are in the streets and that's work that a lot of people don't want to do. It's the work I love to do. We're not afraid of our people. We love our people."

Though there isn't a Black-led newsroom immediately across the river in Sandwich or Windsor, Toronto, Ontario, journalist Matthew DiMera launched a new publication in 2021 - The Resolve - with the goal of countering Canada's predominantly white media. Eighty-percent of Canadian newsrooms had no Black or Indigenous journalists on staff at this time, per the Canadian Association of Journalists' inaugural diversity survey.

Dimera references the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests as part of their inspiration for starting the outlet. The publication takes its name and mission from a letter Provincial Freeman founder Shadd Cary wrote to Frederick Douglass. Out of a desire for more material impact, she said: "We have made but a little progress considering our resolves."

The need for Black journalists and Black-owned publications persists as long as the world's Black populations reckon with injustice. Beyond that, however, Black journalists deserve spaces where they can tell all kinds of stories and give voice to their communities. Black-owned media organizations on both sides of the Detroit River continue to advocate for issues of freedom and equality in the region, resulting in more equitable stories about river communities.

"We see them," Steward said when asked what The Telegram did to build its bastion of community support. "We see them and they know that we love them."

Saarthak Johri and Courtney DuChene are students at the University of Michigan