SOURCE: "Trials of an Editor," in Frederick Douglass, The Associated Publishers, Inc., 1948, pp. 80-98.

Quarles is regarded as a leading Douglass scholar among American historians. In the following essay, he describes Douglass's journalistic exploits as the publisher of an antislavery weekly newspaper in the late 1840s and 1850s.

I think the course to be pursued by the colored Press is to say less about race and claims to race recognition, and more about the principles of justice, liberty, and patriotism.

DOUGLASS

Negro journalism was an outgrowth of the Negro's desire for fuller participation in American life. Significantly, the first of the Negro periodicals was entitled Freedom's Journal, published in New York in 1827. Douglass' venture into the field, therefore, was not a pioneer undertaking; his periodical was but one of the seventeen newspapers published by Negroes prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1847, when Douglass decided...