TGIF POU!
Many of the USA’s largest newspaper companies own dailies that were vital to the slave economy. Antebellum-era newspapers ran ads that promised reward money for the capture of escaped slaves, offered slaves for sale or sought slaves for purchase.
“Cash for Negroes” proclaimed an 1856 ad in The Sun, today The Baltimore Sun, owned by Tribune Co.
“Stop the Runaway” urged an 1849 ad in The Georgia Telegraph, today Knight Ridder’s The Macon Telegraph.
”It would just have been a natural thing that newspapers would advertise slaves the way they would advertise any other commodity,” said David Brion Davis, a Yale University history professor and author of ”The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture,” noting how deeply rooted slavery was, even in Northern states like Connecticut, which abolished slavery in 1848.
”That tradition in American journalism goes back very early,” said Tom Leonard, a professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley. ”I’ve seen it in Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette, even though he was an opponent of slavery.”
Similar ads were carried by The Memphis Daily Appeal, forerunner of E.W. Scripps’ The Commercial Appeal; in The Daily Dispatch, which became Media General’s Richmond Times-Dispatch; in The Daily Picayune, today The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, owned by Advance Publications. The ads were vital to the bottom line for these newspapers.
Gannett, publisher of USA TODAY, also owns newspapers that carried slave ads. Among them: The Montgomery Daily Advertiser, now The Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser; and The Louisville Daily Journal, today The Courier-Journal of Louisville.
Freddie Parker, chairman of the North Carolina Central University history department, says newspapers were a key marketplace for buyers and sellers of slaves and were strong voices in support of slavery.
The Hartford Courant, a Tribune newspaper, acknowledged in 2000 that it had run such ads. It apologized for “any involvement by our predecessors at The Courant in the terrible practice of buying and selling human beings. “