Holy Crap Lookit How Racist the Detroit Free Press Used to Be

[livius drusus]

I don't mean in that patronizing northern liberal way either. They were full-on white supremacist Democractic Party shills in the decades before and after the Civil War. Once Upon a Time, The Liberal Free Press Really Disliked Black People

The venom spiked from the 1850s into the 1870s, as the national debate over slavery grew more impassioned and then erupted into the Civil War. During that period, the paper became increasingly strident and made a name for itself as one of the most aggressively racist journals in the country.

The Free Press once hinted that citizens should lynch a black man accused of sex crimes. In 1856 it ran an editorial that was headlined “Niggers—Niggers--Niggers.” [...]

The Free Press took every opportunity to demean black Detroiters. One day in 1863, for example, the police blotter contained an item, written partially in dialect, about a “low, filthy groggery down on Lafayette Street, kept by a genuine specimen of the Ethiopian race” who serves his “culled bredden” and their gushing wenches” bad whiskey, which results in a “genuine nigger breakdown.” [...]

The term in use then to denote race mixing was “amalgamation,” and it appeared frequently in the Free Press. “Amalgamation dens,” for example, was the Free Press’ term for Detroit saloons frequented by both black and white clients.

“ANOTHER AMALGAMATION CASE,” screamed a headline in 1863. It ran above the story of a white woman and a black man, who, the paper said, had eloped. He was described as “Pontiac Joe,” an “ebony lord” with a “black, wool-covered skull…a genuine Ethiopian head.” The woman, 18, was “forever lost to decency and respect…who disgraced her sex and common decency by consenting to become the wife of a black, ugly looking, disgusting negro.”

Editor and owner Wilbur F. Storey apparently was the prize racist among many racists. Under his stewardship, the Free Press was obsessed with the Black man as rapist/drunk/uncivilizable savage. Even for his time he stood out in his constant and vocal contempt for Black people, and not just among Northern newspaper editors but among mainstream Southern ones too.

The anti-Black vituperation sort of faded away by the end of the 19th century. They weren't suddenly all about the racial equality or anything; they just sort of stopped talking about Black people. In 1940 the Free Press was purchased by progressive publisher John S. Knight and that was the beginning of the paper we know today.

[Qingdai]

Oregon was also a KKK state, so yeah, the North was also a bastion of racism, just not so much the slavery.

Here is a long scholarly article about the very neighborhood we live in and it's institutionalized racism.
http://www.kingneighborhood.org/hist...01940-2000.pdf

Here's a much shorter version (from the Portland Monthly, the magazine that's obsessed with lists of stuff).
http://www.portlandmonthlymag.com/ne...and-march-2012

[Janet]

So I guess it was because the racism had faded away that Henry Ford felt compelled to start his own newspaper to push his racist and antisemitic ideas.

[Kael]

He was just trying to let the Free Market decide how racist America should be.