This is an excerpt from our post-election symposium, “On the Return of Trump.”
In the days since the election, I’ve found myself revisiting an essay on the journalist’s role in a free society by the Reverend Levi Jenkins Coppin, editor of the AME Church Review, included in Irvine Garland Penn’s influential 1891 volume The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. “The journalist is the people’s attorney,” Coppin wrote, at a moment when a new generation of black journalists was emerging to document Jim Crow’s horrors.
He has every man’s case, and can rightfully have but one purpose, which is justice for all. It is no fault of his, if justice itself makes against his client; his only business is to be a faithful recorder of the facts in the case.
Many journalists are currently questioning our place in a nation seemingly disinterested in accepting objective realities, whose voters—our neighbors—have empowered a movement that seeks the destruction of our infant multiracial democracy. It is easy to become despondent when we are reminded that for many of us America, as Langston Hughes observed, “never was America to me”—and there is no guarantee it ever will be.
Under conditions like this, historical perspective can provide a refuge. Coppin invites us to recall predecessors who carried unpopular truths along more hostile paths than ours during even more treacherous times than these. “Had there not been among those who were in the minority brave, wise and good men to protest against such an evil, slavery might have remained until to-day,” he wrote. “This minority was weak at first. But possessing the elements of right, it possessed also the elements of power.” During the years to come, telling the truth in public will be unpopular and under-resourced, and will necessitate conflict with many of our would-be readers. “It is a mistaken idea,” Coppin warned, “for a journalist to suppose that it is his business to take the ‘public pulse’ and then adapt himself to whatever condition he finds to exist.”
Our highest calling, he stressed, is not short-term persuasion or immediate influence but diligent documentation. The work of his contemporary Ida B. Wells was made more important, not less, by the fact that the populace rejected the truths she documented about American lynchings. The pamphlets and papers produced by Warsaw’s underground press still provide undeniable evidence of the very humanity that the Nazis sought to destroy each time they transported Jewish publishers from the ghetto to the gas chambers. Israel’s killings of Gazan journalists are both atrocities in themselves and threats to the future, empowering those who will deny these atrocities ever took place.
“It is a folly for anyone to shut his eyes to the fact that the war for human rights in this country is not closed,” Coppin wrote near the end of his essay. “Our newspapers must be a reliable source of thought and direction for the masses of our people. Here their grievances must be recorded.”
