The Black Press Archives to be Preserved and Digitized at Howard University

Nikole Hannah-Jones, journalist and Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications at Howard University.A $2 million grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation will fund the preservation and digitization of the Black Press Archives at the Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (MSRC).

To secure funding, the MSRC worked with the Center for Journalism and Democracy at Howard, started by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer prize winning journalist and Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Cathy Hughes School of Communications.

The collection contains 2,847 microfilm reels of over 100,000 issues of newspapers, a resource Hannah-Jones herself has used.

“For generations, the stories of Black people in America were not deemed worthy of telling by the newspapers delivered to the homes of white people,” said Hannah-Jones. “The Black press served – and continues to serve – to celebrate, commemorate and honor Black lives in this country and to push this nation to live up to its highest ideals.”