Howard University Receives $2M to Digitize Black Newspaper Archive

By Stacy M. Brown,
NNPA Newswire

Howard University has received a $2 million donation to digitize its Black Press Archives, that contains more than 2,000 newspaper titles including publications like the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, Washington Informer, Baltimore AFRO, and other historically Black publications.

The University said it hopes to make the archives more broadly available to researchers and the public.

“Once digitalized, Howard’s Black Press Archive will be the largest, most diverse, and the world’s most accessible Black newspaper database,” Benjamin Talton, the director of Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, told the Associated Press.

The Moorland-Spingarn Research Center houses the archive, which dates to the 1970s and includes newspapers from Africa and the Caribbean.

The $2 million grant from the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation should also help increase diversity in the university, officials stated.

Howard University credited its Center for Journalism & Democracy for helping to secure the funding from the Logan Family Foundation, which supports social justice causes in journalism and the arts.

“We will be able to go back and look at these archives and these newspapers and the way the Black press was covering the world and have a greater understanding of who we are as a society, who we were back then and who we are now,” Nikole Hannah-Jones told the news service.

“Right now, we really are only getting a very narrow part of the story, and that is the part of the story told through power and through the ruling class.”