With more attacks on democracy, ‘Black journalism has never been more necessary’

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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October 2, 2026

Safiyah Charles, SPLC

While the federal government is actively dismantling policies, programs and laws that protect Black and Brown communities, Black journalists are facing a crisis of trust — when lies spread more quickly than truth — and an atmosphere in which they are seeing their rights, work and credibility attacked and devalued.

“Black journalism has never been more necessary,” Errin Haines, president of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and editor at large of The 19^th, said from the dais at this year’s NABJ national convention in Atlanta, where the theme was “Our Revolution: Truth, Power and Black Journalism.”

Haines was referring not only to the barrage of half-truths, innuendo and outright lies that make up our virtual town square but also the profound challenges that have afflicted newsrooms across the country: media consolidation and layoffs that have disproportionately affected Black journalists.

Read all about the attack on Black journalism.

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