Benjamin Fagan, “The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation” (U. of Georgia Press, 2016)

New Books in African American Studies · Aug 30, 2016 · 1h 7m

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, antebellum African Americans elites turned to the newspaper as a means of translating their belief in black “chosenness” into programs for black liberation. Benjamin Fagan’s The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (University of Georgia Press, 2016) demonstrates how the belief that God had marked black Americans as his chosen people on earth became a central article of faith in many northern African American communities throughout the nineteenth century. Directed by varying understandings of black “chosenness,” black periodicals helped to frame…