St. Paul Recorder (St. Paul, Minn.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
1,502 issues from 1934 to 1963, published in Saint Paul, Minnesota, digitised for Chronicling America.
Long-running Twin Cities African American newspaper the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder began its life on August 10, 1934 as two separate weekly titles with largely identical content: the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder. The two were founded by Cecil Newman, a leader in the Twin Cities African American community, who used his position and his papers to fight against racial discrimination locally and nationally, and to support and improve the lives of Black Minnesotans.
Newman moved to Minneapolis from Kansas City in 1922, working as a busboy and Pullman porter. He co-founded his first newspaper, the weekly Twin-City Herald, in April 1927, serving as editor until 1934 when he left to start the Spokesman and the Recorder newspapers. Newman also published the monthly magazine Timely Digest between April 1931 and May 1932, claimed to be the first and only African American magazine in the northwestern United States.
The Twin Cities African American community was relatively small in the 1930s, totaling around 7,000 people. The Spokesman and the Recorder served as “small-town” style newspapers for the community, highlighting social events, community businesses, clubs, and churches, as well as births, deaths, and weddings. They also covered local scandal and gossip among both the African American and white communities. While the content of the two titles overlaps considerably, the issues do contain some difference in layout, news, society articles, photographs, and…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
- Language
- English
- Collection
- Chronicling America
- Licence or status
- None stated by the archive
- Rights
- The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety.
- Credit
- Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers, Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities
- Who can read it
- Teens profiles and older (placed by Invisible Network from what the archive says; archives give no ratings)
- Archive
- Library of Congress