The Dayton Forum (Dayton, Ohio)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
415 issues from 1918 to 1946, published in Dayton, Ohio, digitised for Chronicling America.
The Dayton Forum, a weekly newspaper established in 1913 by John H. Rives, was for and about African Americans in southwest Ohio. In 1918 it advertised that it “reached 3,000 homes” and was “carefully read by 12,000 people every week throughout Ohio and Middle West.” The paper described itself as “progressive, critical yet reliable, but not radical,” seeking to convey a thoughtful perspective on the issues it covered.
The Forum covered national and international events as well as local ones. In the late 1910s, it published letters from local soldiers abroad in World War I and articles on the race riots, precipitated by racist violence, of Red Summer. The bulk of its early content featured church, NAACP, and YMCA/YWCA community activities in the Dayton area and Ohio more broadly. Some issues also had a “Feature” section containing comics, fiction, and human interest stories, published two days after the usual Friday release. Articles went from merely observing developments to promoting opinions sometime in the 1920s. By the 1930s the paper had also adopted a more active visual style, with a variety of fonts and a larger emphasis on headlines, and by 1936 it was issued by the Forum Publishing Company. In the 1940s, the publication moved to a semi-monthly schedule for unknown reasons, possibly due to paper shortages during World War II. With an increase from six to seven columns, and eight by the 1940s, the Forum used its extra space not only to provide a greater number of…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Dayton, Ohio, 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