The Bolivar County Democrat (Rosedale, Miss.)
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
550 issues from 1902 to 1923, published in Rosedale, Mississippi, digitised for Chronicling America.
Located alongside the Mississippi River, in the heart of the fertile Yazoo-Mississippi River Delta in western Mississippi, Bolivar County was established in 1836. On the eve of the Civil War, the county ranked fourteenth in the state in cotton production relying almost exclusively on the labor of enslaved people to achieve that benchmark. Consequently, since the mid-19th century, the county has had a significant African-American majority. After the war, editor of the short-lived newspaper the Floreyville Star, Blanche Kelso Bruce, emerged as a state leader in the Republican Party eventually serving as the first full-term African-American United States senator (1875-81). Walter Sillers, Jr., segregationist, lawyer, and Mississippi state representative (1916-66) also called Rosedale home. Rosedale, briefly known as Floreyville, is the older of two county seats.
The Bolivar County Democrat was established in 1887 and, for a time in its 82-year run, co-existed with African-American newspapers in the county including the Southern Advocate (1933-41?) in nearby Mound Bayou. Long-time editor Albert David Linnell guided the newspaper for 25 years. After his death in 1928, his wife, Lois A. Linnell, edited the Democrat for another 15 years. The weekly was usually published on Saturdays in its first four decades, and after 1914, it expanded from four to eight pages. The Bolivar County Democrat printed some international and national news, but focused more on state and local news,…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Rosedale, Mississippi, 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