The Daily Independent (Elizabeth City, N.C.) 1936-19??
Historic newspapers carry the language, views and graphic reporting of their time, including racist content. They are shown to teen and adult profiles.
295 issues from 1936 to 1937, published in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, digitised for Chronicling America.
Few North Carolina newspapermen were as fearless and forthright as William Oscar Saunders (1884-1940), who denounced hypocrisy and advocated progressive causes for almost 30 years in his Elizabeth City paper, The Independent. The weekly paper, in seven-column format and expanding from eight pages to twelve in 1920, drew wide attention for its compelling editorials. Therein Saunders opposed fundamentalism, anti-Semitism, and racial prejudice. He was an unrepentant liberal with a style akin to that of H. L. Mencken who wrote that, if the South had 40 editors like Saunders, it could be rid of its problems in five years. Saunders’s brand of personal journalism is largely unseen today. His break came with the sensational murder trial in Elizabeth City in 1901 following the death of Nell Cropsey, which Saunders had covered for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In 1908, Saunders started The Independent and ran it until financial difficulties forced its shuttering in 1937.
During a single term in the State House in 1919, Saunders advocated for abolition of the death penalty. Sarcastic and witty, he counted the powerful as his antagonists. Most notably, in 1924, he took on noted evangelist and antisemite Mordecai Ham, then in the midst of a seven-week tent crusade in Elizabeth City. The Independent denounced Ham, who had accused Sears president Julius Rosenwald of operating biracial brothels, as a “shrewd, vicious and uncompromising demagogue, a careless mouth-artist, an irresponsible…
- Genres
- News
- Published in
- Elizabeth City, North Carolina, 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