Derrick Spires, associate professor of English, discusses how Black voices communicated in antebellum papers on The Academic Minute radio program:
"Beginning roughly in the 1830s, black activists used pseudonyms to comment on culture, politics, science, and current events in papers such as Freedom’s Journal, Colored American, and Frederick Douglass’s Paper. Like Twitter handles, their pseudonyms often weren’t about anonymity. Many of the writers knew each other and fought, told jokes and explored society together in a vibrant community that looks a lot like contemporary social media."
Listen to the full segment here.
Derrick R. Spires specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Pennsylvania Press, 2019), won the 2020 Bibliographical Society/St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize and the 2019 M/MLA Book Prize. Spires’s work appears or is forthcoming in African American Review, American Literary History, Early American Literature, and edited collections on early African American print culture, time and American literature, and the colored conventions movement.
