The first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the United States. Editors Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm promised Black readers that they would "plead our own cause." The Journal's advocacy of Black civil and educational rights helped to establish a precedent for the Black Press as a "fighting press."

The North Star was arguably the most influential Black periodical to emerge during the decades prior to the American Civil War. As the mouthpiece of editor Frederick Douglass, one of the most recognizable Black men in the country, its name and content reflected the primacy of antislavery to the antebellum Black Press.

The California Eagle is most closely affiliated with Charlotta Bass, a pioneering Black female publisher who assumed ownership of the paper in 1912. Under Bass's leadership, the Eagle became one of the nation's most widely circulated Black newspapers and led the fight for Black civil rights on the West Coast.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Defender evolved from a humble community paper into "the world's greatest weekly." Its founder Robert Abbott had migrated to Chicago from rural Georgia, and the Defender became an important voice for millions of Black Southerners who ventured north as part of the "Great Migration."

Monthly photomagazine Ebony transformed the landscape of Black publishing following its introduction in the 1940s. Although it was criticized for a consumerist and class-conscious outlook, Ebony broke the color line in advertising and garnered an unprecedented readership.