In March 1827, Freedom’s Journal, the first Black newspaper in the United States, famously declared, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” Across the two centuries that followed, Black newspapers, magazines, and periodicals have served as crucial sites through which Black women articulated political demands, crafted literary identities, challenged racial and gender hierarchies, cultivated communities, and imagined new social futures.
As part of the conference The Black Press at 200 at Howard University in Washington, D. C. on March 17-18, 2027, this SSAWW-sponsored panel invites papers exploring the diverse roles Black women played in shaping Black print culture from the nineteenth century to the present. Black women have participated in the Black Press as journalists, editors, correspondents, poets, fiction writers, activists, religious thinkers, educators, clubwomen, and public intellectuals. Their contributions illuminate how questions of gender, race, sexuality, religion, citizenship, labor, migration, and cultural production have been negotiated through Black periodical networks.
The panel seeks to foreground women-centered and gender-focused approaches to the Black Press while highlighting the rich intersections among literary studies, periodical studies, African American studies, women’s and gender studies, religious studies, history, and media studies. We welcome papers that engage both well-known and understudied figures, archival research, and innovative methodologies for examining Black women’s print cultures.
Possible topics include:
Black women journalists and editors in the Black Press
Women’s literary publication in Black newspapers and periodicals
Black feminist print cultures and intellectual networks
Religion, spirituality, and Black women’s public writing
Black clubwomen and newspaper culture
Gender, respectability politics, and public discourse
Black women’s activism, reform, and social justice movements
Representations of sexuality and gender nonconformity in the Black Press
Black queer and LGBTQ+ histories in periodical culture
Transnational and diasporic networks of Black women’s print culture
Education, uplift, and community formation
Archival recoveries of Black women writers, editors, and readers
Black women and abolitionist journalism
Black women’s writing in publications such as Freedom’s Journal, The Colored American, The Anglo-African, The Christian Recorder, The Woman’s Era, The Chicago Defender, and other
Black newspapers and periodicals
Digital humanities and new approaches to Black women’s print archives
Potential subjects of inquiry might include Maria W. Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Nannie Helen Burroughs, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Pauline Hopkins, Amy Jacques Garvey, Charlotta Bass, Marvel Cooke, and other Black women whose work shaped the history of African American print culture.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract and a brief 1-2 sentence biography to Alonzo Smith (smithw2@appstate.edu) by September 15, 2026. It is not necessary to be a member of SSAWW to submit a proposal. This symposium will be an inclusive space, and along with the conference organizers, we particularly encourage submissions from community scholars, independent researchers and practitioners.