THE BIRTH OF THE ASSOCIATED NEGRO PRESS
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
It always starts with an idea.
The person unfortunate enough to receive the idea begins to sweat, bleed, cry, and give up time, time, and more time into making the idea work.
Skeleton staffs are formed, mostly of volunteers. Promises are made, along with many tuna sandwiches. Some of the promises are even kept. Constant prayer becomes a new habit.
The game called "How do I keep the phones and the electricity on this month?" is played with much enthusiasm.
But the product emerges from the mind of the dreamer into reality.
It has been that way since the dawn of time--which I'm sure was an idea itself once. Claude Barnett's idea was not new when he thought it in 1919: a Black news "wire" service. (Although it was more a "press service" than a "wire;" then and now, first-class mail is the primary transport. Such a wire service association--a collective of newspapers who decide to share the same material for financial benefit--distributes this column.)
Barnett, who had been an assistant to Booker T. Washington while attending Washington's Tuskegee Institute, resigned from The Chicago Defender to put up his ANP shingle. "It is possible that young Barnett's observation of 'The Tuskegee Machine' propaganda mill and its relationship to Negro newspapers influenced his later entry into the press association field," writes Black press historian Clint Wilson II.
"The key to The Chicago Defender's national success," according to Wilson, "lay in its own network of correspondents and distributors." It would be the kind of network Barnett would create and maintain for decades.
"I was frankly feeling my way and shouldering this hit and miss operation alone," said Barnett of his early days.
"For Negro weeklies operating with limited funds and staff," writes Wilson, "the semiweekly, beige-colored envelopes of the ANP contained both medicine for many a sick newspaper and a prescription for survival, thereby permitting national coverage of events that would otherwise go untouched in the small weeklies."
The ANP packets I've seen on microfilm from the 1930s contain a news roundup, commentaries, a top news story and feature stories, and a business section.
Competition between Negro wire services was fierce, but with the notable exception of the NNPA's wire service and a few others, most rivals were mostly temporary.
Barnett, who had several "stringers" (part-time writers) from around the nation, also hired part-time correspondents in more than 10 nations, including Russia, France, South Africa, Ghana and England.
Barnett retired in 1964, selling the business to Al Duckett, a Black press veteran from New York. Barnett died in 1967, and the ANP followed him not too many years afterward.
"Even with his inroads on his service by white news services--mainly United Press International--Barnett's ANP remained preeminent because it gave the Negro viewpoint and interpretation of the Negro's activities gathered and written together by Negroes," writes Wilson.
The idea is still a good one. Many of the columns in this newspaper are the evidence.
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