Dec 15, 2014 3 min read

When many daily newspapers either ignored them or treated them with condescension, African-Americans launched a host of newspapers around the country in the 20th century that spoke directly to their concerns, advocated forcefully against Jim Crow laws and for their full rights as citizens.

Among the most prominent of those newspapers was The Pittsburgh Courier, which was distributed around the country, and even smuggled into parts of the South where its presence would provoke the ire of the local enforcers of segregation and repression. It fought for the integration of Major League Baseball, and W.E.B. DuBois wrote for it, as did Zora Neale Hurston. Charles “Teenie” Harris, whose work has been widely exhibited within Pittsburgh and elsewhere, snapped rolls of memorable photographs for the newspaper.

The Pittsburgh Courier died off, done in by changes in the media landscape, and was eventually reborn as The New Pittsburgh Courier. It doesn’t have the reach it once did, but it’s still having a valuable impact in the community, adeptly illustrated in an Associated Press story carried in the Observer-Reporter Monday.

Every month, under the heading “Under Attack By Us!”, The New Pittsburgh Courier has been ceaselessly recording the toll of black-on-black violence within Pittsburgh. As the story stated, “The only thing that changes is the number of the dead.”

The newspaper’s reporting has forced readers to look at killings within the African-American community as a long-term, deeply damaging trend. The New Pittsburgh Courier treats them not as discrete incidents to be quickly forgotten and replaced by new rounds of pandemonium and heartbreak. The murders are instead fleshed out, with stories about the victims and diligent follow-up reporting on arrests and investigations.

While admitting that the newspaper’s approach initially encountered some resistance, publisher Rod Doss told the Associated Press he and his staff are “challenging the community to own this problem” and that readers eventually caught on. “People began to understand, we were doing it out of concern for black life,” Doss explained. “We tried to make the issue that every black life is important.”

And it appears that the newspaper is making a difference. Rallies to halt violence have taken place, and they’ve kept the cases on the public’s radar, which can help bring killers to justice and prevent more tragedies. The first step in solving a problem is initiating a conversation about it.

We must remain mindful, though, that crime within the black community – or a community of any other ethnicity anywhere in the United States – is not just a function of individuals behaving badly, but a complex array of problems, from deficient schools, a lack of job opportunities, a criminal justice system that has put low-level offenders behind bars when alternative punishments might have offered better gateways to rehabilitation, and the lingering effects of discrimination and exclusion.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, a columnist for The Atlantic magazine, recently pointed out African-Americans were in chains in this country for 250 years, followed by 100 years of de facto apartheid, and then by “50 years of kind-of trying to fix 350 years.”

Clearly, the work of trying to fix those 350 years will stretch into the new year that’s just over the horizon, and many years beyond.

And, as time goes on, we can only hope the amount of violence within the black community will decline, in this region and elsewhere, and The New Pittsburgh Courier will be able to devote its column inches to better news.