Preserving Black-press buildings is crucial to urban communities

In late 2021, local development firm AIM Strategies announced its intention to tear down the Chiles buildings and rebuild on the site. However, local activists quickly mobilized against this decision, stressing the historical significance of the buildings and the need to see them restored to once more serve Topeka’s Black residents.

Such public outcry is a testament to the Plaindealer’s historical significance for Topeka’s Black community. At the height of its influence, the paper boasted the largest circulation of any Black periodical west of the Mississippi River. The Plaindealer was one among hundreds of Black-owned newspapers and magazines that collectively formed the Black press — a critical institution that gave voice to people who were voiceless and helped to disseminate news of Black attitudes and achievements within and beyond African American communities.

It is telling that activists are not simply concerned with commemorating Chiles or the Plaindealer — something that would arguably be achieved by an open-air museum on the site proposed by AIM Strategies. Their efforts to secure the future of the buildings themselves demonstrate an understanding of the indelible bond between Black periodicals and the buildings that housed them.

For the Plaindealer and countless other Black newspapers, brick-and-mortar offices served as physical extensions of efforts to uplift the race. As Black journalist Eric Easter attests, Black-press buildings were their “own loud protest”–– a prominent mark on the physical landscape of cities, in which White leaders routinely sought to place Black people and their periodicals on the margins of public life.

As symbols of defiance, they became targets of backlash, with Black publishing plants and editorial offices routinely vandalized. But they also functioned as vital connective and communicative hubs, moving far beyond their prescribed role as sites for the production of Black print media. Preserving these buildings is part of the reckoning with racialized urban inequality and a recognition of the continuing value of Black media outlets as voices and advocates for Black communities.

Consider the role the Black press played in Chicago. During the late-19th and early-20th centuries, as the rapid migration of African Americans to the city laid the foundations for Chicago’s “Black Metropolis,” Black periodicals such as the Conservator, the Defender and the Whip rejected the image of a pathologized “Black Belt” promoted by the city’s White daily newspapers. Instead they championed their Chicago neighborhoods as a national hub for Black culture and politics. During and immediately after World War II, new publications such as Ebony and Jet — rooted in Black Chicagoan topics but also covering national and international news — helped reaffirm the city’s importance as a Black-print capital.

In turn, the buildings inhabited by Chicago’s Black periodicals took on roles far beyond media production. They became art galleries and exhibition spaces, political rallying points and community centers, celebrity hangouts and tourist destinations. In other words, they were commons for Black communities across the country.

The celebrated opening of the custom-built Johnson Publishing headquarters on the South Loop in the early 1970s, replete with lavish Afro-modern interiors and a kaleidoscopic Soul Food canteen, was in many ways the culmination of this multifaceted advancement. The first building in central Chicago to be commissioned by a Black corporation, publisher John H. Johnson described it as “a poem in marble and glass which symbolizes our unshakable faith that the struggles of our forefathers were not in vain.” The building’s myriad attractions, including one of the largest corporate collections of African and African American art in the country, had reportedly attracted some 200,000 visitors by its second anniversary.

But the fortunes of many Black periodicals have faltered over the past few decades, raising questions about the practical and performative function of these buildings. Black-press scholars such as Carrie Teresa and Clint C. Wilson II suggest that Black newspapers have been in financial decline since at least the 1960s. Falling circulation and advertising revenue, coupled with the integration of mainstream newsrooms, have contributed to the cancellation of publications such as the Plaindealer and have left outlets such as the Defender with a fraction of their former audience and influence.

Their buildings have also struggled to survive. For example, in Chicago, internal conflict and financial pressures brought on by the death of John H. Johnson in 2005 and the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 prompted the sale of Johnson Publishing’s iconic headquarters to Columbia College Chicago. After redevelopment plans floundered for nearly a decade, the building was put back on the market. By 2017, the building once envisioned by Johnson as “a poem in marble and glass” was being described as a “decaying relic” at risk of being picked clean by “the buzzards of urban progress.”

The sad decline of Johnson Publishing, one of the nation’s most enduring and influential Black media enterprises, is indicative of broader challenges facing Black media outlets, with the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic exacerbating a decades-long trend toward increasing financial precarity. Black journalist Chida Rebecca describes the pandemic as “a menace like no other,” and while some Black-owned publications have been able to achieve a degree of stability through external loans and grants, “the majority of them are struggling to keep the lights on.”

Accordingly, the efforts of existing Black publications to maintain control of their assets, combined with ongoing uncertainty over the fate of historic buildings owned or used by Black media enterprises, have placed many Black-press buildings at the center of important and hotly contested debates around public history and historical preservation. After the Johnson Publishing building was put up for sale, local activists placed pressure on the city to fast-track landmark status. It worked, and the building was saved from demolition. Then, when redevelopment threatened its legendary interiors, artists and preservationists from organizations such as Stony Island Arts Bank and the Museum of Food and Drink mobilized to save key fragments of the building’s material culture.

Such victories, if we can call them that, are an important reminder of the role Black-press buildings continue to play in public debates around racial progress and urban redevelopment. Once crown jewels on the landscape of thriving Black business and entertainment districts, many historic Black-press buildings now sit underused or abandoned within communities that have been decimated by decades of municipal neglect and the out-migration of businesses and residents. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as activists in Topeka, Chicago and other cities across the country are making clear.