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Title:
The Charleston advocate. [volume] : (Charleston, S.C.) 1867-1868
Place of publication:
Charleston, S.C.
Geographic coverage:
  • Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina  |  View more titles from this: City County, State
Publisher:
H.J. Moore
Dates of publication:
1867-1868
Description:
  • Began with Feb. 16, 1867 issue; ceased in 1868.
Frequency:
Weekly
Language:
  • English
Subjects:
  • African Americans--South Carolina--Charleston--Newspapers.
  • African Americans.--fast--(OCoLC)fst00799558
  • Charleston (S.C.)--Newspapers.
  • South Carolina--Charleston.--fast--(OCoLC)fst01204603
Notes:
  • Archived issues are available in digital format as part of the Library of Congress Chronicling America online collection.
  • Description based on: Vol. 1, no. 2 (Feb. 23, 1867).
  • Microfilmed by the Library of Congress for the Committee on Negro Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies.
LCCN:
sn 83025784
OCLC:
9803264
ISSN:
2166-1707
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The Charleston advocate. [volume] February 23, 1867 , Image 1

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Charleston Advocate

The weekly Charleston Advocate (1867-68) was one of a number of short-lived newspapers from the predominantly black Low Country region of South Carolina in the Reconstruction era (1865-77). Like many newspapers published for an African American audience, the Advocate faced a number of obstacles, including limited funds, opposition from local whites, and a low circulation due to high illiteracy rates among African Americans, most of whom were former slaves. Although it lasted only a year, the Advocate captured the hopes and frustrations of African Americans and reformers in the South in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War.

Two Methodist clergymen, Timothy Willard Lewis and Alonzo Webster, established the Charleston Advocate with financial support from Boston-based philanthropist Lee Claflin and his son, Massachusetts Governor William Claflin. Lewis and Webster both were Northerners. Webster had previously published the Vermont Christian Messenger ; Lewis had served as a missionary to the freedmen on the Sea Islands. The first issue of the Advocate appeared on Saturday, February 16, 1867. At its masthead appeared the golden rule: “As yet would that men should do unto you, do ye even so to them.” Webster served as editor, and Lewis and Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a former chaplain to the United States 26th Colored Infantry Regiment, served as associate editors.

The Advocate combined international and national news, domestic advice, marriage and obituary notices, and news of the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church and South Carolina Republican Party. Notices of the activities of the Baker Biblical Institute in Charleston (Webster and Lewis taught there) were also prominently featured in the Advocates pages. Its editors defended so-called scalawags and carpetbaggers and chastised local Democrat newspapers, the Charleston Mercury and the Columbia Daily Phoenix, and the national Republican Party alike for their indifference to the needs of black Southerners.

On October 16, 1868, three white gunmen assassinated Benjamin Randolph, who had recently been elected South Carolina State Senator, in broad daylight in Abbeville County. The Advocate ran a number of memorials to Randolph, transferred its subscription lists to the Atlanta Methodist Advocate, and folded shortly thereafter. Timothy Lewis and Alonzo Webster went on to establish Claflin University, a historically African American Methodist college in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1869. In doing so, they continued to promote the ideas of racial equality and opportunity they had articulated in the Advocate.

Provided by: University of South Carolina; Columbia, SC