About West Virginia enterprise. [volume] (Charleston, W. Va.) 1885-18??
Charleston, W. Va. (1885-18??)

West Virginia Enterprise

The West Virginia Enterprise, one of the first African American newspapers from the state, began in Charleston on September 12, 1885. The Enterprise was founded and edited by Reverend Christopher Harrison Payne and J.B. Cabell, two African American middle-class intellectuals and leaders within the African American community of Charleston, West Virginia. Typical of African American newspapers of the era, the Enterprise emerged as a political organ to combat African American racial discrimination, inform the African American population of West Virginia, and promote the success of the Republican party. Consisting of a four-page spread, the Enterprise used its front page for national and international news, while the remaining pages dealt with local state news that centered on African American experiences and issues.

Reflecting the religious disposition of its founder Reverend C.H. Payne, the Enterprise was Baptist in orientation and promoted Baptist values like temperance, a strong work ethic, and nuclear family dynamics. Payne and the Enterprise were so pro-temperance that the West Virginia Freemen, a paper dedicated solely to the issue of temperance, took a special interest in the Enterprise. Payne had a long and successful career. Born free in 1848 in Monroe County, Virginia, which would later become part of West Virginia, Payne was an autodidactic who emerged as a prominent African American educator, religious proselytizer, newspaper editor, and Republican politician. Payne founded two other West Virginia newspapers along with the Enterprise, these were the Pioneer and the Mountain Eagle. Payne also became the first African American elected delegate to the West Virginia legislature running within the Republican party. Payne's loyalty to the Republican party garnered him patronage appointments by President Theodore Roosevelt as the consul general to the Danish West Indies (later called the U.S. Virgin Islands) where he died in 1925. Payne's long history as a Baptist and loyal Republican help explain the moderate approach the Enterprise took to race relations that prescribed notions of respectability, assimilation, and economic uplift as the path toward racial inclusion.

Like other late nineteenth-century African American newspapers, the Enterprise was short-lived due to marginalization in a Jim Crow-era where small, independent African American newspapers did not have access to major national news resources like the Associated Press. While the Enterprise reported on national and international news, those stories had to be clipped from other newspapers without the support of the Associated Press. This made maintaining a weekly four-page spread more difficult and far more labor intensive. Nevertheless, the first three issues do include local reporting, such as an exposé on the conditions of a mental asylum and local commentary was regularly provided in the latter pages that gave religious, economic, and political advice to African Americans to improve their material conditions.

The Enterprise experienced significant financial support within its first year, switching from a weekly to a bi-weekly publication schedule by April 1886. Additionally, Payne, who was overburdened by his other ventures, resigned from the Enterprise and gave control to the African American poet and educator J.E. Campbell in August 1887. It remains unknown exactly when the Enterprise ceased publication, but these early drastic changes in its run suggest that the Enterprise ended prematurely sometime relatively soon after 1887. The first three issues that survive here offer a window into one of the earliest West Virginia African American newspapers and the political and racial concerns of the West Virginia African American community at the turn of the century.

Provided by: West Virginia University