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Newspaper Atlanta Age (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-19??

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About Atlanta Age (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-19??

The Atlanta Age was the final publication of veteran politician and newspaper publisher William A. Pledger. Born in Georgia in 1852, Pledger he had only one year of formal education, but he studied algebra, grammar, English, and Latin on his own. At the age of 17, he joined the Republican Party and stumped for their candidates in the 1874 elections. From these beginnings, he went on to become one of Georgia’s most important nineteenth-century Black politicians.

Newspapers were key to Pledger’s political success. After the end of Reconstruction, avenues for Black Georgians to participate in formal politics narrowed, as seen in Pledger’s own frustrated ambitions to hold elected office. Newspapers provided an alternative pathway to political influence within the Republican Party. He founded his first paper, the Athens Blade, in the mid-1870s. The Blade, which Pledger billed as “the only weekly paper owned and edited by colored men in the State,” allowed him to rally support for his program, and in 1880, he led a successful movement within the party to elect Black leadership, with himself as chairperson. However, due to Republicans’ sinking electoral fortunes in Georgia as well as the national party’s policy of retreating from its Black voters, this leadership lasted only two years.

As he demonstrated in 1880, Pledger was capable of forceful action and rhetoric. However, he was more closely aligned with accommodationist Booker T. Washington than activist W.E.B. Du Bois, and he was not above making alliances with conservative Democrats. After the Blade, Pledger went on to edit the Atlanta News and Atlanta Reporter. He founded the Age in the late 1890s and ran the paper until his death in 1904. The Atlanta Age ran at four pages and came out weekly on Saturdays. In keeping with his earlier career, he ran the Age as an organ for the Republican Party and a venue for his outspoken support for Black rights in Georgia. In 1899, he and the Age attracted the condemnation of Georgia’s white press for an editorial on lynchings. In a piece reprinted in the August 10, 1899 issue of the Montgomery Monitor, Pledger accused whites of using the barbaric practice to prevent Black economic development: “There is nothing to do for the poor ‘Angry’ Saxon in Georgia now but to kill negroes who have made good crops and laid them by. Just accuse him of rape and hang him, or burn him, and let the crop revert.” In addition to Pledger’s editorials, the Age carried national and international news. After his death in 1904, the editorship passed to Alonzo Burnett, another veteran newspaper person who had previously run the Atlanta Weekly Defiance. Starting with a circulation of less than 1,000, the newspaper reached around 4,000 subscribers by 1903 and remained at that level until it folded in the late 1910s.

Note: A portion of the issues digitized for this newspaper were microfilmed as part of the Miscellaneous Negro newspapers microfilm collection, a 12 reel collection containing issues of African American newspapers published in the U.S. throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Creation of the microfilm project was sponsored by the Committee on Negro Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies in 1947. For more information on the microfilm collection, see: Negro Newspapers on Microfilm, a Selected List (Library of Congress), published in 1953. While this collection contains selections from more than 150 U.S. newspapers titles, for further coverage, view a complete list of all digitized African American titles available in the Chronicling America collection.

Provided By: Digital Library of Georgia, a project of GALILEO located at the University of Georgia Libraries

About this Newspaper

Title

  • Atlanta Age (Atlanta, Ga.) 1898-19??

Dates of Publication

  • 1898-19??

Created / Published

  • Atlanta, Ga. : W.A. Pledger and A.M. Hill

Headings

  • -  African American newspapers--Georgia
  • -  African Americans--Georgia--Atlanta--Newspapers
  • -  Atlanta (Ga.)--Newspapers
  • -  Fulton County (Ga.)--Newspapers
  • -  African American newspapers
  • -  African Americans
  • -  Georgia
  • -  Georgia--Atlanta
  • -  Georgia--Fulton County
  • -  United States--Georgia--Fulton--Atlanta

Genre

  • Newspapers

Notes

  • -  Weekly
  • -  Began in 1898.
  • -  Microfilmed by the Library of Congress for the Committee on Negro Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies.
  • -  Archived issues are available in digital format from the Library of Congress Chronicling America online collection.
  • -  Description based on: Vol. 2, no. 41 (Jan. 13, 1900).

Medium

  • volumes

Call Number/Physical Location

  • Newspaper

Library of Congress Control Number

  • sn82014241

OCLC Number

  • 8790269

ISSN Number

  • 2833-535x

Additional Metadata Formats

Availability

Rights & Access

The Library of Congress believes that the newspapers in Chronicling America are in the public domain or have no known copyright restrictions. Newspapers published in the United States more than 95 years ago are in the public domain in their entirety. Any newspapers in Chronicling America that were published less than 95 years ago are also believed to be in the public domain, but may contain some copyrighted third party materials. Researchers using newspapers published less than 95 years ago should be alert for modern content (for example, registered and renewed for copyright and published with notice) that may be copyrighted. Responsibility for making an independent legal assessment of an item and securing any necessary permissions ultimately rests with persons desiring to use the item.

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Cite This Item

Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.

Chicago citation style:

Atlanta Age Atlanta, Ga. -19??. (Atlanta, GA), Jan. 1 1898. https://www.loc.gov/item/sn82014241/.

APA citation style:

(1898, January 1) Atlanta Age Atlanta, Ga. -19??. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/sn82014241/.

MLA citation style:

Atlanta Age Atlanta, Ga. -19??. (Atlanta, GA) 1 Jan. 1898. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/item/sn82014241/.