The New York Amsterdam News, A Historic Black Newspaper, Is Converting Its Building Into A Museum

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A historic Black newspaper in New York is dealing with declining interest in physical newspapers by converting its office building into a museum.

According to the New York Times, the building on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem has been home to The New York Amsterdam News since it was founded 115 years ago. The Times described the building as one that has “old typewriters and stacks of reporters’ notebooks on one floor” and “framed front pages with stories about the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and the death of Nelson Mandela in 2013” on the next. But other than the remnants of what might be considered a golden age for Black journalism, the newsroom is pretty empty these days for a newspaper that now only has nine reporters and editors scattered across the world who are working remotely.

So, yeah — might as well go ahead and turn it into a museum.

From the Times:

So The Amsterdam News is turning the newsroom, and several other floors of its building in Harlem, into a museum.

The left-behind typewriters are hardly the only relics of the way newspapers used to be written and produced. There are metal printing plates and a darkroom from the days when photographs were shot on film and developed with chemicals.

“It feels like stepping into another time,” said Elinor Tatum, the publisher and editor in chief, who is sorting through it all with Siobhan Bennett, the president and chief revenue officer.

“We want to celebrate the pivotal role both The New York Amsterdam News, and the Black press writ large, have played in advancing civil rights in our country,” Tatum said. She works out of an office on the second floor surrounded by dozens of books, including a biography of Andrew W. Cooper, who wrote a column for the paper in the 1970s called One Man’s Opinion.

The New York Amsterdam News has published columns by W.E.B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Malcolm X, who had never been published by a media organization prior. It was one of the few institutions of journalism that covered the civil rights movement from a Black perspective, and it claims to have been the first paper to print the term “Hip-Hop” in 1980. If it’s not going to be a newspaper forever, it definitely needs to be a museum. However, that’s not all the building is meant to become.

“We want it to be a place for people to organize, like where the Beat poets hung out in San Francisco,” Tatum said. “People can come through and stop in, whether it be politicians or community leaders so that we can talk to them about what’s going on in the world.”

So far, the newspaper has raised $450,000 to plan and design the museum, according to the Times. Let’s be ready to support it once it gets up and running.

Happy Black History Month, y’all.