Although they did not gain the right to vote until the Fifteenth Amendment passed in 1870, free Black communities found ways to participate in political discussions before the Civil War. Urban Black communities in the Northeast United States began printing newspapers in the 1820s, first in New York, then in Boston in 1827, and starting in 1830, free Black communities hosted state and national conferences where they discussed political and social issues.[1] Ohio’s first Black newspaper, the Palladium of Liberty, printed its first issue in 1843 after its editor, David Jenkins, was inspired by a Colored Conference’s call for Black Americans to author their own newspapers.[2] Black-operated conferences and newspapers gave Black communities their own space for political discussions and activism in a white-dominated society.

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Additionally, antebellum Black citizens could and did influence white Americans through speeches and publications. While John Newton Templeton could not vote when he delivered his colonization speech, he spoke to a white audience about the intellect and humanity of enslaved people. Learn more about Templeton's speech here. Speeches could also express frustration with race policies in the United States. In his famous 4th of July keynote speech in 1852, Frederick Douglass expressed the difference in how Americans experienced freedom based on their race:

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I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine.[3]

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