Newspaper The Clarion (Clarksburg, W. Va.) 1911-191?

About The Clarion (Clarksburg, W. Va.) 1911-191?

The Clarion was an early twentieth-century African American weekly newspaper, which operated out of Clarksburg in Harrison County, West Virginia. While established on the 22^nd of June in 1911, this surviving issue from September 28, 1911, most likely the sixteenth issue of its first volume, remains the only known copy of the Clarion. Due to this absence, much of the information surrounding the origins and intent of the Clarion is from other associated African American newspapers in the region, such as John Gilmer’s Advocate, a weekly published in Charleston.

The founder and editor of the Clarion was Thomas L. Higgins, an African American middle-class intellectual, graduate of the law department of Howard University and lawyer living in Clarksburg by 1910. According to a June 22, 1911, issue of the Advocate, the Clarion originated as a new weekly “devoted to the interests of the race …,” meant to inform and engage the African American community of Clarksburg. Moreover, given Higgins’s legal background, he showed an interest in crime reduction and publicly voiced concern over African American crime rates, asking at a Clarksburg Teacher’s Association meeting: “What can we do to minimize crime among Negros?” as recorded in the Advocate on November 17, 1910.

This single issue from September 1911 reflects Higgins’s concern with crime. Most topics include international, national, and local acts of violent crime or events. These incidents range from the assassination of the Russian Empire’s Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin to the fire of the French battleship Liberté, to regional actions of the Italian Black Hand extortion racket and, finally, to local instances of the 1910 Mann Act, or “White slave” law, being enforced in West Virginia. The Mann Act originated as a law to prevent the sex trafficking of women, but it was quickly applied in the era of Jim Crow to prosecute interracial sexual relationships in which white women were involved, hence the term “white slave” law.

This issue of the Clarion has little content relating directly to African American or racial issues. A probable explanation for this absence is that early century African American presses faced racial exclusion from syndicated news outlets like the Associated Press. (Thornbrough, American Negro Newspapers, 1880-1915) Due to a lack of resources, Higgins most likely had to clip these crime stories from other dailies and periodicals to fill slow weekly issues. (Thornbrough, p.487) The Clarion existed before the 1919 founding of the Associated Negro Press (ANP) which provided news packets to African American newspapers. Before the ANP and its centralized resource networks maintaining an African American newspaper was difficult.

Despite limited information, the politics of the Clarion can be discerned from their masthead quote, “Equal rights to all, special privileges to none.” This phrase, commonly misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, was a Populist Party and Progressive Democrat slogan embraced by politicians such as Williams Jennings Bryan and uttered in the Populist inspired 1908 Democratic party platform. Additionally, the Clarion appeared to support the temperance and prohibition movement indicated by an argument and subsequent falling out between the Clarion and the Advocate, where the Clarion criticized the Advocate for not adequately supporting prohibition (see the Advocate, September 12, 1912). Therefore, the Clarion and Thomas Higgins had lingering sympathy with the progressive politics of the diminishing Populist Party that fractured into respective progressive wings of the Democratic and Republican parties. While sympathetic to the progressive platform that historically embraced prohibition, Higgins and the Clarion also appeared to be staunch Republicans, as many African Americans were at the time, as they also criticized John Gilmer of the Advocate for supporting Theodore Roosevelt and his progressive third-party presidential run in 1912 over the Republican party.

The Clarion ended its weekly run sometime around 1914 without any known cause. While the surviving issue is limited, the Clarion can provide insight into the effect progressive era politics had on the African American community alongside the difficulties African American presses faced during the early twentieth century, specifically when it is analyzed in relation to other West Virginia African American newspapers of the time, like the Advocate.