'From Boston's strident Liberator to Frederick Douglass's North Star, more than forty newspapers were founded in the United States in the decades before the Civil War with the specific aim of promoting emancipation. In Abolition and the Press, Ford Risley discusses how these fiery publications played a vital role in keeping the issue of slavery in the public eye. Reaching an audience that only grew when the papers became objects of controversy and targets of violence in both the South and the North, the abolitionist press continued to provide a needed platform for discourse even after some mainstream publications took up the call for emancipation. Its legacy endured as contemporary reform writers and editors continue to champion the press as a tool in the fight for equality and civil rights.'--BOOK JACKET.
