Barnett, Claude Albert

Impact on the world

Barnett bartered news items to Black publishers in exchange for advertising space when he launched the Associated Negro Press (ANP) in 1919, then built a paid network of freelance “stringers” across the country and, eventually, more than 100 African newspapers, giving Black readers coordinated national and international coverage that white-owned wire services ignored. He recruited Alice Dunnigan as the ANP’s Washington bureau chief, helped pressure the U.S. government during World War II to accredit Black journalists as war correspondents, and served as a consultant to the Secretary of Agriculture from 1942 to 1953 documenting the conditions of Black tenant farmers. A committed Pan-Africanist, Barnett cultivated relationships with independence-era African leaders including Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, attended Ghana’s 1957 independence celebration, and was honored by the governments of Liberia and Haiti; declining health forced the ANP to close in 1964, three years before his death.

Life & background

Born September 1889 in Sanford, Florida (sources differ on the exact day), Barnett was taken as an infant to live with his maternal grandmother near Chicago after his parents’ domestic-worker marriage ended, and he graduated from Tuskegee Institute in 1906. He worked a decade as a Chicago postal clerk, where sorting mail exposed him to the volume and reach of the nation’s newspapers, and in 1913 began a mail-order business selling photographs of prominent Black Americans that grew into the Kashmir Chemical cosmetics company. He founded the Associated Negro Press in March 1919 and directed it for nearly five decades, remaining a trustee of Tuskegee Institute and a board member of the Phelps-Stokes Fund throughout his career; he died of a cerebral hemorrhage at his Chicago home on August 2, 1967, at age 77.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Zinn Education Project; Encyclopedia of Chicago