New York Amsterdam News

The New York Amsterdam News was started more than a century ago, with a $10 investment. It has gone on to become one of the most important Black newspapers in the country and today remains one of the most influential Black-owned and -operated media businesses in the nation, if not the world.

On Dec. 4, 1909, James H. Anderson put out the first edition of the Amsterdam News with six sheets of paper, a lead pencil, a dressmaker’s table and that $10 investment. The Amsterdam News was one of only 50 Black newspapers in the country at that time. Copies were sold for two-cents a piece from his home at 132 W. 65th St. in Manhattan. The paper was named after the avenue where Anderson lived in New York’s San Juan Hill section of Manhattan.

By 1910, as Blacks began the Great Exodus from the South, moving into big cities like Chicago, Philadelphia and New York’s Village of Harlem, so grew the success of the Amsterdam News, so much so that An- derson soon moved the paper uptown to 17 W. 135th St. Still growing, the AmNews moved again in 1916 to 2293 Seventh Ave. The next move came in 1938 to 2271 Seventh Avenue until, in the early 1940s, it relocated to its present address at 2340 Frederick Douglass Blvd. in Harlem. In 1926, publisher Edward Warren’s wife, Sadie, purchased the paper. It struggled for survival until 1935, when it was bought by two of the nation’s foremost Black entrepreneurs, Dr. Cielan Bethan Powell and Dr. Phillip M.H. Savory of the Powell Savory Corporation.

Powell assumed the role of publisher. During Powell’s tenure, the Amsterdam News expanded its reach, reporting not only on local stories that were important to the Black community, but national news stories as well. The AmNews reported on the fight for equality during the Jim Crow era, the events of the Civil Rights Movement, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Freedom Riders, among other stories, making it by far the most influential and most frequently-cited Black weekly in the country.