In 1820, The Emancipator became the first newspaper in the country devoted exclusively to the cause of abolishing slavery. It was published in Tennessee, a slave state. Other abolitionist newspapers followed, such as The Liberator, published by famous Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, and The North Star, the anti-slavery newspaper founded and edited by abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.

Today, The Emancipator rises again. This modern version is a multimedia collaboration with The Boston Globe’s Opinion team and Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.

“Just as abolitionist publications in the 19th century called for the end of the enslavement of Black people, The Emancipator will amplify big ideas and solutions for achieving a racially just society,” Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas, co-editors-in-chief of The Emancipator, wrote in their introductory essay.

Payne tells The Vermont Conversation that there is a difference between reporting about race and journalism that is intentionally anti-racist.

“I think about reporting on racism and race (is) reporting the facts, getting the story down," Payne said. By contrast, "Anti-racist journalism (is) centering the right voices in a story, centering those that are most impacted and empowering them to tell their story.”

“I don't know that we're trying to change people's minds,” Douglas said. “What we're trying to do is have a dialogue to give people the context to think about how they're implicated in the American project. So we can offer information that partially validates some of what they think but offers better information. Or we can just blow them out of the water with straight facts about how it’s different, or we can offer our own personal stories or allow our contributors to offer their personal stories and their own lived experience and just really flood the public conversation with a whole new set of narratives that previously there hadn't been much room made for. By taking up space, and giving people the opportunity to at least hear a different story or a different side of the story, then possibly we can embark upon this narrative change that we hope to effect.”

“We're in this shared mission drawing from that abolitionist spirit of this multiracial and diverse movement where there's shared equity around one focus," Payne said.

She hopes readers of this modern abolitionist newspaper “feel equipped to maybe have that conversation with their neighbor or their father or anybody (who) they felt a bit uncomfortable about and uninformed about when it comes to racial and social justice and equity, but they feel like they can have that conversation and have a better understanding.”