The American Muslim Podcast · El-Amin Communications

Ayesha K. Mustafaa on Preserving History & Truth in Muslim Media

·1 hr 8 min·4 clips

John Abbott started the Chicago Defender on his mother's kitchen table and used train porters to spread it south.

Imam Tariq Al-Amin opens with his greeting and welcomes Aisha K. Mustafa. He presents her as the editor of the Muslim Journal, an assistant professor of mass communications, and a source of historical insight. He asks where her story began. She answers by pointing to her parents, especially the sense of responsibility they passed on to her. She ties that to a Mississippi family of civil rights activists and a mother who worked as a career elementary school teacher. The conversation then shifts to the history of Black publishing. Mustafa reaches back before the Chicago Defender. She names Freedom's Journal as the first African American newspaper. She explains that it was started by two freed slaves who wanted Black people to speak for themselves. She reminds the listener that teaching enslaved people to read could be illegal. That gives the act of publishing the feel of resistance. She then turns to Frederick Douglass and his newspaper, the North Star. In her telling, the North Star belonged to the abolitionist movement and pointed toward freedom. Harriet Tubman sits in that same frame too, because the North Star was also a direction north for people escaping slavery. The story continues into the Chicago Defender. She describes John Abbott coming from Georgia to Chicago with his mother and starting the paper on her kitchen table. After printing it, he carried bundles to train porters who took the paper south and dropped it at stops along the way. That circulation helped the paper become part of the Great Migration story. The conversation later turns to the Muslim Journal and to a museum in Jackson, Mississippi that she describes as a very rich historical space co-founded by one Palestinian American and one African American. Imam Tariq closes by thanking her, promising links, and inviting listeners back next week with the familiar final salaam.

As heard by us

A measured survey of Black press history, Muslim media, and the duty to speak in your own voice.

The episode traces Black press history, Muslim media, and the duty to tell a community's story in its own words. Aisha K. Mustafa grounds the conversation in her Mississippi upbringing and family background, then moves from Freedom's Journal to the North Star and the Chicago…

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If you want Black press history in a Muslim media conversation, press play.

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