The Daily Express Archive 

The Daily Bulletin and Ohio Daily-Express were African American newspapers published in the 1940s and 1950s in Dayton, Ohio. By 1944, the Daily Bulletin's full title as it appeared in its masthead was The Daily Bulletin Combined with the Ohio Express, further described as "One of the Two Only Negro Dailies in the World." Here, Ohio Express refers to the Ohio Daily-Express, which officially began publication in 1946 when its publisher, Paige H. Strickland, apparently purchased the Daily Bulletin. It is unclear whether a separate Daily Bulletin existed in Dayton between its origin in 1942 and the first known issue in 1944, or if such a publication continued alongside the combined version. In November 1950, the Ohio Daily-Express dropped "Ohio" and became the Daily Express. The similarities in format, frequency, and content, in addition to the combination of titles from 1944-1946, suggest that the two represent a singular and continuous lineage.

The Daily Bulletin published a four-column, four-page daily newspaper featuring syndicated material from the Negro Newspaper Publishers' Association (now the National Newspaper Publishers Association) and the Associated Negro Press (ANP). The Express leaned more heavily on the ANP for its article content. The Express also added a fifth column and occasionally printed up to six pages, but it kept the same publication frequency.

From the mid-1940s to the early 1950s, these Dayton papers covered African American experiences on a broad scale. They cover the close of World War II, the start of the Korean War, and the transition from the labor movement to the civil rights movement. Frequent topics included the deployment of African American troops overseas, the Fair Employment Practice Committee's role in integrating the workforces across the country, and African American matters in social, political, and legal spheres internationally. A wide-ranging scope lent a unified context to the local matters that did make the pages. On May 27, 1949, reporter Jimmie N. Jones stated that "the EXPRESS has taken a militant stand for law and order" in support of the city police and municipal court for their "campaign against crime" in Dayton. He goes on to chastise the court for a perceived lenient sentence on a local assailant, whose trial had been covered in the weeks previous to a daily readership of 7,500 in the Dayton area. The disparagement of unemployment as an enabling factor for criminal behavior reflects a component of the transition from labor strikes to other nonviolent resistance campaigns that would become commonplace in the 1950s. Other local news generally only included celebratory events, such as commencements and church-sponsored songfests, and rarely featured individuals' goings-on, births, or obituaries. The Daily-Express continued in this fashion until 1955, when it apparently ceased publication.