The Nashville Globe Archive

The Nashville Globe was a black-owned and operated publication launched in 1906. Richard Henry Boyd, the primary architect of the Globe, was a former slave from Texas. After teaching himself to read and write, Boyd attended Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, and spent several years organizing churches and Baptist organizations for freedmen. In 1896, Boyd moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and founded the National Baptist Publishing Board (NBPB) and in 1904 the One-Cent Savings Bank. The following year, when the city made it mandatory for all streetcars to be segregated by race, Boyd, along with his son Henry A. Boyd, Dock A. Hart, Charles A. Burrell, and Evans Tyree, formed the Globe Publishing Company. Its purpose was to publish a newspaper to promote a boycott of the city's streetcars and to combat racial discrimination and social inequalities. The first issue of the Nashville Globe was published in January 1906.

The Republican weekly was published on Fridays at the NBPB's facilities. Henry A. Boyd and Joseph O. Battle oversaw the editorial content, which focused on dispelling false assumptions perpetuated about African Americans by white mainstream newspapers, speaking out against racial segregation and injustice, and promoting self-help literature and middle-class deportment within the black community. The Globe's editors specifically encouraged readers to purchase homes and to support locally black-owned businesses, many of which advertised in the paper. H.A. Boyd also used the Globe to promote education for African Americans, and in 1909 he wrote several editorials campaigning for a state college for blacks. He joined forces with other influential business leaders, and their passionate plea culminated in the creation of the first and only state-funded black university in Tennessee: the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School, established in Nashville in 1912. The college became a university in the 1950s, was later renamed Tennessee State University, and is still going strong today.

In its first decade, the Globe's readership reportedly reached one-fifth of Nashville's total population. In April 1917, in order to keep up with increasing demands at the publishing company, the NBPB purchased two new Mergenthaler Linotype machines. The machines cost $5,000, but were considered necessary for the continued growth of the publishing company. The April 27 front page carried photographs of the new machines and announced that, "These are the first and most improved machines of this make to be installed in a Negro printing establishment, and it puts the National Baptist Publishing Board miles in front of any Negro establishment and places them on par with the most improved printing offices of the United States."

The Globe was a strong supporter of African American troops in World War I. The paper supported fundraising campaigns for African American soldiers and carried government advertisements for Liberty Bonds. From November 1917, the masthead bore a message urging readers to place a 1-cent stamp on the paper when they had finished reading it, hand it to any U.S. postal employee, "and it will be placed in the hands of our soldiers or sailors on the front." On December 6, 1918, a special Victory Edition was published. The 16-page special aimed to give "the working men who are seeking employment in the city, an idea of what Nashville really is and [...] introduce to the manufacturers, wholesale and other commercial interest the real laboring man who is seeking employment [...]." The special edition also celebrated African Americans' contributions to the Great War.

After R.H. Boyd's death in 1922, Henry A. Boyd took control of operations at the NBPB. In the 1930s, the Globe merged with the Nashville Independent to form the Nashville Globe and Independent. When Henry A. Boyd died in 1959, the Globe and Independent remained in print for only a few more months and ceased publication the following year.