Press: Black Daily

In Manhattan appeared the first issues of the second U. S. Negro daily newspaper,* the Daily Citizen, published and edited by bald, brown William M. Kelley, onetime editor of the weekly Amsterdam News. Publisher Kelley got his paper started by selling stock at $5 a share to Harlem notables like Bishop R. C. Lawson, Alderman John W. Smith, Mortician Rodney Dade; white politicians like Tammany District Leader Thomas F. Murray; and to ordinary residents of Harlem reached by door to door canvass. In appearance, the tabloid Citizen looks like a compromise between the dignified Evening Post and the blatant Daily Mirror. Last week’s front pages contained, not pictures, but stories of a specially lively shooting in a Harlem cabaret, a Brooklyn fire in which eight Negroes perished. First issues of the Daily Citizen had a circulation of around 7.500. Principal difficulty of starting a Negro daily in Harlem has always been the popularity of Manhattan’s two morning tabloids, News and Mirror. Both papers used to print, inconspicuously inked in at the bottom of cartoons on the sport pages, a series of numerals which mystified white readers. They were random suggestions for hunch players in Harlem’s famed gambling game of “numbers.”

*First U. S. Negro daily: the Atlanta World (circ. 11,995). Founded as a weekly some five years ago it became a daily last year (TIME, April 4, 1932).