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At The TRiiBE, our mission is rooted in liberation. An ancestral thirst for freedom. An inherent drive to carry the torch for those who died mid-fight. Because this liberation struggle has existed long before us and will continue long after us.
We’re inspired by our fearless journalism trailblazers. In antebellum America, the Black press grew out of abolitionism. The Freedom’s Journal stood in opposition to the New York newspapers and other white media that supported slavery. In early postbellum America, the Black press didn’t see the Emancipation Proclamation as the goalpost. Journalist Ida B. Well’s courageous investigative reporting exposed this country’s continued racism through lynchings.
But let’s not romanticize this work. Some within the Black press lost everything, including their lives, during this pursuit for liberation. In 1837 Illinois, a pro-slavery mob killed Alton Observer publisher Elijah Lovejoy. And in 1898 Wilmington, N.C., The Daily Record publisher Alex Manley and his brother fled town after being threatened with lynchings; the mob of white supremacists burned down the newspaper, the state’s only daily Black newspaper at the time.
As a young Black journalist, I experienced my political awakening in 2012. This idea of objectivity, aggressively taught to me in J-school, became a questionable ideology. George Zimmerman, a vigilante, killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida. I listened to Martin cry out for his life in the distance of a 911 call. The pain that I felt was no different than the generational Black pain felt by seeing a mutilated Emmett Till in the pages of Jet Magazine, or watching Rodney King beaten by police on national television.
This trauma of racial violence is a rite of passage that is inescapable for those with melanated skin.
The aftermath of Trayvon Martin sent me into a fury, studying the abolitionist journalism movement that came before me. It forever changed my approach to this work. It made me leave my job as a breaking news reporter, where I was complicit in producing crime narratives that were not helping to liberate us. It led me to launching The TRiiBE, where we can interrogate such narratives.
When we launched The TRiiBE in 2017, we wanted to uplift the narratives of Black Chicago, particularly through the eyes of Black millennials. At the time, mainstream news headlines led with murder and homicide tallies, making gun violence synonymous with Chicago. This “objective” reporting felt anti-Black to us.
There is no such thing as objectivity. What makes the accounts of those in power hold more weight than the everyday experiences of the people?
With each crisis disproportionately impacting Black Chicagoans, The TRiiBE has risen to the occasion. In 2020, we covered the COVID-19 pandemic. That same year, we uplifted the oft-ignored perspective of organizers during the 2020 uprisings as we covered protests as a beat.
In 2021, then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot tossed The TRiiBE into the middle of a battle with Chicago’s press corp with her midterm interview, but we published a revolutionary interview that shifted political discourse around her relationship to the city’s Black residents. And in 2023, many day-one and new readers told us we educated them about the Chicago mayoral race in ways they’d never seen or even thought was possible.
At The TRiiBE, we recognize that racism is woven into the fabric of America and all of its institutions, including journalism. It is our mission to use our voice to critique those in power, reshape narratives that have prioritized keeping order rather than safety for all and provide a platform for the collective demands of the people.
The TRiiBE will be on-the-ground covering the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago on Aug. 19-22. Now, with President Joe Biden stepping down as the Democratic nominee, many are feeling a lot of uncertainty and anxiety around what happens next.
As a member of the local Black press in Chicago, we want our coverage to spark dialogue around the country. I encourage you to share our work with your neighbors and family, both near and far, to make sure that the radical ideas around this election are a part of mainstream political discourse.
As The TRiiBE’s coverage challenges our audience to see the connections between the past and present, both beyond and within the political apparatus, we hope it will lead to stronger and more liberated Black futures.
