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- CITIZEN CRUSADER / THE NEW CITIZEN [Bound Volume of 52 Issues]
CITIZEN CRUSADER / THE NEW CITIZEN [Bound Volume of 52 Issues]
CITIZEN CRUSADER / THE NEW CITIZEN [Bound Volume of 52 Issues]
CALLOWAY, Deverne (editor) : [African-Americana] : [Newspapers]. CITIZEN CRUSADER / THE NEW CITIZEN [Bound Volume of 52 Issues]. St. Louis, Missouri : (1961-1962). Approximately 18" x 11 1/2" (x about 2" thick) volume. Green buckram cloth over boards with a small title, "NEW CITIZEN / 1961-1962," stamped in gilt to front. Holding 52 issues totalling 736pp. A few mended closed tears to newsprint leaves, one leaf (pp. 3-4 of March 10, 1961 issue) with a small section of paper loss from lower margin. Contents complete and save for a few tiny instances of text underlining in ink, no notable markings, missing elements, etc... Previous moisture exposure to upper corner has left some ugly (though seemingly benign) dampstaining to upper page edge and some expansion to front board panel. Contents with some infrequent and faint dampstaining at very edges of some upper page margins, though interior remains largely unaffected. Contents are clean and the binding is sound.
MORE IMAGES: https://photos.app.goo.gl/9hgJUoLi7KMgFqvs8
A bound volume holding 52 issues of a short-lived Black St. Louis Civil Rights-era newspaper variantly titled CITIZEN CRUSADER or THE NEW CITIZEN in an unbroken run spanning Volume 1, No. 8 (February 24, 1961) to Volume 2, No. 22 (December 7, 1962). The paper was published and edited by husband and wife, DaVerne and Ernest Calloway from their home at 4441 Kennerly Avenue in The Ville neighborhood of north city. DaVerne was the first Black woman elected to the Missouri legislature, serving as a member of the State’s House of Representatives from 1962-1982. Ernest was a nationally-prominent labor leader with Teamsters Local 688 and onetime President of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP.
Highlights in its original reporting and photography include DaVerne’s blow-by-blow commentary on the progress of the Freedom Riders throughout 1961 ; extensive coverage of the Freedom City tent encampment near Somerville, Tennessee ; a 1961 CORE sit-in protest in Sikeston, Missouri ; fearless coverage of myriad local issues in and around St. Louis including the razing of Mill Creek Valley, housing security, school desegregation, employment discrimination, organized labor, etc…. All reflecting Ernest’s comprehensive “total person” philosophy of unionism and political action formed with Harold Gibbons (see Bussel*) and what Hick** called DaVerne’s “[...] dignified agitation to the St. Louis political scene.”
From the paper’s mission statement found in an early issue:
“The new Citizen Crusader is an angry newspaper. There are several other weekly newspapers in the St. Louis negro community which have various and sundry reasons for existing. Some seek to entertain, others seek to make money, and still others seek to create the dangerous image and illusion that all is well [in] our community, state, nation, and world during this critical period of history. That is their concern and we will not spend too much time with the question. But for the Citizen Crusader all is not well-freedom-wise-with our community, our state and our country. There is much work to be done. There are mountains to climb, there are rivers to cross. There are deserts to be endured, and there are new social frontiers to be conquered.
As an angry newspaper, we have only one axe to grind-our studied indifference to our own welfare [...] we believe there is more to the St. Louis Negro community than the Friday night sorority dance or the Saturday night knife and razor crowd. Between these two social extremes, there exist the real St. Louis Negro community-daily working, struggling to survive, and quietly making their own small contributions to a better community. This newspaper addresses itself to that great body of hard-working citizens.” (Volume 1, Number 8 ; February 24, 1961 ; pp. 4)
Commercial offerings for surviving issues are non-existent and library holdings are limited to what appears to be a nearly comprehensive run in the Ernest Calloway papers at the State Historical Society of Missouri at UMSL and about a dozen issues spanning August 1962 to February 1963 at The University of Illinois.
OCLC additionally cites a holding at a Washoe County, Nevada public library, though we suspect that record is a mistake. We estimate the present binding contains roughly 80% of all issues published, usually weekly or bi-weekly between late-1960 and early-1963.
*BUSSEL, Robert, FIGHTING FOR TOTAL PERSON UNIONISM: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship (2015). University of Illinois Press.
**HICK, Holly, "DeVerne Calloway: "I am a Teacher-I will Teach" (2020). Dissertations. 996.
CALLOWAY, Deverne (editor) : [African-Americana] : [Newspapers]. CITIZEN CRUSADER / THE NEW CITIZEN [Bound Volume of 52 Issues]. St. Louis, Missouri : (1961-1962). Approximately 18" x 11 1/2" (x about 2" thick) volume. Green buckram cloth over boards with a small title, "NEW CITIZEN / 1961-1962," stamped in gilt to front. Holding 52 issues totalling 736pp. A few mended closed tears to newsprint leaves, one leaf (pp. 3-4 of March 10, 1961 issue) with a small section of paper loss from lower margin. Contents complete and save for a few tiny instances of text underlining in ink, no notable markings, missing elements, etc... Previous moisture exposure to upper corner has left some ugly (though seemingly benign) dampstaining to upper page edge and some expansion to front board panel. Contents with some infrequent and faint dampstaining at very edges of some upper page margins, though interior remains largely unaffected. Contents are clean and the binding is sound.
MORE IMAGES: https://photos.app.goo.gl/9hgJUoLi7KMgFqvs8
A bound volume holding 52 issues of a short-lived Black St. Louis Civil Rights-era newspaper variantly titled CITIZEN CRUSADER or THE NEW CITIZEN in an unbroken run spanning Volume 1, No. 8 (February 24, 1961) to Volume 2, No. 22 (December 7, 1962). The paper was published and edited by husband and wife, DaVerne and Ernest Calloway from their home at 4441 Kennerly Avenue in The Ville neighborhood of north city. DaVerne was the first Black woman elected to the Missouri legislature, serving as a member of the State’s House of Representatives from 1962-1982. Ernest was a nationally-prominent labor leader with Teamsters Local 688 and onetime President of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP.
Highlights in its original reporting and photography include DaVerne’s blow-by-blow commentary on the progress of the Freedom Riders throughout 1961 ; extensive coverage of the Freedom City tent encampment near Somerville, Tennessee ; a 1961 CORE sit-in protest in Sikeston, Missouri ; fearless coverage of myriad local issues in and around St. Louis including the razing of Mill Creek Valley, housing security, school desegregation, employment discrimination, organized labor, etc…. All reflecting Ernest’s comprehensive “total person” philosophy of unionism and political action formed with Harold Gibbons (see Bussel*) and what Hick** called DaVerne’s “[...] dignified agitation to the St. Louis political scene.”
From the paper’s mission statement found in an early issue:
“The new Citizen Crusader is an angry newspaper. There are several other weekly newspapers in the St. Louis negro community which have various and sundry reasons for existing. Some seek to entertain, others seek to make money, and still others seek to create the dangerous image and illusion that all is well [in] our community, state, nation, and world during this critical period of history. That is their concern and we will not spend too much time with the question. But for the Citizen Crusader all is not well-freedom-wise-with our community, our state and our country. There is much work to be done. There are mountains to climb, there are rivers to cross. There are deserts to be endured, and there are new social frontiers to be conquered.
As an angry newspaper, we have only one axe to grind-our studied indifference to our own welfare [...] we believe there is more to the St. Louis Negro community than the Friday night sorority dance or the Saturday night knife and razor crowd. Between these two social extremes, there exist the real St. Louis Negro community-daily working, struggling to survive, and quietly making their own small contributions to a better community. This newspaper addresses itself to that great body of hard-working citizens.” (Volume 1, Number 8 ; February 24, 1961 ; pp. 4)
Commercial offerings for surviving issues are non-existent and library holdings are limited to what appears to be a nearly comprehensive run in the Ernest Calloway papers at the State Historical Society of Missouri at UMSL and about a dozen issues spanning August 1962 to February 1963 at The University of Illinois.
OCLC additionally cites a holding at a Washoe County, Nevada public library, though we suspect that record is a mistake. We estimate the present binding contains roughly 80% of all issues published, usually weekly or bi-weekly between late-1960 and early-1963.
*BUSSEL, Robert, FIGHTING FOR TOTAL PERSON UNIONISM: Harold Gibbons, Ernest Calloway, and Working-Class Citizenship (2015). University of Illinois Press.
**HICK, Holly, "DeVerne Calloway: "I am a Teacher-I will Teach" (2020). Dissertations. 996.