Pacific Appeal

Pacific Appeal was co-founded by Philip Alexander Bell, an African-American civil rights and antislavery activist who had established Weekly Advocate (edited by Samuel Cornish) and worked for William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator,[4] and Peter Anderson, a San Francisco civil rights activist and delegate at the California Colored Citizens Convention.[5] It was the successor to the Mirror of the Times, another San Francisco-based African-American newspaper that had been established in 1855,[3] with the change of name occurring along with a change of proprietor from Judge Mifflin W. Gibbs[6]^: 76[7]^: 8 to William H. Carter.[6]^: 91 Its contemporaries at the time included the Anglo-African, and it was regarded as the official organ of African-Americans on the Pacific slope.[6]^: 91

The paper’s motto was “He who would be free, himself must strike the blow.”[6]^: 92[3] It began publishing in April 1862.[1][2]

Later, Bell and Anderson would split, with Bell accusing Anderson of becoming less antislavery and more accommodationist.[3]

The coverage of antislavery and civil rights issues in the first few years has been covered by historians and chroniclers of black abolitionism of the era, including in The Afro-American Press and Its Editors.[6]^: 92[8][3]

The inaugural 1862 volume contained eight antislavery poems, including four poems by San Francisco poet James Madison Bell, writing under the initials JMB.[3]

Pacific Appeal also published some 250 proclamations by Emperor Norton, self-proclaimed Emperor of the United States, including his proposals for what would later become the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge and the Transbay Tube.[9][10][11][12]

• List of African-American newspapers in California