In the last chapter, I argued that multiple publics and alternative news media helped to expand the scope of participation and to broaden the substantive content of social solidarity in civil society. By helping to counter the forces of participatory inequality and cultural hegemony in the dominant communicative spaces of mainstream civil society, multiple publics enable minority groups simultaneously to maintain cultural autonomy and to engage other publics in discussion and deliberation. In a civil society consisting of multiple publics, voluntary associations need to develop strategies for participating in both large and small media spaces. Without smaller media over which they have a high degree of control, associations become too dependent on the preferences and practical routines of mainstream journalists. Without access to larger media, they lose the ability to influence the larger public agenda.

This chapter offers historical evidence for the value of multiple publics and alternative media, by describing the development of the African-American and mainstream press and public spheres in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The need for alternative publics developed early in American history, as the exclusion of African-Americans encouraged the formation of separate publics and the desire to build a national black press. The first black newspaper was established in 1827, and more than forty separate black papers were started before the Civil War.