THE
Anglo-African Magazine
Apology.
(INTRODUCTORY.)
The publisher of this Magazine was 'brought up' among Newspapers, Magazines, &c. The training of his boyhood and the employment of his manhood have been in the arts and mysteries which pertain to the neighborhood of Spruce and Nassau streets in the city of New York. Of course the top of the strata, the upper-crust of the laminæ in his geologic region is—the Publisher. . . . To become a Publisher, was the dream of his youth (not altogether a dream, for, while yet a boy he published, for several months, the People's Press, a not unnoticed weekly paper,) and the aim of his manhood. He understands the business thoroughly, and intends, if the requisite editorial matter can be furnished, to make this Magazine 'one of the institutions of the country.'
He would seem to be the right man in the right place; for the class of whom he is the representative in Printing House Square, sorely need an independent voice in the 'fourth estate.' Frederick Douglass has said that 'the twelve millions of blacks in the United States and its environs must occupy the notice and the care of the Almighty:' these millions, in order to assert and maintain their rank as men among men, must speak for themselves; no outside tongue, however gifted with eloquence, can tell their story; no outside eye, however penetrating, can see their wants; no outside organization, however benevolently intended, nor however cunningly contrived, can develope the energies and aspirations which make up their mission.
The wealth, the intellect, the Legislation, (State and Federal.) the pulpit, and the science of America, have concentrated on no one point so heartily as in the endeavor to write down the negro as something less than a man: yet at the very moment of the triumph of this effort, there runs through the marrow of those who make it, an unaccountable consciousness, an aching dread, that this noir faineant, this great black sluggard, is somehow endowed with forces which are felt rather than seen, and which may in 'some grim revel,'
