They assembled in the printing office for three afternoons each week, setting their minds and hands to typesetting while their classmates washed laundry or worked in the sewing room. Perhaps it was a joy to be there—smelling the ink, feeling the type click under their fingers. Perhaps it seemed like yet more schoolwork, on which they had already labored from 9 to 2.
Whatever the mood in the print shop, the results are impeccable: the “first work” of four students, the inaugural issue of the Spelman Messenger has nary a misprint or bad break.1 The Messenger was ostensibly a job-training tool for students at the institution then known as Spelman Seminary—now Spelman College, Atlanta’s distinguished historically Black liberal arts college for women. Philanthropist John Fox Slater funded Spelman’s 1885 acquisition of a printing press with the express aim of preparing students to “[earn] an honest livelihood.”2 Printing soon joined sewing as a vocational skill deemed appropriate for young Black women at Spelman and beyond. An 1890 photograph of students at nearby Atlanta University—now Clark Atlanta University—shows seven women as well as eight men at work in the Stone Hall Printing Office. Possibly a posed photo (most of the students look straight into the camera), an overflowing wastepaper basket in the foreground hints at the unseen hubbub of an active print shop.
At Spelman, a Baptist institution organized under the motto “Our Whole School For Christ,” early instructors and benefactors saw printing as a tool for furthering religious work as well as industrial education. The first student creators of the Messenger learned to print under the tutelage of Hattie Phinney, a white teacher from Rochester, New York, who later left Spelman to become a missionary in colonial Myanmar. Phinney maintained close contact with her former printing students, and her letters to the Messenger reveal that one of her first acts upon arriving in the country she knew as “Burma” was to connect with the mission press.3
For Phinney, printing was a vital skill that could help the Lord’s Word become more portable. To some degree, she appears to have passed on this attitude to her students, several of whom started mission presses of their own. In an 1892 letter that appeared in the Baptist Missionary Magazine, for example, Spelman graduate Nora A. Gordon writes to request a new “press and an outfit of type,” noting that she and Class of 1887 Valedictorian Clara Ann Howard “have charge of the printing” at the school the two women founded at Lukunga Mission Station, Congo.4
For Gordon and Howard, however, print appears to have offered a way to build community as well as to further evangelical aims. “We are now getting out a circular letter for the churches and schools,” Gordon adds in her message. “In this letter the people are urged upon to support their own schools, native teachers, etc. We have many reasons to believe that they will do this most heartily.”5 While the Spelman graduates’ Lukunga print shop was inevitably entangled in colonial mission work, Gordon suggests here that the printed word also enabled on-the-ground organizing efforts that placed local teachers and communities at their center.
Other former Spelman students used their printing skills to found publications with the explicit aim of supporting Black communities in the United States. Consider Harriet Rutherford Watson, Class of 1907, a former member of the Messenger staff. In 1929, Watson co-founded The Arkansawyer to serve students at the Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College in Pine Bluff, AK (now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, another HBCU). In her later role as director of the National Youth Administration’s Camp Bethune, a 1937 New Deal project, Watson also established a newspaper for the camp’s young Black women, some of whom may have learned to print at her side.6
Watson’s post-Spelman activities hint that the college press prepared her and her classmates to do far more than earn “an honest livelihood” (in Slater’s patronizing turn of phrase). So, in fact, do her articles for the Messenger, which suggest that the print shop provided early Spelman students with a space for self-expression in spite of the presence of supervisory adults. A remarkable issue of the Messenger published in May 1899 features eight short student-authored articles about printing, including a piece on “Colons” by “Hattie L. G. Rutherford, Pr’g Dept.” Taken together, the articles show both scholarly fluency with printing history and an intimate personal knowledge of printing as a craft.
As a novice printer myself, these articles move me in their attempts to demystify the print shop and welcome other learners into the space. “Let me tell you where you may find this mark when you go to the case,” writes Watson after explaining to her readers how colons function in a sentence. “Come, girls, we will take a proof,” Nannie S. Yates begins in her contribution, “Taking A Proof,” which ends with the deeply relatable admission that “In one proof I took, the paper was not laid smooth and it wrinkled and was of no use.”7
In Learning Legacies (2017), Sarah Ruffing Robbins recalls learning from Spelman College Archivist and Historian Taronda Spencer that an important early audience of the Messenger was not Spelman’s white benefactors but rather young girls in “rural Black communities where future Spelman students lived.”8 Messenger articles like “Taking A Proof” simultaneously impress with their erudition and send younger readers the message join us; you can do this, too. As Spelman student Claudia T. W. Harreld would later reflect in 1924, over 30 years after the Messenger’s founding, “The Messenger has been far more than a school paper; it has been a journal of intelligence. . . . a vital link.”9 In learning to print, students like Harreld and Watson before her claimed space on the page—and drafted their own history of life at the college.
Odds and Ends
Continued access to the Messenger and current understanding of its development and significance would not be possible without the careful scholarship and archival labor of the late historian and librarian Taronda Spencer (Spelman College Class of 1980), who “lent her gifts…to preserving the history of African American education in the United States.”10
Do you know more about the history of the Messenger (or can reveal what happened to print shop’s equipment)? Ms. Printer’s Devil knows that she has barely scratched the surface and eagerly welcomes your comments, critiques, and thoughts.
Description based on details provided in the Spelman Messenger 1, no. 1 (March 1885): 2.
Messenger 1, no. 1 (March 1885): 1.
The Baptist Missionary Magazine 72 (January 1892): 26.
Fon Louise Gordon, “Hattie Rutherford Watson,” CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas, last updated July 15, 2009, https://encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/hattie-rutherford-watson-1795/.
Sarah Ruffing Robbins, Chapter 2: “‘That my work may speak well for Spelman’: Messengers Recording History and Performing Uplift,” Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching (Digital Culture Books, 2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.4469010.