The Elevator

Reading San Francisco: 1866

Phillip Alexander Bell’s life encompassed the century and the continent. He was born in 1808 in New York to a family of free Blacks. His father was a sailor, and frequently away, and so Bell grew close to his mother. Teased for a speech impediment, he turned to literature, diving into the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Robinson Crusoe. Bell was educated at the African Free School in New York, an Episcopal institution that trained a generation of civil rights leaders. It would prove to be a good education. When he died in 1889 in San Francisco he had been for the last quarter century of his life the editor and publisher of the Elevator, the city’s most prominent African-American newspaper. Today we’re looking at the newspaper, as well as its editor, one of the most prominent members of the city’s small Black community. If you’d like to read the archives of the Elevator, you can find them online here.

I learned about Bell from a monograph written in 1976 and published by the San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society. (It’s available online here.)

Even before moving to the West Coast, Bell had already had a long career as a newspaper editor on the east coast — and a successful one. Bell began publishing the Weekly Advocate in Philadelphia in 1837, before relocating to New York and renaming it the Colored American. As Frederick Douglass told him in a letter, the publication, one of the first Black newspapers in the country, had inspired him. “I cannot tell — no living man can tell –—what joy and hope I felt when, newly from slavery, I looked for the first time upon the Colored American,” wrote Douglass. “Can this really be true, thought I. Is this really the work of colored men? Slavery and slander had done their work. They had made me doubt the ability of my race [...] Since that time I have never entirely lost sight of Philip A. Bell, nor lost faith in the future of my people.”