The Richmond Planet
A Black newspaper of record, 1883–1938 — the complete run, 1895–1900
The Richmond Planet was one of the most important Black newspapers of the post-Reconstruction South, edited for most of this period by John Mitchell Jr., who used its pages to document lynching, fight disenfranchisement, and record Black civic life in Virginia. This collection holds five consecutive years of it — every issue the Library of Congress has digitized from 1896 through 1900, save the first half of 1899, which survives in no known Library of Congress scan. Ask about people, events, campaigns, or everyday life — answers come only from the digitized issues in this collection, and every answer cites the issues it draws from.
For questions it can compute, the answer is calculated from this shelf's records rather than inferred from a sample of passages. Other questions are answered from the passages themselves, quoted and cited.
- Records organized: not yet available
- Names and dates reviewed: not yet available
- Counts and comparisons: not yet available
- Checked against the records: not yet available
Questions that count, rank or group the issues are declined here rather than estimated from a search.
What these marks mean
A check means ready on this shelf; a cross means not available yet.
Records organized. Each issue separated out with its date and the people in it, so the collection could be counted and filtered rather than only searched.
Names and dates reviewed. A scholar has checked the names, places and dates the computed answers use, and those decisions are on the record.
Counts and comparisons. The desk counts, ranks and combines, and says so when a question asks for more than these records can support.
Checked against the records. Every computation is checked automatically against results taken straight from the collection.
Help improve this shelf. Ask the questions you actually want answered. If an answer is wrong, incomplete, confusing, or unexpectedly useful, say so. What readers ask is what decides which capabilities are built and tested next.
For researchers
“The Richmond Planet”, from the Library of Congress, Chronicling America. Ask the Records (Kevin Hegg, publisher), build 889, accessed 2026-09-15, https://asktherecords.fly.dev/shelves/richmond-planet. Reviewers’ flags are welcome — “Something look wrong?” under any answer — and each travels with the exact answer it concerns.