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Wisconsin Labor Advocate, La Crosse,
Wis. : Geo. E. Taylor, 1886-
Special
Collections Wisconsiana Oversize
F586 .W57 |
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“Wisconsin Labor Advocate” Newspaper & Editor, George Edwin Taylor
The second item digitized with the help of Endowment
Fund in 2002 was the only known original copy of the “Wisconsin Labor
Advocate,” a newspaper published in La Crosse in 1886-1887. La Crosse was
a hotbed of Labor political party activity in the 1880s and the “Labor
Advocate” was one of at least four La Crosse area Labor-related newspapers
from that time. Besides Murphy Library having the only original issues,
what makes the “Labor Advocate” unique was its editor and owner: George
Edwin Taylor. Taylor was an African-American, born in Arkansas in 1857. As
a black business owner, he was an anomaly in La Crosse in the 1880s. Taylor
got his start in publishing working at other La Crosse newspapers. He also
became increasingly interested in politics as reflected in his editorship of
the “Wisconsin Labor Advocate.” The last existing edition of the paper
dates from August 6, 1887 and George Edwin Taylor left La Crosse soon
afterwards. He maintained a life-long interest in politics and by 1904 had
become involved in an all African-American political party called the National
Liberty Party. Taylor accepted the nomination of that party in 1904 as its
candidate for the office of the U.S. President. In doing so, Taylor was the
first candidate of a national African-American party for the U.S.
presidency.
The entire run of the “Wisconsin Labor
Advocate,” was scanned, converted both to TIFF and JPEG
versions, and put on CDs. It also was scanned with OCR
(optical character recognition) to enable keyword searching.
This work was performed and recently completed by Northern
Micrographics, a company here in La Crosse Murphy Library
is looking for volunteers to make corrections to the PDF version
to improve the OCR searching. If you are interested in
volunteering, please contact Murphy Library.
The OCR text has not been
corrected and there are many errors. If you would like to volunteer to
assist in correcting the text, please let us know. See the
Volunteering button at the top of the screen.
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