 In Montgomery, Alabama, in March of 1955, a young woman was arrested for refusing to move to the colored section in the back of a city bus. That young woman's name was Claudette Colvin. She refused to get proceed nine months before Rosa Parks. Colvin was only 15 years old when she was arrested. Unlike Rosa Parks, who was an NAAC officer and dedicated activist, Colvin did not have civil rights training and did not become a symbolic figure of the civil rights movement. To understand why Sophie people have heard of Claudette Colvin, we have to consider how her arrest was covered in the media at the time. Colvin was on the front page of the Chicago Defender, the nation's leading African-American newspaper. But her courageous stand against segregation was not deemed newsworthy by any national white newspapers. If journalism is the first draft of history, white newspapers were the first to write Colvin out of our nation's history. If you travel back in time to the 1950s and pick up a big city newspaper like the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times, you have no idea that those cities had thriving African-American communities. While millions of African-Americans lived in those cities, the newspapers carried very little information about black people, and what they did carry were often sensationalized crime stories. Thankfully, African-American newspapers like the New York Amsterdam News, Chicago Defender, and Los Angeles Sentinel filled this void. Unlike mainstream white newspapers, African-American newspapers were dedicated to recording and sharing stories about the everyday joys, struggles, and complexities of black lives. The black press was a fighting press, and reporters and editors understood that they had to take a side on certain issues, such as civil rights. The legacy of black newspapers lives on through the work of black journalists, organizers, and activists in social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, much in the same way that black newspapers in the 1950s reported on the murder of Emmett Till. Today, many Americans learn about police shootings of black people through social media. These historical echoes are not accidental. Black lives mattered every day in papers like the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier. And when African-American newspapers advocated for the humanity of black people, they also made it clear that white newspapers were not politically neutral. Media has always had the power to reveal or conceal different people, events, or histories. Like the story of Claudette Colvin, the stories that live in the archives of black newspapers can help us reckon more honestly with our nation's history. The history of the fighting press is important today because there's still so many things worth fighting for.