On December 3, 1847, the first issue of The North Star appeared. It was a four-page weekly with a subscription cost of two dollars per year. It had a circulation of between two and three thousand copies, and its publishing costs were about eighty dollars per week. It was printed in the first print shop owned by an African American. Douglass chose journalist Martin Robison Delaney as his coeditor, but the two soon clashed over the issue of “colonization.” Colonization was a scheme promoted by the American Colonization Society to resettle former slaves in Africa, rather than integrate them within American society. Delaney supported colonization, and Douglass vigorously opposed it. When a disgusted Delaney left in 1848 to found a colony along West Africa’s Niger River, Douglass became sole editor of his paper. He vigorously espoused the principle of integration throughout the rest of his life.
In the first issue of The North Star, Douglass urged African Americans to become politically active and pledged that his newspaper would aggressively attack slavery, work to free southern slaves, and promote African American morality and progress. The paper’s lead article recounted the convention of “colored people” of 1847, with its primary objectives of abolishing slavery and elevating free African Americans. In subsequent years, The North Star dealt with such burning issues as social injustice, inequality, racism, the dangers of drink and dissipation, the benefits of integrated school systems, the elimination of segregated hotels and railroads, the folly of war and capital punishment, the worth of laborers, the imperative need for racial unity among African Americans, and the unfair voting practices designed to handicap African Americans in northern states. The North Star came to the defense not only of persecuted African Americans but also of Native Americans, the Irish, and members of other immigrant groups. From its beginnings, The North Star lived up to its masthead:
“Right Is of No Sex—Truth Is of No Color—God Is the Father of Us All, and All We Are Brethren”