At the time, anti-Catholicism and political nativism were rampant, causing American Catholics to be physically threatened by Protestants with acts such as the burning of churches and convents.

Rudd believed that the newspaper was important in promoting the church as a transformational institution that was capable of bringing equality and social justice for African Americans.

Rudd was also a very good businessman who knew how to reach out and teach others who thought like him and wanted to push for the same rights and changes, such as Black Catholics and Protestants.

This allowed him to expand his own business and dreams with printing, and start creating custom cards, letterheads, envelopes, invoices, pamphlets, books, legal documents, and advertisements.

African Americans saw his will to make a change and fight for something they've believed in for quite some time, so many bishops, monsignors, laypersons, and even more Protestants gave him financial aid.

Wells and her Memphis Free Speech, alongside the Detroit Plaindealer, in hiring a correspondent to investigate the conditions of African Americans in the former Confederacy.

His successes led the Afro-American Press League (a consortium of the roughly two hundred Black newspapers being published in the country at the time) to ask Rudd to serve as its president.

[This quote needs a citation] In May 1888, Rudd called upon Black Catholics all over the country under the “Blessing of Holy Mother Church.” It was believed that this group could serve as a “leaven” of the race, lifting all African Americans both in the eyes of God and in humanity.

The Colored Catholic Congress held its first meeting in Washington, D.C. in January 1889, where Venerable Father Augustus Tolton, the nation's first openly-Black priest, celebrated Mass, and the 200-strong group met with President Grover Cleveland.

In 1897, there was a collapse of the Tribune due to the economic recession and increased competition from other businesses in the newspaper industry in Cincinnati and Philadelphia, as well as new Black Catholic papers in other parts of the country.

After a while, Rudd started to notice that the movement toward equality for African Americans was moving at a very slow pace, prompting him to accept Booker T. Washington’s self-help philosophy.

In Fall 2020, Rudd's childhood parish—in conjunction with the Archdiocese of Louisville—announced plans to unveil a memorial historical marker at his gravesite on All Saints' Day of that same year, commemorating his impact on American Catholicism and the larger United States.