Nebraska has had a significant black press in the state since the late nineteenth century, though most of the commercially successful newspapers were in its city of Omaha.
[A][2] After the New Era folded due to costs in August 1926,[B][3] Herman J. Ford founded the Omaha Guide on February 27, 1927,[4] which revolved primarily around the area of North 24th Street.
[4] In a 1931 letter, Galloway laid out his intentions to "put out a Red-Hot paper" that would "smash the color line with a cosmopolitan, by weekly, ten-page newspaper".
Harris (who published the St. Joseph Review in Missouri) and Arthur B. McCaw (a civil servant and law student) to oversee two of its departments and write for the paper.
[8] While Galloway had originally supported Herbert Hoover over Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, the Guide gradually changed its political outlook; it subscribed to the communist-operated Crusader News Service, and printed radical material—including defenses of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.
[D][9] Galloway's editorial control was subdued in 1937—around the same time as his disillusionment with radical economic policy—and the paper shifted to the right with the hiring of Mildred Brown and her husband Edward Gilbert.