The Monitor was founded in 1915 by John Albert Williams, an African American civic and religious leader[1] and previous writer for the Enterprise, another black Omaha newspaper.
[3] The paper advocated for an expansion of civil rights for and civic participation by black people, which included stories devoted to church activities and economic agitation.
[2] Williams regularly pushed for his readers to gain a sense of racial pride, though in 1918, after he criticised their existence, he began accepting advertisements for products developed to distort natural Afro-textured hair and black skin.
[1] Civic participation was a feature of the Monitor, and the paper successfully rallied protests against a public showing of The Birth of a Nation; in one protest, however, they failed to stop or alter the showing, though the cinema's manager "agreed to print a statement about the good behavior of blacks in the cinema program", according to one historian.
[5] George Wells Parker was the paper's manager until 1920, when he left to found the New Era, a publication that was stronger in its calls for racial equality.