On this day, Nov. 7, in 1837, abolitionist printer Elijah Lovejoy was shot dead by a mob in Alton, Ill., while attempting to protect his printing shop from being destroyed a third time. Lovejoy, a pastor who ran a religious newspaper in St. Louis, had been forced to move from Missouri after a mob destroyed his business for printing stories about a lynching and the subsequent trial that acquitted the leaders of the hanging.
He then began the Alton Observer, which advocated the end of slavery.
Three times mobs seized the printing press and tossed it into the Mississippi River.
When slave owners heard about the arrival of a fourth press, they shot Lovejoy dead.
Lovejoy is considered by some to be America’s first martyr for the freedom of the press.
— Scott McCabe
