The Broad Ax

Julius F. Taylor, born into slavery in Virginia in 1853, launched the Broad Ax in Salt Lake City in 1895 with the motto "Hew to the line." A committed Democrat and outspoken atheist in Mormon Utah, Taylor moved the paper to Chicago four years later. There it attacked Booker T. Washington and reported on wartime lynchings without restraint, running until Taylor's health forced him to stop in 1931. Digitized pages provided by Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, a project of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library.