PushBlack
PushBlack is a nonprofit media organization based in Washington, D.C., that delivers Black history, news and civic content to millions of subscribers through messaging and social platforms. Founded in 2015, it describes itself as the nation's largest nonprofit media organization for Black Americans, and its model inverts the usual news relationship: instead of waiting for audiences to visit a website, it pushes short, engaging stories directly to subscribers on the platforms they already use, then converts the trust built by that storytelling into civic action, including voter registration and turnout campaigns that reach millions of people.
The organization works from a historical diagnosis. Its leaders argue that mainstream education and media long presented Black people through narratives of oppression that began with slavery and treated progress as something granted rather than achieved, leaving many readers feeling powerless. PushBlack's answer is narrative at scale: daily stories of Black achievement, resistance, culture and organizing, told in accessible formats, designed to help subscribers see themselves as agents in a continuing history and to act on that understanding in their communities and at the ballot box.
Founding and growth
PushBlack was founded in 2015 and obtained its federal nonprofit recognition later in the decade, with a ruling year recorded as 2018. It grew up inside the messaging era of the internet. Its early breakthrough was an innovative Facebook Messenger service that delivered Black history content directly to subscribers in a conversational format, building a list that the organization reports grew to about five million Messenger subscribers. That direct, opt-in relationship, unusual among news organizations of its size, became the engine for everything else the organization built.
From that base, PushBlack expanded into a multi-platform network. By the early 2020s it reported serving about nine million people across all platforms, with audiences numbering in the hundreds of thousands each on TikTok, Facebook and Instagram, a YouTube channel of anchored commentary, newsletters, two podcasts and a website carrying its daily stories. Its own appeals to readers note that, as a small team, it reaches tens of millions of people a year with Black news and history stories. A staff of roughly thirty people, within a total team size in the dozens, produces that output from its Washington base.
Mission and theory of change
PushBlack's stated mission is to inspire Black people to take liberating actions in the best interest of their community, and to build a mass media network that changes hearts and minds through empowering narratives and actions advancing Black liberation at a systems level. That language separates it from conventional news organizations in an important way: it does not claim neutrality about its purpose. It is an advocacy media organization whose journalism, history content and campaigns openly serve civic and economic goals for its community.
Its theory of change runs in stages. First, storytelling builds knowledge and trust: subscribers who may distrust mainstream media encounter accurate, affirming history and news in formats built for sharing. Second, that trust is treated as civic infrastructure. An audience that reads together daily can be asked to register, to make voting plans, to message friends and to support campaigns on criminal justice and economic prosperity. PushBlack argues that narrative is what makes those later asks work, because people act for communities they feel part of, and shared history is how that feeling is manufactured at scale.
Black history as daily news
The core product is evergreen Black history, published every day of the year rather than concentrated in February. Stories recover people, places and episodes omitted from standard curricula: free African communities in colonial America and the burial grounds they protected, Black newspapers that served as voices of the oppressed, Black farmers and towns, inventors, organizers, artists and episodes in which Black history was deliberately rewritten or erased, in the United States and abroad, including in countries such as Argentina. The organization's program reporting organizes this work as a Black History Evergreen program, sharing stories of Black history and culture across all its social platforms.
The format is disciplined. Stories are short enough to read inside a messaging or social feed, written in a direct, communal voice, and closed with an invitation to support the nonprofit's work. That structure reflects hard lessons about attention: history competes with everything else in a phone feed, so each story must earn its place on its own merits while contributing, over months, to a cumulative education no single article could deliver. Readers describe the effect as a course they never enrolled in, taken one story at a time.
News and criminal justice coverage
Alongside history, PushBlack reports current news through a Black community lens, with criminal justice as a signature program area. Its criminal justice work shares stories that raise awareness of problems and solutions in America's criminal legal system, and it publishes a weekly State of Criminal Justice newsletter tracking developments for subscribers. Coverage connects present-day policing, courts and incarceration to the historical material that surrounds it, so a story about a current policy arrives in a feed already rich with context about how that system developed.
Other recurring editorial areas include Black finance and economic life, health, politics and culture. The organization's second podcast, Building Black Dollars, is devoted to finance content, extending the economic strand of its mission. Across beats, the editorial test is consistent: does this story increase subscribers' understanding of their power, personal and collective, and does it point toward an action, a protection or an opportunity relevant to Black readers specifically, rather than to a general audience in the abstract?
Black History Year and audio
PushBlack's best-known expansion beyond the feed is Black History Year, a podcast launched on May 22, 2020, that connects listeners with Black thinkers and activists usually excluded from mainstream conversation. Its first season of six episodes addressed subjects including the fear of Black women's bodies, Black gun ownership, religion in Black America and young Black millionaires. The launch was a notable popular success: within its first day the show reached the top of Apple's history podcast chart and ranked among the most popular podcasts overall on the platform, and it gathered more than twenty thousand subscribers in its first forty-eight hours.
The podcast feed later incorporated the short-form 2-Minute Black History strand, delivering compact audio history alongside long interviews, and the production credits show a substantial in-house team of producers, editors and researchers, with chief executive Julian Walker serving as executive producer. Audio matters strategically for PushBlack because it deepens the relationship that short text stories begin: a subscriber who spends half an hour with a historian through the organization's podcast is a different kind of audience member from one who taps through a feed, and that depth supports the organization's membership and mobilization work.
Civic engagement and voting
PushBlack's get-out-the-vote program is national and year-round, built on relational organizing. Since 2018, according to its program reporting, it has used its engaging history and news stories and targeted advertising to build its subscriber base, then asked subscribers to do three things: make a commitment to vote, send personalized messages to friends encouraging them to vote, using shareable media such as images and profile frames, and turn out on Election Day. The aim is to convert subscribers into digital organizers within their own networks, where a message from a friend carries weight no advertisement can buy.
The organization says its voting campaigns reach more than ten million African Americans. That scale, combined with its relational method, makes PushBlack a significant piece of American civic infrastructure that happens to be organized as a media company. Election researchers increasingly treat trusted messengers as the scarce resource in turnout work; PushBlack's entire editorial operation can be read as a system for manufacturing and maintaining such messengers, with history content as the trust-building medium between election cycles.
Leadership and organization
PushBlack is led by chief executive Julian Walker, a filmmaker by background who also executive-produces its flagship podcast, and it operates as a 501(c)(3) public charity headquartered in Washington, D.C. Its published address is on H Street NE in the capital. The organization is governed by a predominantly independent board, and charity evaluators have rated it strongly: Charity Navigator awarded it a four-star rating with an overall score in the low nineties, citing accountability, financial health, a high share of spending on programs and efficient fundraising, with no reported material diversion of assets.
Funding follows the nonprofit media pattern of reader support plus institutional backing. PushBlack appeals directly and frequently to its audience for small monthly contributions, commonly five or ten dollars, framing donations as what makes independent Black media possible. That reader-revenue base aligns its incentives with its subscribers in a way advertising-driven models do not, while foundation and partner support underwrites campaign-scale work such as its voting programs.
Networks and recognition
PushBlack joined the URL Media network as its fourteenth partner, aligning with a coalition of media organizations committed to uplifting marginalized voices and stories. URL Media highlighted precisely the qualities that define PushBlack's model: daily Black history, criminal justice reporting, finance content, an evergreen voter registration effort and a platform strategy centered on messaging. For PushBlack, network membership offers content amplification and collaboration, including the chance to add historical context to partner outlets' news coverage.
Within Black media, PushBlack's significance is partly demographic. Legacy Black media institutions were built on print and broadcast economics that have contracted sharply. PushBlack demonstrates an alternative native to phones and feeds: no printing plant, no transmitters, but a subscriber relationship measured in millions and an archive of thousands of short stories. Its description of itself as the nation's largest nonprofit Black media company is also a claim about where the center of gravity in Black media is moving, from owned distribution infrastructure to owned audience relationships.
PushBlack as a news service
For this directory, PushBlack belongs among news agencies and services because distribution is its essence. It supplies a continuous wire of Black history, news and civic content into messaging inboxes and social feeds, and through its network partnerships into other outlets' coverage. Subscribers experience it less as a destination than as a service that arrives, daily, with a story they did not know and an action they can take. That push model, reflected in its name, is its founding insight and remains its competitive advantage.
The organization's own storytellers have framed its purpose through the educator Carter G. Woodson, founder of Black History Week, whose 1933 book argued that miseducation taught Black Americans to doubt themselves. PushBlack presents its work as a corrective delivered through the dominant communications technology of its century, just as Woodson used the print institutions of his. Whether measured by its millions of subscribers, its voting campaigns or its chart-topping podcast, PushBlack has built one of the most closely watched experiments in American nonprofit media: proof that history, told well and delivered directly, can organize a public.
