George Pheldon Stewart co-founded The Indianapolis Recorder with Will Porter, establishing a voice and a vehicle for African-American news underreported or overlooked completely by mainstream media.

Founded in the mid-1890s, the newspaper’s initial focus was on church news.

As the city’s African-American communities grew in size and sophistication, so did The Recorder. By 1903, according to a profile of Stewart at DePauw University’s Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, the paper was generally four pages, including local and national news.

After Stewart died, his wife, Fannie C. Stewart, took over as owner and publisher. In 1928, Marcus Cuthbert Stewart Sr., the eldest of the couple’s six children, became editor of The Recorder.

Several of his siblings — and later, his children — worked at the paper in various capacities as it became increasingly respected.

In the late 1920s, it took on the Ku Klux Klan and received threats from the group. Marcus Stewart was a crusader for social change and used the newspaper as a platform, urging readers to vote, campaigning to reduce crime in African-American neighborhoods and fighting for stores to hire black workers in their own neighborhoods, among other issues.

In 1974, Marcus Stewart became the first black to be inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. George Stewart was inducted in 2004.