User:Vchimpanzee/The Colored Enterprise

The Colored Enterprise was a weekly newspaper serving the African-American community of Asheville, North Carolina which was published for two years starting February 7, 1896. Only one copy, found in March 2015 a time capsule placed at the Vance Monument in 1897, is known to exist. content from the paper appeared in the Asheville Citizen, most likely because Leatherwood tried to have a positive relationship with white people.

Thomas Leatherwood, whose father was English and whose mother was Cherokee, was publisher and editor of The Colored Enterprise. In addition to starting the city's only black pharmacy, he edited The Freedmen's Advocate, another newspaper, in 1892. Leatherwood used his paper to advocate for improvrments in the lives of area black people, and at least one of his columns ran in other papers in North Carolina.

The Colored Enterprise apparently ended publication when Leatherwood started a group of black soldiers called the Maceo Volunteers, intending for them to serve in the Spanish-American War. After the war, Leatherwood moved to Washington, D.C. and started another paper.