The Iowa Bystander is an Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

 newspaper

Newspaper

A newspaper is a scheduled publication containing news of current events, informative articles, diverse features and advertising. It usually is printed on relatively inexpensive, low-grade paper such as newsprint. By 2007, there were 6580 daily newspapers in the world selling 395 million copies a...

 targeted toward an African-American audience. It was founded in Des Moines on June 8, 1894 by William Coalson. From 1896–1922 the publisher was John L. Thompson

John L. Thompson

John Lay Thompson was an Iowa journalist and businessman who played a key role in the early history of the African American newspaper the Iowa Bystander....

. In 1922, Thompson sold the newspaper to World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 veteran James B. Morris for $1,700. In the subsequent years, Morris and the paper developed close ties with the NAACP and fought the rise of the Ku Klux Klan

Ku Klux Klan

Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...

in Iowa.

After James Morris's death in 1977, the newspaper has switched hands several times, but it still publishes under its original motto of "Fear God, Tell the Truth, Make Money".