Black-owned paper’s ‘soldiers’ fight to give African American perspective Amudalat Ajasa in Minneapolis
Just five blocks away from the crossroads of 38th and Chicago, where the world watched Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd last May, sits the oldest Black newspaper in Minnesota: the Spokesman-Recorder.
The almost 87-year-old paper was originally two Black newspapers, the Saint Paul Recorder and the Minneapolis Spokesman, launched by civil rights activist Cecil Newman. In 1976, when he died, his wife, Launa Newman, ran the paper until she was 86. In her retirement, Newman passed the paper down to her granddaughter: Tracey Williams-Dillard.
Now Williams-Dillard heads the paper from the same desk where her grandfather once sat. Williams-Dillard started at the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder, one of the longest-standing family-owned newspapers in the United States when she was eight – the same age her grandfather was when he started his first newspaper.