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Letter to the editor

To survive, and flourish

A widow won't let the Weekly Challenger fade into oblivion after 40 years.

By PAUL SWIDER, Times Staff Writer
Published October 24, 2007

Ethel Johnson took over publishing the Weekly Challenger after her husband died in 2001. "The Challenger is another point of view," she says, one that highlights the positives in African-American culture.
	[Paul Swider | Times]

ST. PETERSBURG 

From its audacious beginnings, the Weekly Challenger has placed demands on all who've touched it.

Ethel Johnson became the newspaper's publisher after her husband, Cleveland, died in 2001.

"He always said it was quite a challenge every week just to get it out," she said.

She had watched her husband all those years, but taking over "was quite a challenge for me too."

This year, the family-owned newspaper celebrated 40 years speaking to the city's African-American community. While the paper is still a niche publication, its history is felt well beyond its tiny offices on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street S.

Born of a notion of empowerment during the civil rights movement, the Challenger has always sought to portray the positive aspects of life among black residents, Johnson said, not the crime and poverty for which they are known in the mainstream media.

Her husband also laid down a challenge: for African-Americans to live up to their potential.

"He also emphasized commerce," said Deputy Mayor Goliath Davis, who said he grew up reading the Challenger and can still vividly recall its front-page banner: "Black people must sell as well as buy or remain a beggar race."

"It was something you not only read a lot, it was something you waited for," Davis said of the paper. "It was a great tool for shaping one's political perspective."

The paper started in 1954 as the Weekly Advertiser, a product of Johnson and M.C. Fountain, who had a printing business as well. The paper became the Challenge before Fountain died in 1967, when Johnson took sole control and it became the Challenger.

Early on, his wife said, Johnson wanted to de-emphasize crime reporting, feeling it harmed the black community and was a cheap sell. The paper became filled with stories of business and accomplishment, and community announcements that appeared in mainstream papers' "colored pages" before those disappeared in the 1960s.

Johnson worked hard to gain readers but also hawked the audience to advertisers. He provided a useful outlet to area business, including white-owned businesses that catered to black residents.

But he wanted the big game.

"The big companies said, 'What do you want? We contribute to the NAACP,' " said Ethel, 76.

"That made his hair stand on end."

Eventually he cracked the code, she said, and in the 1970s got Sears and Publix to advertise.

Once one large company was in the paper, the rest followed, both to compete and in belated recognition of the value of the ad buy.

Johnson got circulation up to about 35,000 at its peak in the 1990s. By the time of his death, it was less than a third of that. Ethel, who had raised five children while her husband built a newspaper, was suddenly thrown into publishing.

"The only thing he had told me was that it had to hit the streets on Thursday, but he didn't leave any instructions on how," said Mrs. Johnson, who for a while thought about selling the paper. "I don't know what came over me to think I could run a newspaper."

She sought help from SCORE, the retired executives organization; from the city's Business Assistance Center; and from the community. While grieving her husband's loss, she shepherded a transformation that now has the paper again turning a profit.

Davis said the city was especially involved because the paper is "an institution."

There is a whole economy of African-American newspapers that have flourished for decades and that are largely invisible to the mainstream media, said Karen Brown Dunlap, president of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies.

"Black newspapers are like part of the family," she said. "It's like the griot. It plays a special role. You see our lives more fully. In some cases, you get the sense that you're not legitimized until you see yourself in the black newspaper."

While African-American newspapers date back to the 19th century in Florida, they gained a political potency in the 1960s, Brown Dunlap said. Newspapers heralding civil rights leaders and actions were passed from hand to hand and offered a kind of underground direction for the movement.

Dianne Speights remembers waiting for the Pittsburgh Courier to make it to her Panama City, Fla., home so she could read about African-Americans like herself.

She later moved to St. Petersburg and, after a career with Pinellas County schools, is now the Challenger's general manager.

"We didn't have a black paper where I was from," she said. "Here there was a paper with images of people like myself. When an African-American can pick up a paper like this, it gave me a vision there were organizations I could belong to, businesses I could start, and I could see this was a community moving forward."

Now, leafing through yellowed copies of the paper from the paper's tiny closet archive, Ethel Johnson feels that her efforts are worth the stress of the last six years.

"I didn't want to just shut it down and dissolve it," she said. "It would be a shame not to keep it going.

"The Challenger is another point of view."

Paul Swider can be reached at pswider@sptimes.com or 892-2271.

[Last modified October 23, 2007, 23:20:44]