Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 20, 1992 TAG: 9203200389
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ You wouldn't call Claudia Whitworth a hard-nosed journalist.
\ She hardly ever publishes crime or tragedy in The Roanoke Tribune, the paper her father founded in 1939. The scandal-of-the-week isn't on her pages either.
"We don't like to humiliate people," she said. She leaves that to other news media.
But as the Tribune's editor and publisher, she is a powerful uniter of the black citizens of Western Virginia. The 3,000 or so Tribunes she prints every week transmit Roanoke's social and church news across Virginia and to ex-Roanokers in other states and countries.
For that - and for decades of other good works - the 64-year-old Whitworth takes her place tonight in the Virginia Women's Hall of Fame. She is the only Western Virginian among seven women being honored in Richmond by the Council on the Status of Women, a state agency.
It is Whitworth's philosophy and religious faith - certainly not timidity or indifference - that drives this straightforward woman to put out an easygoing newspaper.
For years she quietly resisted the destruction and disruption of Roanoke's black communities when the city's bulldozers tore down hundreds of homes, churches and black-owned businesses. But you didn't read about it; she worked behind the scenes.
Only nine years ago, those bulldozers plowed under her own newspaper office on Henry Street, in Roanoke's historic Gainsboro neighborhood. She was able to retrieve just one old filing cabinet from the shops equipped by her father for more than 30 years.
But for all the outrages she has known, Whitworth never intended to be a crusading editor.
She left home at 17 to train as a Linotype operator in New York City. She wanted to help out her father, Christiansburg Baptist minister and newspaper entrepreneur Fleming E. Alexander. He started newspapers in Roanoke, Lynchburg, Martinsville, Charlottesville and West Virginia.
"I came up in the shops, working in the grease and graphite and hot metal," Whitworth said. She often was the only woman.
She didn't plan to stay in the grimy business. But her father was injured in an automobile accident. "I kind of hated to see the paper just stop after 30 years." She bought it from him in 1971.
Those years were rough. She put out a newspaper, raised her three children and nursed her father at home until his death in 1980. For a while, she worked from a typesetting machine in his bedroom so she could keep an eye on him.
\ Breaking down barriers
Still, Whitworth wanted out of the business. The year after she bought the paper, she had joined the Baha'i faith, a worldwide, interracial religion that preaches world unity. It abhors partisan politics and negativism - hardly the kind of religion one associates with newspaper people.
An elderly white woman from South Carolina had wandered into Whitworth's former office on Henry Street and told her about the Baha'is. "I said, `The last thing I need is some old white folks' religion.' "
But what the woman said - and the Baha'i literature she gave away - captivated Whitworth. She can recite one passage today, about how the faith seeks "to break down the barriers between people." About how it's based on "the principles of justice and love."
"She was so kind," Whitworth said of the woman. "Just totally ignored the fool in me."
The woman organized a gathering of people from the Yard, a neighborhood that once stood where Roanoke's Coca-Cola plant is now. Whitworth said alcoholics and other troubled people were there - people she avoided on the street. "I went in there with my Christian nose in the air," she said, "and I came out wanting her kind of humility."
At first, she was all the more eager to get out of the newspaper business. She wanted to teach the Baha'i faith.
Then she thought: "Wait a minute. I've got thousands in my congregation." She decided to use the paper and its readers to bring people together.
A typical Tribune carries several national black columnists, news releases of Virginia colleges and organizations, and pages loaded with tidbits about local families, churches, schools and clubs. It's a community bulletin board.
"If you want to get in the Tribune," Whitworth said, "you've got to be good." She doesn't want to glorify crime and encourage people to emulate it, as she believes most newspapers and television stations do.
"There is some awesome power with a vehicle like this," she said just after her weekly deadline at her office in a former library at 2318 Melrose Ave. N.W. "There are very few people who can handle that much freedom or that much power" and not exploit it for personal gain, she said.
She was quick with a list of the Tribune's goals: to promote self-esteem among its readers, to encourage respect for human diversity and to find "lasting ways" to bring people together.
\ Watching social changes
One way she's established is a workshop called "Overcoming Racism" that meets at the newspaper every Thursday night at 7.
Another is the Improved Family Image Development Center, a community center she and her son, associate editor Stanley R. Hale, started last summer in an old store next to the newspaper.
Every Wednesday night after the Tribune's weekly deadline, children rush to the paper from school to help fold and label the papers. "And I mean, they work," Whitworth said.
But the kids started showing up on days when there were no papers to fold. "The kids don't have anywhere to go," she said.
So Whitworth and Hale gathered video machines, a piano, a pool table and furniture. Every afternoon after school and on Saturdays, the kids now have a place to go. Whitworth hopes to organize a corps of older people to run the center.
Other women being inducted into the hall of fame tonight are:
The late Lila Meade Valentine, leader of the women's suffrage movement in Virginia.
Clara Mortenson Beyer, a labor reformer and grandmother of Lt. Gov. Don Beyer.
Virginia Supreme Court Justice Elizabeth Lacy.
Dr. Lisa Kaplowitz, an internist and infectious disease pioneer.
Richmond homeless advocate Susanna Capers.
And Sister M. Majella Berg, president of Marymount College.
There is a long list of other things Whitworth has done that made the council choose her among 42 nominees. She nursed her ailing mother, aunt, father and then her husband, Clifton Whitworth, who died of cancer in 1983. She is on many local boards and on the board of visitors at Norfolk State University.
Once or twice a month for almost 20 years, she has delivered dinners as a volunteer in Roanoke's Meals-on-Wheels program. All those years covering Route No. 4 - Northwest Roanoke - she has grown attached to hundreds of people. Some have died; some have been assaulted. Whitworth has seen the city's social changes through those people.
Donna Pickett, head of the Council on the Status of Women, said Whitworth's life shows "the ability of women to handle enormous burdens and overcome those obstacles, while at the same time providing a service not only to her community but all citizens of the commonwealth. . . .
"You can look on Mrs. Whitworth's life and see that all things are possible through faith in oneself and a belief, a strong belief, in God."
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