ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, February 9, 1996 TAG: 9602090069
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
Claudia Whitworth was surprised to hear the Richmond Afro-American had folded.
"It was so low-key that I didn't realize it still existed," the editor and publisher of The Roanoke Tribune, Southwestern Virginia's purveyor of black news, said Thursday evening.
She said her weekly paper is "doing great."
But then, she pointed out, her circulation is small - only about 5,600 compared with the Afro's 20,000 - and her printer at the Salem Times-Register holds down newsprint costs by doing other printing work.
Whitworth isn't so grateful to the U.S. Postal Service, though. Most of her subscriptions go out by mail, and the rates are steep. "That post office has practically ruined us," she said.
Her father, the late Christiansburg minister Fleming E. Alexander, founded the Tribune in 1939 and got the first copies off the presses in 1941. He began papers in Lynchburg, Martinsville, Charlottesville and West Virginia, too, but Whitworth owns only the Tribune now.
Antoinette Bruce's parents, Samuel and Louise Johnson, sold the Afro-American and other nationally distributed black papers such as the Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier out of their home at 206 Gilmer Ave. in Northwest Roanoke. Bruce and one of her brothers wrote Roanoke news for some of the black newspapers.
In the 1920s and '30s, she said, the Afro "was a connecting link for the people in Virginia with the outside world. They learned how other people lived in other parts of the world - their activities and interests and accomplishments. It also served as an inspiration for people."
Dr. Maynard Law, a retired Roanoke physician, was sorry to hear the Richmond paper was no more.
"That is a shame," he said. "That is where we routinely picked up news that, if it was carried at all in other daily papers, it was only a line or so.''
Those weekly editions "served a purpose, a very good purpose," he said. "I regret to see this, but I guess this is what happened down the road from integration, and we'll just have to live with it."
LENGTH: Short : 46 linesby CNB