Oldest African American Newspaper Notes 125th Anniversary

When Christopher J. Perry launched the Philadelphia Tribune, he faced a readership problem that makes today's newspaper industry woes seem trivial. The Tribune - USA's oldest continuously published black newspaper - was founded in 1884, when the city had only 108,000 blacks, few of them literate. However, that didn't deter Mr. Perry from his dream. (hat tip: Target Market News).

Mr. Bogle and an array of dignitaries including Mayor Nutter and U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) yesterday launched a year-long celebration of the Tribune's 125th anniversary. A striking gray granite monument hailing Perry as "Publisher, Writer, Statesman, Civil Rights Activist" was unveiled at the nation's oldest public African American cemetery. "All these years, Chris never had a marker," said Robert Bogle, current publisher. "The Tribune felt it was important that he have one." The dedication was followed by a rousing yet reverent balloon-studded service at the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in the city's Overbrook section.

Advocating for black causes, rights, and recognition has sustained the paper, which is published five days a week and online. Its circulation last year was about 31,000, according to a Pew Research Center report on African American media.

Mr. Perry, the founder, was born in Baltimore to free parents in 1854. He grew up in Philadelphia, an avid student in the meager schools provided for "Negroes." He began writing for newspapers at age 13 and rose to become editor of the "Colored Department" of a Northern daily. He was 30 years old when he set up the Tribune. He steadily expanded but lost everything in a fire, then doggedly started over at another location, where the paper remains today.

From the start, Mr. Perry's politics hewed to the Republican Party, the party of President Lincoln. An 1891 book, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors, quoted one of Mr. Perry's editorials: "It is a fact of which we are truly proud, that The Tribune is the only colored journal north of Mason and Dixon's line which has never wavered in its fidelity to Republicanism."

After Mr. Perry died in 1921 at 67, the publisher's job passed to his son-in-law, E. Washington Rhodes, later appointed the first black assistant U.S. attorney.