Kay Smith-Yount grew up in 1930s Mississippi picking cotton with her family and listening to her grandmother's stories about slavery. At a young age, she saw men in white robes and pointed hats ride to her house looking for her uncle.
Church was one of the few places she felt safe.
Her first memories of reading the newspaper are not from the Northeast Mississippi Daily, the region's largest paper. Although she remembers there were rarely mentions of Black people, unless they committed a crime.
Instead, her memories came from second-hand and days-old copies of the Chicago Defender, a fabled Black newspaper taken on trains and distributed in the south. This was a newspaper that campaigned against Jim Crow-era violence and segregation in the military and urged Black people to move north.
It was how Smith-Yount learned her life could be more than picking cotton.
She moved to Cincinnati when she was 17. And, for decades now, the Cincinnati Herald has been her newspaper. Founded in 1955, it has been that newspaper for a large part of a community other newspapers didn't care about, her go-to for everything from hard news to church news, from births to deaths and all that her community felt and said and did in between.
The Cincinnati Herald operates in a two-family home on Reading Road. On the walls, bright artwork captures people reading the newspaper. The office has the feel of a place that’s been abandoned, and it has been during the pandemic as its four full-time staffers and 10 part-time staffers have worked from home.
For years, the paper struggled financially and publisher Walter White explains subscriptions slipped during the pandemic.
But this paper, like most historically Black newspapers, has never been just about the news. White, who is sitting in the newspaper's empty office in North Avondale, says people come to the Herald for just about everything.
“You’d be surprised how many people call about work,” he says. “People ask questions like we’re the Urban League. Or social services.”
He points to a full-page color advertisement about the COVID-19 vaccine, of which much of the country remains unconvinced. White decided to publish this ad for free.
It cost the Herald $4,500.
“This is important,” he says.
The Herald makes no apology for being a partisan newspaper. Unlike many other publications, it has an objective and that objective is to advocate for Black people. Staff members say the goal is to show Black people are not a monolith, but also to provide a community space.
That was always the idea.
Gerald Porter was running the African-American Dayton Tribune in 1955 when he realized he could fill the local void – the only Black newspaper in Cincinnati had ceased publication in 1920 – and created the Cincinnati Herald.
Sadly, in 1963, Porter died in a car crash. He was taken to a hospital on Cincinnati's east side, where they refused to treat him.
"The nurse's exact words were, 'We don't accommodate Negro bed patients,'" his late wife, Marjorie Parham, told The Enquirer in 2005.
By the time they got him to a hospital that would accommodate him, it was too late. And Parham inherited the Herald at a time when racial tensions in the country were high.
Avondale saw some of the worst unrest.
But Parham, along with son Bill Spillers, made sure the paper came out. She wrote and edited stories, recruited staff, swept floors and found advertisers.
In 1994, someone threw a firebomb through the rear windows of The Herald's offices. No one was injured, but the newsroom was destroyed. The paper still came out on time that week.
In 1996, Parham decided she had done all she could, but she still believed in the paper. So she approached Eric and Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney and asked them if they were interested in buying it. (Jan-Michele Lemon Kearney was just reelected to Cincinnati city council and Eric Kearney is a former state senator and is now the president of the Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky African American Chamber of Commerce.)
They were.
Soon enough, the pair understood all too well the commitment they had made.
In 2001, Lemon Kearney walked the streets with the rest of the city after a police officer shot and killed Timothy Thomas in Over-the-Rhine. A police horse almost trampled her while she was covering civil unrest that would make national news.
"We walked corner to corner, neighborhood to neighborhood asking people how they felt," said Lemon Kearney. "People often forget if you're going to talk about what's good for a community, you have to get out there and ask people what they need, what they want."
Newspapers and the world they once dominated have changed radically in the last few decades. News is a 24-hour cycle business. Outlets that deliver it are more numerous, more diverse, more available and sometimes tailored for a niche audience.
It's reasonable to ask if Cincinnati still needs a Black newspaper.
Last summer, protests erupted across the country after a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck and restricting his ability to breathe for nearly nine minutes. In Cincinnati, thousands marched, occupying city blocks and at times disrupting council meetings.
Lemon Kearney said the Herald worked to explain why people were protesting. And she said the newspaper stuck with the story long after the protests ended.
"It's not writing for or about the community," Lemon Kearney said. "It's writing with them and making sure everyone is heard.”
But that might be harder than it sounds. Dan Yount, a longtime Herald editor, says he is disheartened by the answer he receives when he asks his interns which paper they read.
They often respond they read no paper at all. (The storied Chicago Defender no longer publishes a print edition.)
Morgan Owens, who is 35, says her family has read the Herald her entire life and still thinks it occupies a unique spot in the Cincinnati media world.
"We've been left out of the conversation for so long," Owens said. "It's also a great gateway and a great bridge for people of other communities to learn about Black communities."
Smith-Yount, that girl from Mississippi who is now 90 and married to the editor, still finds plenty to keep her reading. She says she enjoys the positive news, the community calendar and the church news.
Walter White can't help but be proud of the loyalty his paper has inspired.
And about the range of its impact that, even now, has expanded its mission.
Take the annual Daddy-Daughter Dance, a community event the Herald has been organizing since 2006. Something that started small with a few families connected to the Herald has grown into an event big enough for the Duke Energy Convention Center.
It is not just a celebration for Black families anymore, but one for the entirety of the city.
Like the Herald itself.
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