Researching a book about Richmond and Virginia civil rights icons Oliver W. Hill and Spottswood Robinson III some years back, I came to a quick realization. The story could not be told — at least not with the same nuance, humanity and depth — without the archives of the city’s former Black newspaper, the Richmond Afro-American.
Pouring through the microfilmed pages of the Afro from the 1930s to the early 1960s, I encountered scores of milestone events, pivotal lawsuits and personalities that had either been ignored or given short shrift in the city’s prominent white-owned newspapers, the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Richmond News Leader.
That reality came to mind recently with the unwelcome announcement that the Richmond Free Press, the direct descendant of the Afro, ceased publication with its first and only digital edition on February 12. An ice storm had held the distribution of the usual paper edition at bay.
The closing signals not only the end of a 34-year run for Virginia’s third-oldest Black newspaper, trailing just the Tidewater-based New Journal and Guide and the much-smaller Roanoke Tribune. It also leaves Virginia’s capital without a print-based, collective Black voice for the first time since 1882.
That is the year thirteen former Richmond slaves joined forces to publish the Richmond Planet. Two years later, the indomitable, 21-year-old John Mitchell, Jr., took over the editorship, which he maintained until 1929 through anti-lynching campaigns, a streetcar-segregation boycott (“Let us walk,” Mitchell thundered decades before the Montgomery bus boycott) and a brazen proclamation in 1890 when defiant southerners erected a statue to former Confederate General Robert E. Lee on Richmond’s Monument Avenue.
Of the Black laborers assigned to install the massive statue, Mitchell wrote, “He put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, he’ll be there to take it down.” The time came in September 2021 when African American entrepreneur and construction company executive Devon Henry oversaw the statue’s dismantling.
If there is a fitting 21st-century successor to Mitchell, it is Ray Boone Sr.
Boone founded the Free Press in 1992 and shepherded it until his death in June 2014 at age 76. His widow, Jean Patterson Boone, and their children kept the paper alive over the last decade. Ray Boone’s journalistic influence dated to well before launching the Free Press, however. For years, he guided the Richmond Afro-American, which had merged with the Planet in 1938, first as its editor, starting in 1965, and then as editor and vice president of the entire Baltimore-based Afro-American Newspaper Group.
From there, Boone settled into a comfortable stint as a journalism professor at Howard University while continuing to oversee circulation for the newspaper chain. The more sedate life did not satisfy his crusading, warrior spirit.
Returning to Richmond, “he changed the game,” Jean Boone wrote in her farewell to the community. “He presented a public image that was unbossed, unbought and unafraid to speak truth to power.”
Speak, he did.
A dapper presence with combed-back hair and starched, cuff-linked shirts, Boone bowed to no one. He persistently chided city and state power-brokers for their failure to support Black businesses and institutions. Eugene Trani, then president of Virginia Commonwealth University, proved a regular target over faculty and administrative hirings. Boone’s diatribes helped lead former Gov. Mark Warner to the embarrassing discovery that ½ of 1% of state spending on goods and services was going to Black and minority firms. Well before the notion had achieved wide popularity, Boone announced that the Free Press would no longer refer to the Washington, D.C., football team by its racially insulting nickname, the Redskins. And as an equal-opportunity critic, he blasted the administration of Mayor Dwight Jones, a Black man, when the city closed its parks to Occupy Richmond protesters in 2011. Boone then invited the young activists to camp out on his lawn — a nose-thumb to his next-door neighbor, Mayor Jones.
So visceral was Boone’s disdain for the Richmond newspapers, which he had battled through segregation and the civil-rights wars, that he once fired a valued employee whose only crime was moonlighting to write for a special section in the Times-Dispatch.
That spirit was forged in the crucible of mid-20th-century Black journalism. It was, as my Hill-Robinson research suggested, a David v. Goliath struggle to illuminate truths that the dominant white press in Virginia and many other states resisted or ignored.
Among endless such cases, there was the story of Howard Walker, a Winchester man scheduled to die a mere fifty-two days after an alleged rape in 1944. The Afro-American reported concerns that Walker’s confession was forced and that a rape might not even have occurred. It took note of Robinson’s excruciating decision to witness the execution.
An Afro-American reporter captured the drama of the moment when schoolgirl Barbara Rose Johns, rising unbidden and speaking without notes, confronted her elders during a community meeting in 1951 over her desire for a desegregated school. The school walkout Johns led became part of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board school desegregation decision. And it was the Black newspaper that called out the viciousness when the legislature targeted the NAACP lawyers for disbarment during the mid-1950s fights over massive resistance to school segregation.
Times change, of course. In signing off, Jean Boone optimistically noted that several online news organizations now provide “strong, consistent coverage of the city and the Commonwealth.” Stories, once ignored, may still find a home. Nor can any community print newspaper in 2026 easily resist the tolls of rising costs, declining readerships and a move by advertisers to digital platforms.
Still, the combination is especially hard on long-struggling, Black-owned papers. The National Newspaper Publishers Association describes itself as the trade association of more than 200 African American-owned community newspapers. Its online roster lists only 169.
Now, there is one fewer. As many of the gains of the civil rights era are being dialed back or discarded nationally, the times cry out for voices focused relentlessly on those suffering in that retrenchment. Racial accountability has been the mission of the Black press in Richmond for 144 years. Who and what will fill the void?
Margaret Edds is an author and journalist based in Richmond.