Dorothy R. Leavell, longtime publisher of the Chicago Crusader and the Gary (IN) Crusader, was recently elected chairman of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). There are more than 200 NNPA member papers from Boston to Seattle, and from Mississippi to Minnesota. The NNPA member papers have a combined readership of 15 million readers.
Leavell, who took the reins of the papers when Crusader founder, her late husband Balm died in 1968, is among only a handful of Black publishers who have been associated with one paper more than 50 years.
A Pine Bluff, AR, native, she prides herself on never missing a publication date over five decades. “There were some lean periods when I was worried we might not get the paper published on time, but with God’s grace, we always made it.”
Leavell has been unwavering in her support of the NNPA, a Black Press trade association, founded in 1940 in Chicago. Her dedication has been rewarded with roles as chairman of the association and of the association’s Foundation, as well as being a regional board member several times. The 11 years she served as the association’s treasurer were unprecedented.
A consistent thread in both of her papers is her editorial decision to uplift the Black community as much as possible. The Crusader newspapers rarely run crime stories as Leavell has offered repeatedly that mainstream media goes overboard with those kinds of stories, especially when the offender is Black. “I decided to use my pages to talk about matters and issues and topics that aren’t found in mainstream media, and frankly, rarely in other Black papers. Yes, every once in awhile we publish a crime story, but it has to be something major that impacts our community directly.”
She is firmly entrenched in the Black community. The Chicago Crusader has been located on the city’s South Side in the same location since the late 1960s. Despite drastic economic shifts in the neighborhood, Leavell said proudly that neither she, her staff, nor her property have ever been harmed by negative influences in the neighborhood. “The people in the community know what we do, and they respect us,” she said. “We have not been harmed in any way.”
Not only has she led her papers successfully over the decades, she has been instrumental in achieving many of the advances made in the Black Press. From 1995-1999, she served two consecutive terms as chairman of the NNPA. In 1998, she was named the organization’s Publisher of the Year. In 2013 she served as Chairman of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, and in 2014 was appointed as board member of the National Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
In 2016 the National Association of Black Journalists inducted Leavell into its Hall of Fame.
