Charles Tisdale
*Charles Tisdale was born on this date in 1926. He was a Black Newspaper publisher and civil rights activist.
Charles Wesley Tisdale was the sixth of fifteen children born in Athens, Alabama. At age seven, he ran away from home and began working at a newspaper, pouring lead into molds in linotype machines. At fourteen, he was foreman of a tobacco field in Connecticut and the co-founder of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He later returned to Athens, where he graduated from Trinity High School. In 1950, he received a bachelor’s degree from LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee, working as an advertising and whiskey salesman in Memphis. He later earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago. An adviser for numerous companies, he found his true profession in reporting for the Black press. His byline appeared in the Memphis Tri-State Defender, Memphis World, New York Amsterdam News, and Chicago Defender. He edited the Memphis Times Herald and the Midsouth Times. While reporting for the Tri-State Defender in 1955, he traveled to Money, Mississippi, to report on the trial of the men accused of murdering Emmett Till. Tisdale also covered the 1957 integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
After working intermittently selling advertisements for the Jackson Advocate, Tisdale purchased the nearly defunct newspaper in 1978 for seventeen thousand dollars. He declared that the paper would “promote civil rights and fight discrimination,” a stance that was the opposite of that taken by the paper’s founding publisher, Percy Greene, a conservative on segregation who took money from the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Two weeks after he began publishing the Jackson Advocate, he received the first of what became hundreds of death threats. Tisdale and the Advocate staff were routinely harassed by racists and local authorities whose policies he challenged. He and the newspaper were targets of numerous violent attacks, break-ins, and vandalism.
On January 28, 1998, Molotov cocktails were thrown through the windows of the Advocate offices, and in 2003, men who identified themselves as Ku Klux Klansmen riddled the office with bullets. In addition, the paper faced harassment from the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and various Mississippi state agencies. Battling government corruption, prison injustice, and racism, the Jackson Advocate, a weekly that cost fifty cents per copy, garnered an impressive national and international readership, with a circulation of twenty thousand. Tisdale also began a weekly radio program, Views from the Black Side, on Jackson’s WNPR; was a member of the national coordinating committee for the National Alliance against Racist and Political Repression, and helped organize the Eddie J. Carthan Support Project in Los Angeles.
His coverage of the Tchula 7 trial, in which the town’s former mayor, Eddie Carthan, was accused of capital murder, brought international attention to Tisdale and the Jackson Advocate. The paper’s circulation declined to seventeen thousand in 2000 and little more than 8,000 by 2010. However, the Advocate has never missed an issue and maintains a solid online presence.
He was a crusader who believed journalism was critical to activism. His motto was to “print the news whether it pinches or comforts.” Tisdale also noted, “I think newspapers that provide information are the most essential tool in a democracy. I always wanted to have my say. This is true liberty when free men speak freely.”
Charles Tisdale died on July 7, 2007, in Jackson; his widow, Alice Tisdale, succeeded him as the publisher of the Advocate. Within months, the Jackson Chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists established the Charles W. Tisdale Scholarship for high school students from Mississippi majoring in journalism. Two years later, Jackson’s City Council and voters approved renaming the Northside Library in his honor. It houses a collection of Tisdale’s papers and writings.
