Hallie Almena Lomax
*Hallie Almena Lomax was born on July 23, 1915. She was a Black journalist and activist.
Hallie Almena Davis was born in Galveston, Texas. Her parents, Clifford and Geneva Davis, moved the family to Chicago and Los Angeles, where she graduated from Jordan High School in the Watts neighborhood. She briefly studied journalism at Los Angeles City College and left school to work full-time in journalism.
Her first job was at the California Eagle from 1935 to 1941. She joined a church newspaper, the Interfaith Churchman, in early 1941; after she purchased it for fifty dollars, this newspaper morphed into the Los Angeles Tribune, a weekly newspaper targeted at the African American community, which she ran with her former husband, Lucius W. Lomax, Jr; they were married in 1949. He was the publisher, and she was the editor. She also wrote a weekly opinion column. In 1946, she was one of three winners of the Wendell Willkie Award, established to honor the best Black journalists in the United States.
During the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, she left California with her children to join the struggle in the South. Later, she returned to California, working at the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. As a reporter, she covered topics such as Patty Hearst's kidnapping. In 1952, Lomax served as a delegate to the Democratic convention. Mrs. Lomax became the first black journalist accredited by the Motion Picture Academy. She led boycotts of the movies "Porgy and Bess" and "Imitation of Life," which Mrs. Lomax believed "libeled the Negro race."
She was a contestant on the March 1955 edition of You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx alongside Joe Louis. Lomax, a divorcee, had six children, Michael L. Lomax, CEO of the United Negro College Fund, and Michele L. Lomax, a San Francisco film critic and journalist, who died in 1987, and Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Melanie E. Lomax, who died in 2006. A noted agnostic, Hallie Lomax, died on March 25, 2011.
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