HISTORICALLY ST. PETE Black History Month - The Weekly Challenger

In this episode of HISTORICALLY ST. PETE, Rui Farias - the executive director of the St. Petersburg Museum of History, highlights another St. Pete leader and organization in our African American community during Black History Month. Rui welcomes Irene Johnson-Pridgen to studio to talk about her brother, Cleveland Johnson Jr., the founder of The Weekly Challenger in St. Petersburg, today still a comprehensive source of African American news in all of Tampa Bay. 
Learn more all year round at SPMOH's Civil Rights trolley tour events and exhibits, and on their social media.
👉In 1967, The Weekly Challenger dcoumented the history of St. Petersburg's African American community. Founded by community advocate Cleveland Johnson Jr., it provided fair and affirming coverage of Black life in Pinellas County . It thrived as a folksy paper that published news that the larger daily papers ignored.
The late publisher Cleveland Johnson, a native of Thomasville, Ga., started working as a salesman in the early 1950s for the Weekly Advertiser owned by M.C. Fountain. After years of working under Fountain, Johnson acquired the business in 1967, changed the name and rebranded it as a weekly newspaper catering to African-American news in the Tampa Bay area.
👉During the first two decades of ownership, Johnson expanded the paper from just a few pages to 32, eight of them in color, seven with full-page advertisements. The paper closely followed events related to school desegregation, and kept up with national corporations, noting which ones would hire black employees. When Johnson died in 2001 at the age of 73, obituaries were published in newspapers as far away as Honolulu, Hawaii.
👉After his death his widow, Ethel Johnson, stepped in as publisher. Now, more than a decade later, The Weekly Challenger is still the voice of the black community in Pinellas County, and after a cavalcade of general managers, Johnson’s youngest daughter, Lyn Johnson, has taken over as publisher. Since her short time at the helm, becoming manager in February of 2012, Johnson has brought readership up by focusing strictly on community news, adding national news only to the website.

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