The story below is from our March/April 2021 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
At 93 years old, Claudia Whitworth has no intention of slowing down her work for justice and journalism.
Aaron Spicer
Open the front door of the Roanoke Tribune on a Wednesday afternoon, and you’ll hear the sound of hurried voices and rustling paper. Plastic mailing bins are strewn around the small newsroom, where at least a dozen people, mostly family members, stick address labels onto folded newspapers.
The air inside the brick building at 2318 Melrose Avenue in Roanoke holds the faint smell of newsprint. It’s the Tribune’s weekly mailing day, the one afternoon when like clockwork children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and friends of editor and publisher Claudia Whitworth gather to label and pack the weekly publication. The approximately 4,500 copies of the newspaper are mailed to addresses across the Roanoke Valley and to at least 27 other states.
In the 50 years that Whitworth has run the Tribune she has never missed a publication, a testament to her tenacious devotion to a news enterprise that her father, a former Baptist pastor, launched in 1939. The newspaper’s first issues were published in 1941.In 2019, the Tribune celebrated its 80-year anniversary.
Now, at 93 years old, Whitworth arrives at the Tribune at 9 a.m. each day and leaves no earlier than 5 p.m. She writes her own weekly column, Turtle Talk, and she edits all of the articles that appear in the newspaper. Her mission: To shine a light on the Black community both in Roanoke and nationwide.
“We don’t print negative news,” Whitworth says. “That’s what everybody else does. The most important thing to me is that we print the positive side of blackness.”
Each Tribune issue contains national and local news as well as articles covering athletics at Black colleges and universities and in professional sports, along with commentaries, obituaries and event listings. It is printed each week at the Salem-Times Register in Salem.
Whitworth, who was born in West Virginia but grew up in Lynchburg and Christiansburg, got her start in the newspaper business after graduating high school in Christiansburg and attending Bluefield State College for a short time. She moved away from the Roanoke Valley to gain experience at other newspapers as a linotype machine operator. She says she originally wanted to learn the machine at the Tribune, but her father, the Rev. Fleming E. Alexander was afraid that she would hurt or break the equipment.
“I was determined to do [learn] it anyhow,” she says.
Whitworth scanned a map and chose Dayton, Ohio, because she knew no one there and it wasn’t too far from Virginia. She bought a one-way train ticket there. Whitworth lived in YWCAs when she first arrived in Ohio, and later she moved to New York City. Linotype machines once were used to set word type for printing newspapers, and as a woman, it was easy to find a job operating them. That’s because there were few, if any, female linotype operators at that time.
“Women weren’t expected to do the things that she was doing,” says Katherin Elam, president of Junior Achievement of Southwest Virginia and a member of the Tribune’s community board. Elam first heard Whitworth’s story when the editor was selected as Junior Achievement’s 2009 laureate for the Business Hall of Fame. “If somebody told her she can’t, she’ll find a way to do it,” Elam adds.
Whitworth says she was never interested in becoming a newspaper reporter, claiming that she would rather work behind the scenes, even in mostly smoke-filled and male-dominated newsrooms in Ohio and New York.
“I wouldn’t talk or play with them [the men],” Whitworth says. “I would just go to work.”
All along, her goal was to return to the Roanoke Tribune. Whitworth did come back, and in 1971, she purchased the Tribune from her father after he became ill. It was a role that Whitworth took on willingly, but it did not come without its challenges.
She recalls the time that the newspaper’s building on Henry Street in Roanoke’s Black district was bulldozed to make way for urban renewal. Whitworth says she received a phone call at 8 a.m. that day, telling her that the building was coming down.
“I came running there,” she says. “Everything was laying on the sidewalk.”
At the time, her father was ill, and she was caring for him. Luckily, Whitworth already had moved a typesetting machine into her home. She still published the Tribune that week.
“She is unbendable at times,” says Elam.
Eventually, Whitworth’s son, Stan Hale, came to work with his mother at the Tribune, handling advertising and layout. Hale practically grew up at the Tribune, where as a teenager and a college student he helped prepare newspapers for mailing and did other odd jobs.
Hale writes some of the Tribune articles, while others are submitted by local writers and those who live elsewhere.
Hale says the Tribune’s personal connection to the community and its local news content has allowed it to remain relevant and successful, despite the dire environment for newspapers nationwide.
“I am a firm believer that it is the local report that will keep you alive,” Hale says. “Because of the Internet you can get that national stuff any kind of way.”
Plus, the Tribune focuses solely on the Black community, unlike other local media outlets.
“We’re the only game in town,” Hale says. “Who’s going to write about us like we can?”
The Tribune now publishes its content online, as well as in paper form.
Hale serves as associate editor, and he is responsible for designing the newspaper’s front page, while his sister, Eva Shaw-Gill, also works at the Tribune. The siblings are two of six total staff members.
Though Hale and Shaw-Gill make the major decisions for the family business, they always keep Whitworth in the loop.
Hale describes his mother as becoming more mellow over the years in her approach to work, but “she’s still got the drive,” he says.
Through the years, Whitworth has become quite the fixture in Roanoke, where she is known not only for her work with the Tribune but for her community service. She has served on numerous boards of local organizations, and she was inducted into the Virginia Women’s Hall of Fame in 1992. In 2004, she was named Roanoke’s Citizen of the Year.
Whitworth also has invested in the neighborhood surrounding the Tribune building. Whitworth and Hale purchased a former funeral home, located at the corner of Melrose Avenue and 15th Street, and converted it into a community center. Its purpose was to be a neutral gathering space for teenagers and other local groups.
Whitworth also is active in the Baha’i faith, which teaches the essential unity of all religions and the unity of humanity. She refers to these beliefs often in her Tribune editorials, with a particular emphasis on love and equality in a recent Turtle Talk column titled, “You got to care; Man, you got to care.”
“She wants to be a part of things that would address those who struggle most and wants to make sure that all people are treated fairly,” says Elam of Whitworth. “She knew she had the power of print to share with people how to handle injustice.This woman is not going to be stopped as long as she can find a voice and as long as she can go about it so that it is fair to others.”
Whitworth doesn’t plan to stop writing anytime soon, despite her age. In fact, her strong work ethic may be what has kept her mind sharp all of these years.
“You just keep going day to day,” she says.
The story above is from our March/April 2021 issue. For more stories, subscribe today or view our FREE digital edition. Thank you for supporting local journalism!