National News Briefs
Updates from National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) – The Black Press of America
Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group is buying the Black News Channel, with plans to revive the bankrupt cable news outlet and significantly grow its distribution footprint.
Allen’s company is acquiring “substantially all” of BNC’s assets for $11 million, with a bankruptcy court in Tallahassee, Florida, formally signing off on the sale.
BNC is available in about 45 million homes through companies like Comcast, Charter and DirecTV, and Allen says his company can grow that distribution to about 80 million homes in the next six months. It’s not immediately clear, however, what Allen has in store for BNC’s lineup or programming. BNC had just rebooted its primetime lineup last year with hopes of turning things around.
BNC’s previous owner, Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan, had invested over $100 million in BNC since its 2020 launch, before shutting it down in March.
Allen says that his company “will deliver a best-in-class network to serve the underserved African American community and the advertisers who want to reach this extremely valuable audience.
“Also, we appreciate the opportunity to provide cable operators, satellite companies, telcos and digital platforms diversity of ownership, voices and viewpoints on their programming lineups by having a 100 percent African-American-owned network,” he added.
Allen, a comedian turned media mogul, has become one of Hollywood’s most aggressive players, opportunistically acquiring digital media brands, cable networks and local TV stations to grow his company. AMG owns The Weather Channel, 27 local TV stations in 21 markets, and digital brands like The Grio and Comedy.TV.
And Allen has long expressed interest in the TV news space.
White Daily Newspaper launches anti-racism challenge
The Louisville Courier-Journal, the newspaper in the town where Breonna Taylor was slain by area police in a botched raid, launched a four-week anti-racism challenge on July 1 as a call to action in the ongoing fight against bigotry and xenophobia.
The publication claims it is “committed to learning from the Black community, speaking out against racism and ending white silence.” To do so, per their report, “we partnered with the Earth and Spirit Center and longtime justice warrior Reverend Joe Phelps to co-facilitate anti-racism courses.”
As part of its month-long Anti-Racism Challenge, The Courier-Journal has been publishing a list of 10 to 12 anti-racism activities each week since July 1. They encourage participants to complete at least three of the following every week: Watch a film made by Black artists, support a Black-owned business or a Black-led nonprofit by making a purchase or donation, or document personal experiences or observations of racism in a journal.
Participants are not required to report their progress to anyone. The goal is to educate, raise awareness and create more allies and advocates for the Black community.
For the first week of the challenge, from July 1 through July 7, participants were encouraged to watch the “Get On Up” biopic, starring the late actor Chadwick Boseman as James Brown. The ARC list also recommended reading the 2014 National Association of Independent Schools article “What White Children Need to Know About Race,” as well as visiting and donating to Roots 101 African-American Museum in Louisville, where a virtual exhibit of Breonna Taylor is on display.
From July 8-14, its second week, people were asked to watch the speech that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The 1619 Project,” made before the United Nations General Assembly during the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The list also urges participants to write about the history and demographics of their own neighborhood, plus learn about and act on the 1955 arrest warrant never served on Carolyn Bryant Donham that charges her for her participation in the murder of Emmett Till.
For the following week, July 15-21, the publication recommends the films “Citizen Ashe” and “Greenbook,” and calls for donations to Black Market KY, a Black-owned grocery and community garden in West Louisville that was vandalized last month. Additionally, the list asks that locals support the Louisville Story Program and the Muhammad Ali Center.
Emmett Till’s Chicago residence get Cultural Heritage Fund grant
Emmett Till left his mother’s house on Chicago’s South Side in 1955 to visit relatives in Mississippi, where the Black teenager was abducted and brutally slain for reportedly whistling at a white woman.
A cultural preservation organization announced Tuesday that the house will receive a share of $3 million in grants being distributed to 33 sites and organizations nationwide that are important pieces of African American history.
Some of the grant money from the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund will go to rehabilitate buildings, such as a bank in Mississippi founded by businessman Charles Banks, who won praise from Booker T. Washington; the first Black masonic lodge in North Carolina; and a school in rural Florida for the children of Black farm workers and laborers.
The money will also help restore the Virginia home where tennis coach Dr. Robert Walter “Whirlwind” Johnson helped turn Black athletes such as Arthur Ashe and Althea Gibson into champions, rehabilitate the Blue Bird Inn in Detroit that is considered the birthplace of bebop jazz, and protect and preserve African American cemeteries in Pennsylvania and a tiny island off the coast of South Carolina.
Brent Leggs, executive director of the organization that is in its fifth year of awarding the grants, said the effort is intended to fill “some gaps in the nation’s understanding of the civil rights movement.”
Till’s brutal slaying helped galvanize the civil rights movement. The Chicago home where Mamie Till Mobley and her son lived will receive funding for a project director to oversee restoration efforts, including renovating the second floor to what it looked like when the Tills lived there.
“This house is a sacred treasure from our perspective and our goal is to restore it and reinvent it as an international heritage pilgrimage destination,” said Naomi Davis, executive director of Blacks in Green, a local nonprofit group that bought the house in 2020. She said the plan is to time the 2025 opening with that of the Obama Presidential Library a few miles away.
Leggs said it is is particularly important to do something that shines a light on Mamie Till Mobley. After her 14-year-old son’s lynching, Till Mobley insisted that his body be displayed in an open casket as it looked when it was pulled from a river, to show the world what racism looked like.
It was a display that influenced thousands of mourners who filed by the casket and the millions more who saw the photographs in Jet Magazine — one of whom was Rosa Parks whose refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, bus to a white man about three months later remains one of the pivotal acts of defiance in American history.
