As we mark the 83rd anniversary of Atlanta Daily World, I am grateful for the shoulders on which we stand — as a family and as a business.
Five generations of Scotts have worked here since the paper was founded by my grandfather in 1928. This includes my grandfather’s mother, my grandmother, my parents, my brother, my two sons and my niece and two nephews. And this is just my immediate family.
My grandfather, W. A. Scott II, was one of nine. All of his siblings worked in the business. A majority of their children and some of their children’s children have worked at the paper at one time or another. Two cousins – Wendell S. Scott and Portia A. Scott – work with us now as vice president of operations and acting managing editor, respectively. We were born with newspaper ink in our veins.
It has been a remarkable journey that also includes dozens, if not hundreds, of non-family members who have dedicated themselves to producing a paper to inform, educate, inspire and entertain countless readers for eight decades.
There have been many daunting challenges along the way.
Our founder was murdered by an assassin’s bullet in 1934, just two years after he put the paper on a daily publishing schedule. It became the first successful Black-owned daily in the country in the 20th century. And he had not yet turned 32 years old when he died. No one was ever convicted of the crime.
One of his younger brothers, Cornelius Adolphus took over. At only 26 years old, “C.A.” took on the mantle of editor and general manager, and ran the paper for an unprecedented 63 years. I succeeded him in 1997.
While the newspaper was born in the Great Depression, we’ve worked hard to survive the Great Recession. As the tornado took the roof off our building in 2008, preparations were underway to open three “Atlanta Daily World” newsstands at the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. We are grateful to our new partners — Atlanta Retail Management — for this very high-profile licensing opportunity, and the much needed new revenue stream.
I am very grateful to family and staff who have stayed with us during this really tough economic period.
Like other newspapers, we are grappling with the challenges of competing for our readers’ time, especially with the proliferation of addictive social networks on the Internet. We launched our website in 1999, and have a Facebook page that is still trying to define itself. And yes, I have a Facebook page and I tweet under the name of “adwnewswoman.”
And, how lucky are we to live in Atlanta to have such a great news town to cover? We’ve been able to chronicle the horrific lynchings, the dismantling of segregation through dramatic court cases and massive street demonstrations, and we’ve covered the elections and administrations of five successive Black mayors. Plus we were able to cover the election of the
first Black president of the United States.
We also owe our thanks to the schools in the Atlanta University Center for giving us such great stories and intelligent and informed readers. The link to education has been very important to our family. My grandfather and his siblings were the children of a preacher – William A. Scott Sr., who published a weekly journal between 1904 and 1917 in Mississippi. My great-grandfather’s father worked as a scout for an officer in the Union Army during the Civil War. This officer offered to educate my great-grandfather. As a result, education has remained one of our most important family values. In addition to Morehouse, Spelman and CAU, we have family members who have Ivy League undergraduate and graduate degrees.
Atlanta Daily World alumni have been outstanding, too. Ebony Magazine Editor Emeritus Lerone Bennett got his start here at ADW. He came to work here after graduating from Morehouse, and went from here to Ebony. Yvonne Shinhoster Lamb went on to work at the Washington Post. Paul Delaney became a national editor for The New York Times. Sportswriter Mark Gray went on to ESPN. My cousin Stanley S. Scott, who died much too young in 1992, left ADW to become the first Black reporter for United Press International. He was in the Audubon Ballroom in New York on Feb. 21, 1965, when Malcolm X was assassinated. As the only reporter present, his story on the incident was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He went on to become the first Black full-time reporter for radio station WINS in New York.
He later went to work for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford before becoming a successful businessman in New Orleans. The cancer center at Louisiana State University School of Medicine is named in his honor.
There are countless others who have gone on to corporate communications jobs, higher education and other professions here in Atlanta and elsewhere following their stints at ADW. The talent through these doors has been amazing.
One of the more recent alumni stories I learned has to do with President Barack Obama. I made this discovery earlier this year while reading Richard Wolffe’s “Renegade – The Making of a President.” Wolffe referred to Obama’s relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, a friend of Obama’s maternal grandfather in Hawaii. It turns out that Obama’s grandfather took him with him to hang out with Davis, so he could have an opportunity to have a Black-male role model. Davis’ name sounded familiar so I checked it out and saw that he had been hired by my grandfather to be the editor of the paper when it became a daily back in 1932. Davis went back to Chicago after my grandfather’s death before moving to Hawaii. How about that?
As we prepare to meet the challenges of the future, we are being honored this year by the Atlanta Press Club. This week, my family and I are being inducted into the inaugural class of the club’s Hall of Fame. We are in some “high cotton,” too. We join CNN Founder Ted Turner; former Los Angeles Times Publisher and former CNN President Tom Johnson; legendary sports columnist Furman Bisher; and longtime TV anchorman John Pruitt in this honor. We definitely won’t forget our 83rd anniversary.
And finally, we are grateful to all of you for being loyal readers over many years. Whether you’re reading us in print or online, we would not be here without you. We look forward to being with you for many years to come. Stay tuned.
M. Alexis Scott is publisher of the Atlanta Daily World.
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