by Nahlah Abdur-Rahman
July 9, 2025
The Southern Courier dared to report on civil rights information in methods different publications wouldn’t.
The Southern Courier, a Montgomery newspaper launched through the Civil Rights Motion, will obtain a historic marker.
The event aligns with one other milestone for the publication, its sixtieth anniversary. The marker, positioned on the Courier‘s former workplace, is a results of a years-long effort to acknowledge its place within the metropolis’s and civil rights historical past.
The newspaper got here into existence in 1965, based by a bunch of journalism college students from Harvard College. In keeping with the Montgomery Advertiser, it documented the booming Civil Rights Motion throughout the southeastern United States. The newspaper recruited native writers to assist cowl injustice and the progress towards racial equality.
One in every of its younger reporters, Viola Bradford, remembers how the newspaper make clear the combat for justice that different publications had systematically ignored.
“We have been doing stuff that no newspaper was doing,” defined Bradford, who joined the paper at 14 years previous. “It was a brave paper written by brave individuals.”
The paper, sadly, didn’t have a long term. It solely lasted for 3 years because it struggled to safe sustainable funding. Nonetheless, its legacy stays as a fearless platform whose writers uncovered the racism at play throughout this turbulent time. For instance, Bradford’s reporting on a firebombing of a younger Black lady’s residence revealed the crime stemmed from the scholar’s position in integrating an area highschool.
The girl, Sophia Bracy Harris, recommended the work of the Courier at an occasion final January. She recalled the newspaper reporting the reality, irrespective of the fee.
“These are recollections that I feel are so necessary for our technology today to acknowledge, it’s not unimaginable for us to show the clock again,” shared Harris. “I feel the braveness that was demonstrated by The Courier, reporters, and all who have been supported by way of the leaders who have been brave sufficient to work with them, it’s the sort of factor that’s so necessary for us to move on and plant seeds.”
Bradford’s time with the Courier is clear in her present advocacy for revolutionary journalism. She has since based the Sankofa Service, a nonprofit whose first occasion would be the marker’s dedication. The occasion will happen on July 26.
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