[Return to Race and Place]

[Go to Charlotesville Tribune Article Summaries]

Even in the early days of Sellers' career as a newspaper man, it is easy to see his commitment to education, political awareness, and "the betterment of the race." Sellers, like all men of media, sometimes used his paper as a bully pulpit, writing editorials and allegorical stories that he used to illustrate his philosophy of community involvement and action. After The Reflector discontinued in 1935, Sellers had a brief stint as editor of The Dawn a Negro literary magazine published in Richmond. In the following years, Sellers went back to school and earned a degree from Virginia Union University, taught alongside his wife at the Jefferson School in Charlottesville, and became District Manager at the black owned, Richmond Beneficial Life Insurance Company. By 1950 Sellers was a founding member of the Charlottesville Interracial Commission, a friend and mentor of the young author Sarah Patton Boyle, and on his way to founding the longest running Negro paper in Virignia besides the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

The samples that were chosen as representative of The Tribune include the newspaper's most covered topics. For instance, The Tribune often reported society news, like the regular column, "Our Town in Review" or any of several wedding and anniversary announcemnents. There is also extensive coverage of NAACP educational legal battles, such as Gregory Swanson's suit for entry into the University of Viringia Law School. Other common topics include, coverage of black intellectuals and celebrities like Lena Horne, Ralph Bunche, and Paul Robeson. There are also several columns encouraging religious piety and church attendance such as, "World Evangelist" and "The Bible Speaks." Finally, there are the ever present editorials such as, "The Price of First Class Citizenship," "Why the Negro Should Vote Democratic," and " Facts About the Korean War." These articles are the voice of the newspaper itself, the allegorical stories, thinly vieled morals, strong encouragements, intelligent observations, and conservative demands are the very heart of The Tribune and many similar papers of the day. It is through these largely didactic pieces that the editors of black newspapers fixed the limits of their beliefs, and the shape, scope and content, of their communities.

This site attempts to create as complete a picture of The Tribune as possible without access to the text of the articles themselves. Hopefully, the newspaper's importance as a forum for the "mainstream" black bourgeois opinion, a source of political analysis and rhetoric, as well as a tool that the community used to define itself, is apparent in the selections that have been presented.

Although The Tribune exsisted until 1969, Thomas Sellers left the paper as of February 7, 1953. By 1955 the Charlottesville staff had disappeared from the paper altogether and coverage of Charlottesville's local news in The Tribune had abated almost entirely. Despite this turn of events, Thomas Sellers and the Charlottesville staff of the newspaper have given historians a unique lens to look back into a small, African American community in the pre-Civil Rights era.

Sources and Links:

The Charlottesville Tribune Aug 11,1950 -Aug 4, 1951 is available in its original form and on microfilm at The University of Virginia Library in Special Collections.

The Tribune Aug 11, 1951-? are available at The Library of Virginia in Richmond as a part of "The Virginia Newspaper Project"

Resources and Links: An Extended Bibliography for the Black Press