WASHINGTON (NNPA)--The National Newspaper Publishers Association is
celebrating its 60th birthday this year with its convention in Chicago,
its founding city.
Its birth father is a ChicagoanCJohn
H. Sengstacke, publisher of The Chicago Defender. The first meeting of
what was then called the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association was designed,
in Sengstacke=s words, to Aharmoniz[e]
our energies in a common purpose for the benefit of Negro journalism.
New times demand new organizations. The old, original NNPA--the National
Negro Press Association, founded in 1909--was fading. Both the strengthening
of Jim Crow since World War I and the coming Second World War brought with
them a stronger sense of the need for Black unity.
So the first day of the first meeting--February 29, 1940, at the Wabash
Avenue YMCACbrought old and new
passages of time together when Defender owner Robert S. Abbott died in
the early morning hours prior to the gathering. A bridge had emerged.
"Sengstacke had launched an organization that would outlast any previous
association of Negro publishers," wrote Black Press Institute Director
Clint C. Wilson II and scholar Armistead S. Pride in their 1997 book "A
History of the Black Press."