Lighthouse and Informer

A few years after graduating from college, John Henry McCray founded the Charleston Lighthouse in 1939.[1] It was printed by one of McCray's associates in Savannah, Georgia, and distributed in Charleston, South Carolina.[2] In the paper's earliest issues, it attacked the president and board of Allen University, a historically black university in Columbia ran by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, for misusing funds.[2] McCray's paper argued that Samuel J. Higgins, the principal of Charleston's Burke High School, be made the university's president.[2] The board acquiesced to the paper's suggestion, and Higgins became a proponent of the paper as a result.[2] Among its other articles were expositions of racially-motivated police brutality in the city and arguments against legally-codified racial discrimination and separation (Jim Crow).[2]

Following the publication of one article about racial discrimination, McCray was arrested by Charleston police, and the fee to publish the paper was increased tenfold.[3] He met with journalist Esau Parker, the owner of the Sumter Informer, and the two agreed to merge their papers under the name Lighthouse and Informer in Columbia.[4]

The first issue of the Lighthouse and Informer was released on December 7, 1941, the same day as the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service.[4] During the course of the war, McCray personally supported the Double V campaign – a political agenda to establish political freedom abroad and within the United States, especially for African Americans – but the paper was more restrained.[5] While the paper pushed for the ideas encompassed in the Double V campaign, it did not use the iconography or symbolism of the campaign itself, instead relying on stories of patriotism by African American soldiers abroad.[5] Though some of its messaging was subdued, it also expressed its displeasure (with great "assertiveness", as historian Sid Bedingfield writes) with various racial inequalities in the state.[6] In addition to its political orientation, the paper also published personal stories of black South Carolinans (including news of deaths, travels, and cultural events), fiction (including a serialized form of the novel Native Son by Richard Wright), and sports news.[7]

The paper was a staunch defender of the NAACP and black press.[8] Several attempts were made to quash the NAACP, but the paper asked its readers to create new chapters, contribute to existing ones, and to continually support the organization.[8] It decried black Southerners who undermined the civil rights work the NAACP performed, either through inaction (the "I Dunnits") or through active subversion (the "I Killits").[9] When the NAACP began to publicize the realities of so-called separate but equal education in the 1940s – a bipartite racially segregated scheme – the Lighthouse and Informer supported the NAACP and requested that black teachers demand equal pay and treatment.[10] In 1944, after the Lighthouse and Informer requested that a lawsuit be initiated on behalf of teacher Viola Louise Duvall for race-based pay differences, Thurgood Marshall took up the case; state judge Julius Waties Waring (himself a reader of the paper) decided in Duvall v. School Board that teacher pay must be equalized.[11]

That same year, the paper declared the establishment of the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP; originally intended to be named the South Carolina Colored Democratic Party), which sought to increase political engagement by black South Carolinans.[12] The Lighthouse and Informer endorsed the campaign of PDP co-founder Osceola E. McKaine[13] for Senate in that year's election (who lost), and McCray sent an alternate delegation to that year's Democratic National Convention to contest racial segregation in the party.[14]

In 1947, the paper published an editorial by the NAACP's president rejecting the separate but equal doctrine.[15] The next year, South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond ran in the presidential election.[16] The Lighthouse and Informer requested that black South Carolinans instead vote for incumbent president Harry S. Truman, who advanced racial equality in voting; Truman won, though Thurmond won South Carolina and two other Southern states.[17] It portrayed Thurmond an "inciter of [...] the Ku Klux Klan" with "anti-Semitic, anti-Negro, anti-Catholic" tendencies.[18]

McCray, writing in the paper, argued in support of the ongoing legal case of Briggs v. Elliott; he wrote that the government "will never do justice to the Negro until and unless it is beaten over the head with a federal court blackjack".[19] In 1950, he was arrested and convicted for criminal libel in connection to an execution authorized by an all-white jury; he blamed the arrest (and a subsequent arrest for violating parole) on his relation to the Lighthouse and Informer, which governor James F. Byrnes read.[20] Historian Kari Frederickson writes that Byrnes actively sabotaged McCray's life and ended his parolee status, leading to his arrest.[21]

During the 1950 senate election, the paper endorsed Olin D. Johnston over Strom Thurmond; Johnston won the election due to the support of black voters.[22]

In 1954, a short time before the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that a bipartite racially-segregated school system was unconstitutional, McCray left the paper to work at the Baltimore Afro-American.[23] The paper was experiencing financial difficulties – some readers were not paying for their subscriptions and McCray had extensive debt following his 1952 prison term – leading to it declaring bankruptcy in 1954.[24] That year, under the leadership of Modjeska Monteith Simkins,[25] the paper dissolved and its facilities were sold.[26]

The paper and Columbia's Palmetto Leader are described by historian Theodore Hemmingway as "the principal voices of black protest in the state".[27] He argues that the paper was one of the most significant black newspapers in the state at the time, and its focus on racial inequalities – a subject the Palmetto Leader rarely discussed in detail – was highly effective.[28]

In a statement prior to his filibuster of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, Thurmond cited the Lighthouse and Informer's finding of extensive black voting in 1952 and 1956; he claimed that due to high voter turnout, a bill enacting civil protections for black voters was unnecessary.[29]