Charles Tisdale; crusading Miss. publisher
LOS ANGELES -- Charles Tisdale purchased an innocuous, nearly defunct weekly newspaper in 1978, transformed it into a strident voice for blacks and poor whites in Mississippi, then endured the wrath of those who wanted to silence the paper -- and him.
In at least 20 separate instances over the years, the office of The Jackson Advocate was attacked: firebombed, riddled with bullets, burglarized, ransacked, firebombed again. Mr. Tisdale received threats on his life.
Yet when Mr. Tisdale, 80, died July 7 at a hospital in Jackson, Miss., from respiratory failure at age 80, it was with the knowledge that his paper had never missed publishing an edition. After a devastating firebombing in 1998, he and his wife, Alice, laid out the week's paper in their home, refusing to surrender their roles as journalists and advocates.
"It is widely accepted that there is no one who represents the black press's mission to fearlessly defend the rights of all better than he," said Ben Jealous , a former managing editor of The Jackson Advocate.
"For him, the matter was simple: In order to live for your people, you must live beyond your fears."
During the civil rights movement, Mississippi ran neck and neck with Alabama in playing host to some of the most infamous hate crimes of the era. By the time Mr. Tisdale moved to Mississippi, the civil rights movement had ended, and it seemed, to much of the country at least, a New South had been born.
But when Mr. Tisdale looked at the South through the eyes of a journalist, he saw people in power using new ways to achieve old goals. Before Mr. Tisdale purchased The Jackson Advocate, "it was just spouting the white folks' rhetoric," he told a reporter for the now defunct Emerge magazine in 1999.
In his hands the paper practiced a hard-hitting, in-the-trenches brand of advocacy journalism, and tried to offer aggrieved people of all races a voice. The Jackson Advocate won awards and influenced other major news agencies -- and sometimes governmental bodies -- to investigate the same matters.
In the 1980s and '90s the paper exposed bribery and corruption among law enforcement officials. It brought national attention to the town of Tunica , where in the early 1980s residents were so poor, they had no indoor plumbing and everyone dumped their waste into "Sugar Ditch." The paper regularly covered the use of a local airport by drug dealers. The failure by authorities to interdict their cache contributed to the drug problem in the black community, said Alice Tisdale, who was associate publisher of the paper.
The Advocate also ran stories about numerous black men who died while incarcerated in Mississippi jails. Officials ruled the deaths suicides, but many others suspected the men were victims of modern-day lynchings.
One of Mr. Tisdale's most prolonged battles was with a group of business owners whose proposal to revitalize Jackson's downtown was, the paper alleged, a plan for gentrification that would leave behind poor black residents.
But Mr. Tisdale's muckraking crossed color lines. If he felt black elected officials failed their constituents, the paper said so. In the black community -- where he also had his detractors -- Mr. Tisdale was a bridge connecting the haves and the have - nots, reminding the black middle class, which he accused of complacency, of its responsibilities, Jealous said.
"A newspaper has to mean something to people, has to represent something," Mr. Tisdale said.
Charles Wesley Tisdale was born Nov. 7, 1926, in Athens, Ala., the sixth of 15 children. Mr. Tisdale always wanted to be a newspaperman and began living that dream early: At the age of 7 he was working at a newspaper, pouring lead into molds in linotype machines.
At Trinity High School he was editor of the school paper and excelled in academics and sports. But when he and others tried to organize a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, "he was dragged behind an ox cart by white folks to punish him," Jealous said, recalling a conversation with Mr. Tisdale.
After graduating from what is now known as LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis in 1950, Mr. Tisdale spent a few years at advertising firms, but always kept a hand in journalism. By 1954, he had joined The Tri-State Defender, one of many papers that carried his byline, including The Amsterdam News in New York and The Chicago Defender. During the civil rights movement he covered the murder of Emmett Till in Money, Miss., and the uproar surrounding efforts to integrate schools in Little Rock, Ark.
After his return to Mississippi in 1978, he met and married Alice Thomas.
Mr. Tisdale also leaves their daughter, DeAnna of Jackson; two children from a previous marriage, Beverly of Memphis and Charles Jr. of Atlanta; a brother, William of Los Angeles; and a sister, Nona Hollis of Oxford, Ohio.
