lit a candle 5h agotold my mum about this and she just said 55 years without missing an issue, like that was the whole eulogy
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Claudia Whitworth was the editor and publisher of the Roanoke Tribune, the weekly newspaper of Roanoke's Black community, for 55 years. She bought the paper from its founder, her father, in 1971 and kept it in print every week through firebombing, demolition and loss, building it into one of the…
Claudia Whitworth was the editor and publisher of the Roanoke Tribune, the weekly newspaper of Roanoke's Black community, for 55 years. She bought the paper from its founder, her father, in 1971 and kept it in print every week through firebombing, demolition and loss, building it into one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in Virginia. She died in Roanoke on Thursday, October 8, 2026, at the age of 98, three weeks short of her 99th birthday.
She was born Claudia Sedonia Alexander in Fayetteville, West Virginia, in 1927, the daughter of Sedonia Rotan Alexander and the Rev. Fleming E. Alexander, a Baptist minister and printer who founded the Roanoke Tribune in 1939. She spent her early years in Lynchburg and moved with the family to Christiansburg in 1935, graduating from the Christiansburg Institute at 16. After a brief spell at Bluefield State, the self-described rebel set out on her own, first to Dayton, Ohio, then to New York, where she worked as a linotype operator on the New York Age at a time when few if any women worked in composing rooms. She also worked on Black newspapers in Cleveland and Columbus, returning to Roanoke between jobs, and joined her father at the Tribune in the summer of 1945.
After her father was injured in a car crash on July 4, 1971, and retired, she purchased the Tribune from him that August. Under her leadership the paper never missed a weekly edition. In 1979 her office was firebombed and its records destroyed, and in 1983 she arrived one morning to find that the city had bulldozed the plant during redevelopment; the paper moved to Melrose Avenue and carried on. That same year her husband, Clifton B. Whitworth Jr., died after a long battle with cancer. In 1991 she bought the building next door and opened it as a community center for neighborhood young people.
Whitworth insisted on a paper with a purpose, one that put good news from the Black community on the front page. "Most papers headline bad news. You know. And I don't do that," she told WSLS in 2021. She served on the Board of Visitors of Norfolk State University and in many civic roles. She was inducted into the Virginia Women's Hall of Fame in 1992 and the Southwest Virginia Business Hall of Fame in 2009, and Roanoke named her Citizen of the Year in 2004.
Her son Stan Hale became associate editor, her daughter Eva Shaw-Gill rejoined the paper in 2006, and her grandchildren helped with the weekly mail-out, carrying the Tribune into its fourth generation. Her family confirmed her death, and tributes recalled her tenacity and her decades of service to Roanoke.
Biography adapted from WDBJ7, WSLS, Southwest Virginia Business Hall of Fame, The Roanoke Tribune, Roanoke Times archive.
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1by People Forever
that's the right eulogy honestly