Harlem World Magazine

Tisdale’s Uncle Charles Wesley Tisdale (pictured above), in the 1970s, became owner and publisher of the Jackson Advocate, founded in 1938, to create the best content for Jackson, Mississippians.

Charles Wesley Tisdale was born in rural Athens, Alabama on November 7, 1926, he was one of a family of eighteen children. Tisdale always wanted to be a newspaperman and began living that dream early: At age 7, he was working at a newspaper, pouring lead into molds in Linotype machines. An American to is core, his father Thomas Jefferson Tisdale, was a sharecropper. Thereafter, he supported his family through day jobs and yard work. Charles Tisdale remembers his father as a poet and songwriter, an intellectual who read three newspapers every day. Charles Tisdale’s mother, Winnie, was “a stern and courageous woman.” She insisted that her children stand up for their rights. She was a fierce defender of the family who “would shoot in a minute.”

At fourteen he was foreman of a to***co field in Connecticut and the cofounder of a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He later returned to Athens, where he graduated from Trinity High School. 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. In 1950 he received a bachelor’s degree from LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, Tennessee, working as an advertising and whiskey salesman while in Memphis. He later earned a master’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago. An adviser for numerous companies, he found his true profession in reporting for the African American press. His byline appeared in the Memphis Tri-State Defender, Memphis World, New York Amsterdam News, and Chicago Defender. He edited the Memphis Times Herald and the Midsouth Times.

NPR Radio reported that “Charles Tisdale was a champion of civil rights, a dedicated journalist who owned the Jackson, Mississippi newspaper called, appropriately enough, the Jackson Advocate. Mr. Tisdale bought the newspaper in 1978. And over the course of almost three decades, he published stories that gave a voice to the less fortunate, bringing to life the impoverished state of some of Mississippi’s majority black towns and exposing corruption among law enforcement officials.”

Mr. Tisdale was committed to his community, as Ben Jealous, onetime managing director of the Advocate and NAACP president said about Mr. Tisdale,

Mr. Tisdale was committed to the people in his community, and he was committed to the integrity of his business.

The paper encouraged discourse and critical debate and understood the importance of giving a voice to community ideas in his column Tisdale’s Topics.

Activist Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, said,

For 20 years, Mr. Tisdale had a talk show on Evers’ radio station, WMPR in Jackson, where he often took elected leaders to task for not effectively serving their community. He said,

Like his Uncle Charles, Danny Tisdale and his team have a commitment to creating the best content that reflects the ideas of their readers.

Harlem World has remained fiercely proud of its heritage, its independence and its commitment to living their best life in Harlem is at the heart of what we do.

Harlem World wins the NAACP Game Changer Award: