The NAACP is launching a push for increased advertising and reader support of black-owned newspapers, magazines and radio stations.
Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the civil rights organization, said he will appeal to Fortune 500 companies to increase advertising in black-owned publications and on black-owned stations.The campaign also will include a directive to the nation's 2,100 local branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, encouraging blacks to buy black publications and listen to black-owned radio stations, Hooks said.
Hooks said Friday he plans to assign an NAACP staffer to work full time on the effort. The project is important, he said, because - alongside churches - the black press has been the NAACP's "strongest and most consistent ally" in providing information that might otherwise not be available to blacks.
Frances Draper, president of the Afro-American, which publishes weekly newspapers in Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; and Richmond, Va., said she welcomed the NAACP campaign.
The Afro-American, a 98-year-old publishing concern that was mired in debt last year but has since secured a $500,000 loan from Baltimore and the state of Maryland, has seen an increase in circulation in the past four years, Draper said.
But she said the newspaper consistently has had trouble securing lucrative national advertising.