Black community leaders get their due

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Dorothy Leavell. | Sun-Times Media

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Updated: January 23, 2012 3:19AM

By this time of the year, I’ve had just about all the chicken dinners I can swallow.

But last week I attended separate galas for two very remarkable women, and I thoroughly enjoyed every moment.

On Thursday night at the Navy Pier’s Crystal Gardens, Dorothy R. Leavell, editor and publisher of Crusader Newspapers, celebrated 50 years at the small, weekly, black newspaper, 43 years as publisher.

She was 24 when her husband died, leaving her their two small children and two of her brother’s children that the couple was raising.

“That was in 1968, and most of the women who were publishers were senior citizens like I am now,” Leavell told me.

Leavell has managed to keep publishing 28 pages once a week, even as better known publications like the Defender have been forced to make drastic cutbacks.

She gained a national reputation from her four-year stint as president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA). The organization represents 200 black newspapers across the country.

“I have a deep passion for the black press,” Leavell told me. “Working here taught me the importance of what we do. No matter how small.”

The weekly has not missed a beat in 71 years.

The gala was special because Leavell doesn’t often get the star treatment she deserves.

“We don’t have that glamor tag that we had in earlier years before [blacks] were on television and in other media. We were a little bit more accepted as VIPs. [Today] our people seemingly don’t understand the importance of what we do.

“But if the black newspaper shut down today or tomorrow, I believe our people and our community would suffer even more so.”

On Friday night, a different group gathered at the Nineteenth Century Club in Oak Park to honor West Side activist Jacqueline Reed. She is the founder and former CEO of Westside Health Authority. The organization built a $7.5 million wellness facility in Austin to serve disadvantaged families. Besides celebrating her 23-year milestone, Reed officially turned over the reins of the organization to her son, Morris Reed, a lawyer who has worked at the organization for 12 years.

His activist mother’s philosophy is simple: “It is your giving that makes you strong, not in your receiving.”

“The mothers who mopped floors and ran out and cleaned up other people’s kitchens to send their kids to college were able to do it because they were doing something for someone else. When people began to think of what they need and what they don’t have, it weakened them,” Jacqueline Reed told me.

The facility itself is a testament to that philosophy.

When a group of women from the Austin community decided what the community needed was a health center, they started selling catfish dinners every Friday night to raise the money.

“The men would come in vans and they would sell catfish dinners all over the city until they raised $60,000 in a year and a half. They were serious,” Reed recalled.

She used that seed money to secure the funding needed to build a state-of-the-art facility that addresses not only health, but also prisoner re-entry, youth development, employment and community organizing.

“I didn’t know how to build it. I didn’t believe we could do it. But when those ladies raised that money, I had to try,” Reed said.

Putting the Westside Health Authority under her son’s leadership is the fulfillment of her dreams for him and for the community.

But it is the hard work and the faith the community put in this project that still overwhelm her.

“When we cut the ribbon in 2004, we had a bunch of dignitaries, but I was looking at the people who sold the catfish dinners.”

Too often, the people who build black institutions get their honors after they are gone. I’m so glad these women were on hand to take their bows.