THE ESSAY
Black journalism has never needed permission to tell our story. What it has always needed — and what we have always struggled to provide — is support.
I sat down recently with Rhonda Crowder — journalist, media entrepreneur, literacy advocate, and one of the sharpest voices working in Cleveland — and what came out of that conversation confirmed something I’ve believed for a long time: the greatest threat to Black media is not corporate suppression. It’s our own disinvestment.
That’s a hard thing to say. But it’s the truth. And if we’re going to fix it, we have to be honest about it first.
Rhonda taught me something I didn’t know going into that conversation. The Call and Post — 110 years old this year — was not started as a business. It was started as an act of resistance.
In 1916, Garrett Morgan pulled miners out of a tunnel explosion on Lake Erie using a gas mask he invented himself. Rescue workers initially refused to put on the mask because a Black man made it. Morgan and his brother put the masks on themselves, went into that tunnel, and saved lives. Days later, the mainstream press ran the story — and left Garrett Morgan’s name out of it entirely.
So he started a paper.
That paper became the Call and Post. And the lesson Morgan understood then is the same lesson that brought me into media: if you don’t own the platform, you don’t control the narrative. If you don’t control the narrative, you don’t control how your community sees itself, how it makes decisions, or how it organizes when it matters most.
That is not a historical footnote. That is the blueprint we are still operating from — and still failing to fully fund.
Here’s the economic reality that most people don’t understand about how media survives. Rhonda broke it down plainly: 90 to 93 percent of traditional media revenue comes from advertising — not subscriptions, not community appreciation, not social media shares. Ad dollars. Business investment. Consistent financial support from the community the outlet serves.
When Black readers migrated toward mainstream platforms after integration, the advertising dollars followed. The Call and Post didn’t lose its value. It lost its revenue base. There’s a direct line from that decision — made collectively, not by any one person — to the hollowed-out state of Black print media today.
And it’s not just print. Black radio stations. Black digital platforms. Black podcasts building real audiences with real influence. All of them operating on fractions of what they need because the community that benefits most from their existence has not yet treated them like essential infrastructure.
We will share a post. We will stream an episode. We will nod in agreement when the truth gets told. But when it comes to placing an ad, buying a sponsorship, or choosing a Black-owned outlet over a mainstream one for our marketing dollars — we hesitate. We defer. We assume someone else will handle it.
Nobody else is going to handle it.
Think about what Black media actually does for our community when it’s properly resourced and functioning. It documents our history — not the version that leaves our names out of the story, but the real version. It holds local power accountable in ways mainstream outlets never will. It gives voice to the stories that don’t fit the mainstream narrative — the Eagle Scout being raised by his grandmother, the sixth grader who can recite hundreds of digits of pi, the community leader doing quiet work that never gets a camera.
Rhonda told me about covering those stories at the Call and Post — producing five to seven stories a week, going wherever the community needed coverage to go. That kind of output requires resources. It requires a staff. It requires an editorial team. And it requires the Black businesses, Black entrepreneurs, and Black community members who are served by that coverage to reciprocate by investing in it.
That reciprocity has broken down. And we are all paying the price.
Rhonda also raised something that connects this directly to our survival as a community, not just our media landscape. Cleveland has a functional illiteracy rate of around 66 percent. More than half of our population is not reading at proficient levels. She put it plainly: illiteracy is the root of all other ills — incarceration, health outcomes, economic exclusion. Everything.
You cannot build a strong Black media ecosystem in a community that has been systematically denied the tools to engage with it. And you cannot address illiteracy without the kind of sustained, community-rooted journalism and storytelling that Black media has always provided.
These are not separate problems. They are the same problem wearing different faces.
So what do we do?
We start treating Black-owned media the way we treat other things we claim are essential to our survival.
If you own a business — advertise in Black outlets. Not as charity. As strategy. Your customers are there. Your community is there. Put your dollars where your people are.
If you have a product, a service, a brand — choose Black platforms first. Stop assuming that mainstream reach is automatically better reach. For our audience, a trusted Black voice carries more weight than any billboard on a highway.
If you consume Black media — podcast, radio, newspaper, digital platform — find a way to support it financially. Subscribe. Donate. Buy a sponsorship. Tell your network to do the same.
And if you run an organization, a church, a nonprofit, a civic institution — your communications budget should include Black media investment. Not a courtesy mention. Real investment. Because those outlets are doing the work of keeping our community informed, connected, and organized.
Garrett Morgan understood that if the mainstream world wouldn’t tell our story, we had to build something that would. He built it. Others maintained it. And now it falls to us — this generation, right now — to decide whether we’re going to let that infrastructure die because we wouldn’t put the resources behind it.
We don’t get to lament the absence of trusted Black voices and simultaneously refuse to fund the platforms trying to be exactly that.
This is why Strategic Moves exists. Not just to produce content — but to model what it looks like when Black media operates as infrastructure. As a civic tool. As a platform that takes the community seriously enough to tell it the truth.
But we need the community to take us seriously in return.
Support Black media. Advertise in it. Invest in it. Defend it.
Because the day is coming when you’re going to need it — and it needs to still be standing when that day arrives.
Listen to the full conversation with Rhonda Crowder here →
What Black-owned media outlet are you currently supporting — financially, not just following? Drop it in the comments. Let’s build each other up.