COMMENTARY: BY OSWALD T. BROWN
WASHINGTON, D.C., November 21, 2019 — My Facebook reminder this morning is a photo posted with the following message: “Oswald and Kevin are celebrating 1 year of friendship on Facebook!”
Kevin McNeir is Editor of the Washington Informer. I actually thought that we had been friends on Facebook for more than a year, given the fact that I have been communicating with him on a weekly basis ever since I started compiling an AFRICA/CARIBBEAN NEWS segment for publication in The Informer two years ago.
Kevin joined the staff of The Informer several years ago after a stint with The Miami Times, whose owners – the Reeves Family – have “deep roots” in The Bahamas. In fact, during my early years as a journalist in The Bahamas back in the 1960s, The Miami Times’ office was located on 15th Avenue, N.W., not far from 1510 N.W. 69th Terrace, where my late Aunt Amanda Elliott Fox and Uncle Lawrence Fox lived and where I generally stayed when I visited Miami back then.
What’s more, on more than one occasion I contributed articles on The Bahamas that were published in The Miami Times. So even though Kevin and I only recently became “friends,” to me he is an “Honorary Bahamian” and I am looking forward to “hanging out” with him in Nassau or Freeport at some point in the future. He is an excellent writer and I enjoyl reading his incisive and analytical commentaries in The Informer.
The photo that was used to highlight the fact that Kevin and I have been Facebook friends for a year was actually posted on December 9, 2018 by “my sister” Denise Rolark Barnes, Publisher of The Washington Informer, with the following caption:
“Last year this time, Omarosa Manigault Newman invited The Washington Informer Publisher Denise Rolark Barnes and Editor Kevin McNeir along with the NNPA to the White House Press holiday reception. It was the first such invitation for me since President Bill Clinton was in the White House. We never made the cut during the Obama Administration…but that’s a conversation for another time. We viewed Omarosa’s invitation as suspect, especially after she walked out on a meeting with NNPA during my tenure as chair; nevertheless, after getting a personal call from her, we went. She told us she was incensed when she realized no Blacks were invited to the event, so she set out to invite her own media contacts, who allegedly included April D Ryan despite the dissolution of their friendship. She was gracious, but clearly agitated. Days later Omarosa resigned.”
I made the following comment under Denise’s remarks: “As someone who has always promoted the importance of the Black Press in the United States, including the more than 200 Black-owned newspapers that are members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA), several questions immediately crossed my mind after reading that caption, but as Mrs. Rolark-Barnes said, “…that’s a conversation for another time.”
I was News Editor of the Washington Informer for more than 12 years when I previously lived in Washington, D.C. for 21 years before returning to The Bahamas permanently in 1996. When I came back to D.C. in May of 2013 as the Press, Cultural Affairs and Information Manager at the Embassy of The Bahamas, I was extremely pleased with the journalistic advancements that The Informer had made under the leadership of Mrs. Rolark Barnes, since those “struggling years” when I worked along with her father, the late Dr. Calvin W. Rolark, and a hard-working staff late into the nights as deadline approached for me to take final edited copy to our printing company in LaPlata, Maryland.
Our staff back then included several of long-time friends of Dr. Rolark that he developed over his many years as a civil rights advocate and activist – Fab Fisher, Ruth Martin, Lil Wiggins, among others – and some very talented younger staff members like artist Malik Edwards and photographer Akmal Holden.
This was before the remarkable technological advancements that have drastically changed how news is gathered and disseminated; however, although The Washington Informer over the years has kept pace technologically with the “changing times,” it has never abandoned the principal objectives to “positively impact and give a voice to the District’s disenfranchised and predominately-Black community” that were enunciated by Dr. Rolark when he established The Informer in 1964.
As I have noted on more than one occasion, I have advocated for a number of years that it makes perfect sense for the powers-that-be with responsibility for promoting tourism to The Bahamas to advertise in the Black Press. This is currently particularly true as The Bahamas continues its stepped-up efforts to spread the word that THE BAHAMAS IS STILL OPEN FOR BUSINESS in the aftermath of the devastation caused to Grand Bahama and Abaco, two northern Bahamian islands, the first week of September.
While many mainstream white newspapers continue to experience a drastic decline in readership, African-Americans still strongly support black newspapers. Because of my close ties over the years to the Washington Informer, this has been the core aspect of my recent lobbying efforts to convince the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism to advertise in the Washington Informer, which is widely circulated in the Washington metropolitan area, and selected other Black newspapers.
The Informer has a strong presence in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which has been enhanced by the fact that the newspaper is the sponsor of the Prince George’s County Spelling Bee, through which a spelling champion from P.G. County is selected to participate in the annual Scripps National Spelling Bee. As I noted in several previous articles on this subject, it was because of my previous ties to the Washington Informer that The Bahamas became a participant in the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Another “selling point” I have advanced in my lobbying efforts to convince the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism to advertise in The Informer is that there are many well-educated professional African-Americans living in the Washington metropolitan area who are either employed by the federal government or in the private sector with disposable income to be able to afford an annual vacation to a foreign country.
The Hon. Dionisio D’Aguilar, Minister of Tourism and Aviation, has just led a huge delegation of tourism officials and industry partners on a promotional blitz across Canada spreading the message that The Bahamas is indeed still open for business. There clearly is no better time than now to let the Washington Informer spread the word among its devoted readers.
