Explorations in Black Leadership

Co-Directed by Phyllis Leffler & Julian Bond

Tisdale, Charles (1927–2007)

Tisdale bought The Advocate, a weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1978. After the civil rights era, Tisdale realized that much remained to be done. He changed The Advocate to be a hard-hitting journalistic paper that exposed corruption in the Mississippi government and reported on the injustices and civil rights violations African Americans and impoverished whites experienced in the Deep South. Tisdale received death threats throughout the 1980s and 1990s for his work, and the paper’s offices were frequently threatened by shootings and fire bombings.