Milwaukee Community Journal

About Milwaukee Community Journal

The Milwaukee Community Journal is the largest African-American newspaper in Wisconsin, publishing since 1976 as the official journal for Milwaukee's diverse Black community. Founded by Patricia O'Flynn Pattillo — who remains its founder, CEO and publisher — the paper has reported on the plight, struggles and victories of African-Americans in Wisconsin for nearly five decades, advancing the causes of its local readers from its Milwaukee headquarters. With editor Thomas E. Mitchell leading the newsroom and a weekly readership reported at 200,000, it is a National Newspaper Publishers Association award winner and a pillar of the Black press. Its website is communityjournal.net.

Founding in 1976

When Trisha Thomas founded the Community Journal in 1976, she asked Mikel Holt to join her, creating the staff of one of two Black newspapers in Milwaukee — alongside the newly combined Milwaukee Star Times and the Milwaukee Courier. The timing was freighted: Milwaukee was the city of redlining, the Open Housing marches and Vel Phillips, Wisconsin's first Black alderwoman, judge and elected secretary of state. Holt had decided to become a journalist after watching the city's white dailies — the conservative Sentinel and the supposedly liberal Journal — misrepresent Black people during the unrest of the late 1960s: "It was at that point that I decided I wanted to be a journalist: so I could tell the truth." The Community Journal was born to tell that truth.

Patricia O'Flynn Pattillo's leadership

Patricia O'Flynn Pattillo — honored by the city of Milwaukee as one of its "28 Days of Black History" trailblazers — has led the paper since its founding as founder, CEO and publisher. In 1987 she became the first female president of the National Newspaper Publishers Association–Black Press of America, a landmark for Black women in publishing. After losing her 29-year-old son Terence to an asthma attack in 1991, she established the Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship Fund, which has provided more than $1 million in stipends to low-income students and students of color in Milwaukee. In 2015 she was inducted into the Milwaukee Press Club's Wisconsin Media Hall of Fame. Her leadership has made the Journal not just a newspaper but a civic institution.

Pattillo's 1987 election to lead the NNPA — the Black Press of America — broke a barrier in an industry where publishing power had been overwhelmingly male, and it announced the Community Journal's arrival as a national player. Her subsequent honors, from the city's Black History tribute to the Press Club's Hall of Fame, recognize a career spent building Black institutional power in Wisconsin: a newspaper, a scholarship fund, and a model of what community-rooted Black publishing can achieve.

The Holt tradition

Mikel Holt, who joined Trisha Thomas at the paper's 1976 founding, became one of the Journal's defining voices — a journalist who had chosen the profession specifically to tell the truth about Black Milwaukee after watching the white dailies misrepresent his community. His philosophy of the Black press, articulated from the Journal's front office across decades, shaped the paper's adversarial stance toward power and its commitment to stories the mainstream press wouldn't tell. Holt's later co-founding of the Wisconsin Black Media Association extended that mission beyond the paper's pages, organizing Black journalists statewide around the same truth-telling imperative that had launched the Journal.

Mission: the community's official journal

"Our mission is as our name states: to be the official journal for Milwaukee's diverse Black community." Since 1976, the paper has been Wisconsin's largest African-American newspaper, distributed at community churches along with its weekend edition and refusing, in its own description, to publish anything that demeans or undermines Black people's journey toward freedom. That mission — record, advocate, uplift — has guided the paper through five decades of Milwaukee history.

Editorial voice

For 40-plus years the Journal has reported on the plight, struggles and victories of African-Americans in Wisconsin, in the words of one profile — covering the institutional issues affecting Black Milwaukee long before they reached the mainstream news. Editor Thomas E. Mitchell, a veteran journalist described as grizzled, frank and impassive behind a desk crowded with articles, awards and calendars, brought a knowledgeable, deliberately objective perspective to the city's racial conversation. When the Sherman Park shooting and protests put Milwaukee's racial divides in the national spotlight, the Community Journal — "uniquely positioned, and duty-bound," as one account put it — was already there, having covered those issues industriously for four decades. A National Newspaper Publishers Association award-winner, the paper's journalism has been recognized nationally.

Distribution and readership

The Milwaukee Community Journal and its weekend edition are distributed at community churches across Milwaukee — a distribution network rooted in the Black church, the historic center of the community's civic life. The paper publishes biweekly, on Wednesdays and Fridays, and its weekly readership has been reported at 200,000 — a remarkable reach that reflects both the paper's free distribution and its deep penetration of Black Milwaukee.

The Wisconsin Black Media Association

Mikel Holt's early experiences with racism in Milwaukee newsrooms — recruited as a copyboy by the Sentinel's only Black reporter, Ray Moore, then frozen out after the unrest — later prompted him to co-found the Wisconsin Black Media Association. The association institutionalized what the Community Journal practiced: Black journalists organizing to tell Black stories truthfully, in a state whose largest daily remained overwhelmingly white.

Scholarship and community investment

The Dr. Terence N. Thomas Scholarship Fund stands as the paper's most tangible community investment: more than $1 million in stipends to low-income students and students of color in Milwaukee, created from Pattillo's personal loss. It exemplifies the Journal's philosophy that a community newspaper's obligations extend beyond its pages — into the schools, churches and lives of its readers.

The fund's scale — over a million dollars to students who needed it most — makes it one of the most significant philanthropic legacies of any Black newspaper publisher in America. Born from the 1991 asthma death of Pattillo's 29-year-old son Terence, it transformed private grief into public opportunity, sending low-income Milwaukee students and students of color to college year after year. It is the Community Journal's mission made concrete: not just reporting on the community's struggles, but investing in its future.

Nearly five decades of Black Milwaukee in print

Since 1976, the Milwaukee Community Journal has been Wisconsin's Black paper of record: through the Open Housing era's aftermath, the deindustrialization decades, the Sherman Park uprising and the present day. Founded by a woman who would become the first female president of the Black press's national association, staffed by journalists who chose truth-telling as a vocation, and read by 200,000 people a week, it remains — as its mission states — the official journal for Milwaukee's diverse Black community.

The paper's endurance across nearly five decades — through the collapse of print advertising, the digital transformation of media, and the persistent economic pressures on the Black press — testifies to the loyalty of its readership and the depth of its community roots. Distributed through the Black church, led by a publisher honored as a city trailblazer, and committed to a mission it has never diluted, the Community Journal stands as proof that a community newspaper, honestly serving its people, can outlast every obituary written for it.