About Carolina Peacemaker

Carolina Peacemaker

The Carolina Peacemaker is an African-American weekly newspaper published in Greensboro, North Carolina, since 1967. It was founded by Dr John Marshall Kilimanjaro, a professor at North Carolina A&T State University, who served as its president and publisher until his death in 2019. His first issue appeared on 30 March 1967, and in the founding editorial he explained that the paper existed because Black citizens of Greensboro had seen their hopes for political representation at local and state level defeated, and because the community needed a journalistic vehicle through which its hopes, ambitions, fears and aspirations on social, economic and civic affairs could be expressed. That statement of purpose has defined the Peacemaker for nearly six decades.

The paper is owned by Carolina Newspapers Inc., has reported a weekly circulation of 9,100, and belongs to both the National Newspaper Publishers Association, the Black press association, and the North Carolina Press Association. Its headquarters have been listed at 807 Summit Avenue in Greensboro. After its founder's death, editorship passed to Afrique I. Kilimanjaro, keeping the paper in the hands of the family that created it and preserving an unbroken weekly record that the family itself noted with pride: at the founder's death in 2019, the paper had not missed an issue in 52 years.

A Founder From the University and the Movement

John Marshall Kilimanjaro did not come to publishing from a newspaper apprenticeship. Born John Marshall Stevenson, he was an academic in speech, theatre arts and English who joined the faculty of North Carolina A&T in 1955 and founded its theatre arts programme. He had studied at Tougaloo College, earned a bachelor's degree in English from Arkansas A.M.&N. College in 1952, and completed master's and doctoral degrees at the University of Arkansas, where he was among a small number of African-American graduate students. He served in the United States Marine Corps and Navy during the Korean War as a naval hospital corpsman before beginning his teaching career in Greensboro.

His activism preceded his newspaper. In 1958 he was appointed secretary of the Greensboro NAACP, and his efforts helped facilitate a visit by Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke at Bennett College. On 6 June 1962 he was arrested during a peaceful protest with A&T students against racial injustice in downtown Greensboro, and in 1963 he and his wife Vickie attended the March on Washington. In the summer of 1974 he legally changed his surname from Stevenson to Kilimanjaro, stating that keeping the name of his great-grandfather's enslaver would glorify one who had exploited and denigrated a great but unfortunate people. The newspaper he founded sits directly in that line of work: an institution built to give a voice to people whose concerns the established press did not carry.

Why Greensboro Needed the Peacemaker in 1967

Greensboro occupied a famous place in civil rights history after the 1960 sit-ins, yet representation and coverage lagged behind symbolism. Kilimanjaro's founding editorial, titled to evoke the other side of the tracks, argued that Black Greensboro lacked both political representation and a paper of its own through which to pursue it. The Peacemaker was therefore founded as an organizing instrument as much as a news product. It would report local government, education, employment and community life from the standpoint of Black readers, endorse and scrutinize candidates, and provide the public record of a community that mainstream papers covered mainly at moments of conflict.

That mission explains the paper's durability. A weekly that exists to unify and inform a defined community earns a loyalty different from that of a general newspaper. Readers turned to the Peacemaker for news of churches, schools, civic organizations, Black business and political campaigns in Guilford County and across North Carolina, presented as central news rather than as a supplement. Its self-description as a paper addressing the needs and interests of African Americans in Greensboro and the rest of North Carolina, recorded in NCpedia's entry drawn from the Encyclopedia of North Carolina, captures a statewide ambition that went beyond a single city's limits from the start.

The Black Press Tradition in North Carolina

The Peacemaker belongs to the tradition of the Black press in America, whose papers combined reporting with advocacy because their readers were excluded from both the franchise's full exercise and the mainstream press's attention. Its membership in the National Newspaper Publishers Association placed Greensboro's weekly inside a national network of Black-owned papers sharing news, advertising and political strategy. At the same time, membership in the North Carolina Press Association placed it inside the state's general newspaper industry, a dual position that mirrors the paper's work: rooted in a specific community, recognized as part of North Carolina journalism as a whole.

Recognition followed that work. Accounts of the paper note that its investigative stories, opinion columns, editorial cartoons, photography and public service campaigns were recognized by the National Newspaper Publishers Association and by community development organizations locally, regionally and nationally, and that it came to be held up as an example of community journalism with a national reputation. It also became part of the BlackPressUSA network. For a weekly of 9,100 circulation, that standing shows how influence in the Black press was measured not by raw numbers but by trust, longevity and the paper's place in its community's civic structure.

Editorial Voice and Political Engagement

The Peacemaker's editorial page was never neutral territory. The paper endorsed Democratic candidate Tom Gilmore in the 1984 North Carolina Democratic gubernatorial primary, an intervention documented in contemporary reporting, and its endorsements formed part of the political education mission Kilimanjaro announced in 1967. A paper founded because representation had been denied could hardly treat elections as spectator sport. Its endorsements, candidate coverage and reporting on voting access were continuations of the founding editorial by other means, aimed at readers whose votes and organizing the paper sought to inform and mobilize.

Its willingness to print argument within the community is documented as well. In 1986 an editorial in the paper criticized the film The Color Purple for its portrayal of a same-sex relationship between two women, and the Peacemaker then published a rebuttal to its own editorial. The episode, preserved in scholarship and in Alice Walker's later writing, matters less for the positions taken than for what it shows about the paper's pages: they were a forum where Black Greensboro debated culture, morality and representation in public, with the paper willing to carry a reply against its own stated view. That forum function is one of the oldest roles of the community weekly, and the Peacemaker performed it on a nationally discussed subject.

Coverage Beyond Politics

Although its founding was political, the Peacemaker's weekly contents ranged across the full life of its community: local news, education, sports, arts and entertainment and healthy living, in the paper's own description of its coverage areas. North Carolina A&T, one of the nation's prominent historically Black universities and Kilimanjaro's own institution, naturally figured in its pages, as did Bennett College and Greensboro's schools, churches and civic groups. Sports coverage of Black athletes and teams that received little attention elsewhere, arts coverage rooted in the founder's own theatre background, and health coverage aimed at a community with specific unmet needs all extended the founding purpose into everyday service journalism.

That breadth helped the paper function as a community record. Births, achievements, organizational milestones, campaigns and controversies passed through its pages in a continuous weekly chronicle stretching back to 1967. For historians of Greensboro and of North Carolina's civil rights era and its aftermath, the Peacemaker's file is a primary source precisely because it recorded, week by week, what Black Greensboro considered important, in its own editorial judgment, rather than what outside papers selected from it.

The Founder's Death and the Family Succession

John Kilimanjaro died in March 2019 at the age of 88, on the day the weekly newspaper was printed, with his wife Vickie, his partner of 62 years, at his side. His daughter Afrique I. Kilimanjaro, who had moved back home years earlier to help run the newspaper, succeeded him in editorship. Her response to his death captured the paper's ethic: the Peacemaker had not missed an issue in 52 years, and she was not going to let that happen. The succession was therefore both familial and institutional. The founder had built the paper with his wife in 1967 as a response to the civil rights struggle; half a century later, the next generation of the same family carried the same weekly obligation.

Family succession is a recurring pattern in Black newspaper history, where papers often depended on a founding family's labour across generations to survive economics that defeated better-capitalized competitors. The Peacemaker fits that pattern exactly. Vickie Kilimanjaro's role in founding and sustaining the paper, and Afrique Kilimanjaro's move into the editor's chair, show a publishing house in which family commitment substituted for scale. The result is one of North Carolina's longest continuously published Black weeklies, still appearing from Greensboro under the name its founder chose in 1967.

The Peacemaker in Greensboro's Civic Life

Greensboro's civic history since 1967 cannot be written without this paper. It covered the decades after the sit-ins, when the questions shifted from lunch counters to representation, employment, education and political power, and it did so as a participant institution whose founder had himself been arrested in the movement and had helped bring King to the city. The paper's offices on Summit Avenue placed it physically in the community it served, and its pages gave Greensboro's Black organizations a reliable means of addressing one another and the wider city. Mayors, councils and school boards operated knowing that a Black weekly would report their decisions to readers the daily press reached less directly.

The paper's name itself carried meaning. Peacemaker suggested neither submission nor strife, but a community seeking its rightful place through organized, informed civic action. Kilimanjaro's founding editorial framed journalism as the vehicle for that action, and the paper's subsequent history of endorsements, campaigns and public service recognition followed the frame. In a city whose name is permanently attached to a protest over exclusion, the Peacemaker represented the longer, less photographed work of building an institution that outlasted any single protest.

Recognition and Later Years

In its later years the Peacemaker continued to collect professional recognition. Its honours at the North Carolina Press Association awards included recognition for election and political reporting, including coverage of local voting access and a Guilford County elections board decision affecting voting at North Carolina A&T, and for feature photography. Those categories are telling: more than fifty years after its founding, the paper was still being honoured for exactly the kind of reporting it was created to do, scrutiny of the mechanics of political representation, alongside the visual record of community life.

The weekly also remained connected to the institutions that shaped its founder. Coverage of honours for Kilimanjaro himself, including fraternity and university recognition of his work as an educator and founder of A&T's theatre arts programme, appeared in its pages, tying the paper's present to its origins.few community newspapers carry so direct a line between a founder's biography and a paper's mission, and the Peacemaker's coverage of its own community's honours and history reflects the archive it has itself become.

Legacy of the Carolina Peacemaker

The Carolina Peacemaker's legacy rests on continuity. Founded on 30 March 1967 by a professor who had been jailed in the movement he covered, published without missing an issue through its founder's death in 2019, and continued by his daughter, it embodies the Black press ideal of a newspaper as permanent community infrastructure. Its circulation figure of 9,100 understates its role: for Greensboro's African-American community and for North Carolina more widely, it has been a political educator, a forum for internal debate, a record of achievement and a watchdog over representation, all functions named or implied in its first editorial.

Today the Peacemaker continues in Greensboro as a weekly voice under Afrique I. Kilimanjaro's editorship, owned by Carolina Newspapers Inc. and connected to both the Black press nationally and North Carolina journalism generally. Nearly sixty years after a theatre professor decided that his city needed a paper, the vehicle he built for his community's hopes and aspirations is still in service, which is the strongest evidence of how accurately he judged the need.