In the heart of Kansas City, amidst the buzz of the Kansas City Call’s newsroom, Lucile Harris Bluford emerged as a prophetic voice of resistance.
With every phone call she answered and story she penned, Bluford was not just performing the duties of an activist, journalist, owner, editor, and publisher; she was carving out a legacy as a formidable force against the city’s vicious white supremacy. Her life’s work, woven through the fabric of her personal and professional endeavors, stood as a defiant challenge to the existing racial order, illuminating the path toward justice and liberation.
How Her Studies Launched Her Passion for Journalism & Activism
Born on July 1, 1911, in Salisbury, North Carolina, Lucile Bluford lost her mother at four years old. Three years later, her father married Addie Aliston, and relocated to Missouri. However, Lucile stayed with her grandmother Mariah Harris, in Salusbury , until the age of 10 when her grandmother died.
She moved to Kansas City and enrolled in Lincoln High School, where her father taught chemistry and other science courses. There, encouraged by her English teacher Trussie Smothers, Bluford had discovered her affection for writing. She became a staff member and editor of the school newspaper and yearbook, The Lincolnian. Bluford graduated as valedictorian from Lincoln High School in Kansas City in 1928.
In 1932, she completed her degree in journalism and graduated with honors from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. During her college years, she faced significant discrimination.
Not only were Black students forbidden to participate in sports, swim in university pools, and sit in the front of movie theaters, Bluford was denied entry by national officers into the university’s honorary journalism sorority, Theta Sigma Phi – even though she had been elected by her white peers.
In 1939, Bluford applied to the Master of Journalism program at the renowned Missouri School of Journalism in Columbia, Missouri. Her application was originally accepted, but once she showed up to enroll, she was denied because of her race.
These events would set the stage for Bluford’s activism against racism in the years to come.
Media, Activism and Organizing are Powerful Tools in the fight for Black Liberation
Following her college graduation, Bluford joined the Kansas City Call, founded in Kansas City, Missouri in 1919 by Chester A. Franklin.
Bluford spent all of her seventy-one-year career with this publication, working first as a reporter, then an editor, and finally, as publisher and media owner. As time went on, Lucile Bluford became a well-respected editor, a nationally renowned figure and gifted orator in the Black American struggle for civil rights. Between 1968 and 1983, Bluford played a significant role in giving voice to the Black American Community through The Call.
The paper served as a source of news and information, entertainment, and culture at the local and national levels, often including stories ignored by mainstream media.
Bluford herself wrote 253 news stories and thirty commentaries. Her stories represent 79% of the news articles published in the Call during 1968-1983. They are not all signed with her name: she often used the pen name Louis Blue, as well as L. H. Bluford, for occasions when, according to former journalist Donna Stewart, “she wanted to tell somebody off” or “tell it like it is.” Using masculine names as pseudonyms also made her reporting credible to readers, in addition to keeping her safe from race and gender discrimination.
Bluford wrote stories on education, politics, police violence, women’s leadership, civil right activism and women’s rights. Bluford used personal stories and experiences to lend clarity and force to her articles, which exposed racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression and advocated for social change.
Her papers promoted positive social change that sought justice for all people and championed race and gender consciousness and economic self-sufficiency.
Unity is Strength: Developing Partners in Advocacy
Lucile Bluford knew that the Black media had the power to unify an oppressed community. She used the media to provide a forum in which the Black community could finally give voice to their needs and present images that would influence public opinion and result in changes to policies.
Lucile Bluford was actively involved and cultivated strong relationships with coalition groups that would help her to define the Black community’s needs in Kansas City. She aligned with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, the National Organization of Women,and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference .
Bluford never married and had no children. Her colleagues attested that she often joked about the newspaper being her husband and its staff members were her children. Her tireless editorial campaign as an advocate and journalist for social change played a significant role in linking both social movements, civil rights and women’s rights.
Referring to Bluford’s career in the book Whither the Black Press?, scholar Clint Wilson II wrote that “[h]ers was among the most stellar African American journalistic careers that flourished in the 1930’s, 1940’s, and 1950’s despite the limited opportunities for black people to obtain formal training in the field.”
Bluford died on June 13, 2003, at Baptist Lutheran Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, at the age of ninety-one. In 2011, the Eastside Branch at 3050 Prospect Avenue was named in her honor. At the Lucile Bluford Library, A bust of her likeness and a display of her work also commemorates her lifelong activism and advocacy in Kansas City
Sources & References
The information presented in this article was pulled from Lucile H. Bluford and the Kansas City Call: Activist Voice for Social Justice written by Sheila Brooks and Clint C. Wilson II and published by Lexington Books(2018)
