Remembering Daily Challenge publisher Thomas Watkins, a true journalism pioneer

Sign up for our FREE acclaimed newsletters!

The news mainstream media just doesn’t cover. Racial justice journalism since 1909.

Sign up

Thomas Watkins, founder of the Daily Challenge, like his customary hat, was well-balanced and easily identified in a crowd. Still, it was his inalterable commitment to publish the truth, no matter the consequences, that endeared him to readers.

Watkins, 88, joined the ancestors Dec.19, and as expected, a flood of encomiums came from a variety of public officials who knew of his journalistic prowess personally, including Dr. Ben Chavis, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and the Rev. Herbert Daughtry, whose columns in the Challenge were always a fount of information. 

Watkins came from a lineage of freedom fighters, most notably his grandfather, who was steadfast in his opposition to the KKK and lynching, and his father, whose tenure at the Amsterdam News tripled the paper’s readership base. Rather than recounting what others closer to Tom have stated elsewhere, I vividly remember being in his presence when I arrived in New York City for the third time as a freelance writer in 1985, a Johnny Come Lately, as Dr. John Henrik Clarke used to remind me. 

He published several of my stories before I began my long-term relationship with the Amsterdam News, and even then, when we bumped into each other, he said the door was still open to submit pieces, which I did on occasion. I found him to be a man of unquestionable integrity and shared some impressions with him during his stewardship as president of the National Newspaper Publishing Association. What endeared him to me most was the space and leeway he gave to the activist organizations, none more prominent than the Patrice Lumumba Coalition and the December 12 movement.

I relished Pan-African freedom fighter Elombe Brath’s articles, from which I was permitted to quote, the obituaries by Rev. Daughtry, and later the articles on Black nationalism by Nayaba Arinde. Tom was an astute and enterprising visionary, and after establishing the Daily Challenge, which shared the unique position of an African American daily with the Atlanta World, he branched out, creating several other publications. 

If Watkins had done nothing more than provide opportunities for alternative voices for writers advocating for the underserved, his contribution would still have been a distinguished one. 

Tom, you were an unwavering voice for the voiceless, and when we recall that other eternally worthy Brooklyn paper, Freedom’s Journal, like Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm, you plead our cause, never waiting for others to speak for us.