Lighthouse and Informer

Black journalist John McCray founded the Charleston Lighthouse newspaper in 1939. In its first year, the Lighthouse highlighted the abuse of Black citizens by police and demanded the removal of “whites only” signs from a local beach. While both signaled the paper’s forthright style, it was McCray’s investigation of rape charges against a Black doctor under the headline “Whites Frame Doctor, Force Him From Town” that drew the ire of local whites. As McCray considered leaving Charleston, NAACP leaders extolled the need for a paper that could extend a message of mass Black struggle against Jim Crow across the state. McCray concurred and merged the Lighthouse with the Sumter-based People’s Informer to create the Lighthouse and Informer to be located in the state’s capital of Columbia.

During World War II, the Lighthouse and Informer embraced the “Double V” campaign launched by the Pittsburgh Courier that called for victory over U.S. enemies abroad and over racism in the U.S. Without using the term, the paper emphasized its themes by highlighting Black soldiers and Black patriotism while emphasizing claims for equal citizenship. When South Carolina Governor Jefferies failed to appoint any Black members to the post-war planning committee, McCray called it an abandonment of the allies’ ideals of democracy. To this end, the paper attempted to show, through its coverage of issues like discriminatory Black teacher pay in segregated schools, that segregation meant an implied white supremacy. In 1944, tensions in the South rose as the Supreme Court struck down the all-white Democratic Primary election and President Roosevelt campaigned for a fourth term. McCray used the Lighthouse and Informer to organize the Progressive Democratic Party of South Carolina, an organization that allowed Blacks to organize independently, support Roosevelt, and wield their political voice by attempting to vote.

In addition to political coverage, the Lighthouse and Informer covered literary and sports news, while its network of correspondents across the state covered the breadth and depth of Black life in South Carolina. The society columns of the paper reported births, deaths, marriages, and visits from family and friends. This gave the paper a place in the lives of Black South Carolinians that political coverage alone could not. In 1942, the Lighthouse and Informer serialized Richard Wright’s recently released and then controversial novel Native Son. The paper also covered the career of Los Angeles Dodgers player Jackie Robinson, the first African American to break the color barrier in Major League Baseball, and African American Boxing star Joe Louis.

In 1947, South Carolina NAACP President Reverend James Hinton wrote in the Lighthouse and Informer that the NAACP would no longer accept “separate but equal,” which Hinton called “unconstitutional, unlawful and immoral.” Subsequently, the Lighthouse and Informer vigorously supported the NAACP’s case Briggs v. Elliott challenging gross inequalities in Black and white school facilities in South Carolina, which later became one of the five cases decided in the consolidated 1954 Brown decision. Yet by the time the Brown decision was announced in May of 1954, the Lighthouse and Informer had tipped into bankruptcy and John McCray had left the paper. By the end of the year, the paper was closed.

Bedingfield, Sid. Newspaper Wars: Civil Rights and White Resistance in South Carolina, 1935–

1965. 1965. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Bedingfield, Sid. 2011. “John H. McCray, Accommodationism, and the Framing of the Civil

Rights Struggle in South Carolina, 1940–48.” Journalism History 37 (2): 91–101.    

Roefs, Wim. “Leading the Civil Rights Vanguard in South Carolina: John McCray and the

Lighthouse and Informer, 1939 – 1954” in Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African

American Activism, 1850-1950, edited by Adam Green and Charles M. Payne. New York: NYU Press, 2003.