Richland County · Marker 40-144
The Lighthouse & Informer
1507 Harden St., Columbia
Front inscription
The Lighthouse & Informer, long the leading black newspaper in S.C., was a weekly published here from 1941 to 1954 by journalist and civil rights advocate John Henry McCray (1910-1997). McCray, who founded and paper “so our people can have a voice and some means of getting along together,” published articles covering every aspect of black life and columns and editorials advocating equal rights.
John H. McCray
In 1944, after the S.C. General Assembly repealed laws regulating primaries and the S.C. Democratic Party excluded blacks from voting in them, John H. McCray helped found the Progressive Democratic Party, the first black Democratic party in the South. He was an editor for other leading black newspapers in the 1950s and 1960s, then spent many years as an administrator at his alma mater, Talladega College. McCray died in Alabama in 1987.