It started as ‘just a printing job for the Franklin Press’

• By GEORGE MORRIS
• News Features staff writer
• Published: Oct 18, 2009

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J.K. Land didn’t originally want to start a newspaper, or even want to follow his parents in the printing business.

“From my parents’ experience, I knew you couldn’t make any money in it,” Land said. “But they were in it and kept screwing up all their lives.”

Life, however, often goes differently than planned. When a post-World War II attempt to start a dairy failed, Land went to work for his parents, who’d started Franklin Press.

Then, he had an idea: A newspaper aimed at Baton Rouge’s black community. In 1952, Land started the Weekly Leader, soon changing its name to the News Leader, which he published until selling it in 1977. Land began identical newspapers in five other cities, all now closed.

There were and remain black newspapers in other American cities, including New Orleans. The difference is in the owner.

Land is white, and he knows of no other white owner of a black-interest newspaper in the civil rights era.

“I don’t think there was in the entire United States,” he said.

White-owned newspapers targeting a black audience sprang up in the Reconstruction period in an effort to woo black voters away from the Republican Party, said Clint C. Wilson II, journalism professor at Howard University and an expert on the black press. Those newspapers, Wilson said, usually began a few months before an election and ceased publication shortly afterward.

Wilson is unaware of papers like the News Leader — which he said doesn’t fit the accepted definition of a black newspaper because it wasn’t black-owned.

“I would say that the Baton Rouge newspaper would certainly be a rare example given the racial sensitivities of that era which included the civil rights movement and rise of black power advocacy,” Wilson said.

“He was, I guess, a man ahead of his time, or whatever you might say,” said John H. Williams, a photographer who did freelance work for the News Leader. “I don’t know that he was a bleeding-heart liberal, but he was a fair man. He was liked by a lot of people.”

Land was born in 1922, the same year his parents, E.J. and Inez Land, began Franklin Press. His mother’s family also owned 160 acres near the corner of Perkins Road and Siegen Lane, which they farmed, especially during the Depression.

During World War II, Land had a job at the Standard Oil (now Exxon) refinery while his brother, E.J. Jr., served as an Army news correspondent. After the war, the brothers started a dairy on the family land. When that failed, they went to work for their parents.