* Bennie G. Rodgers; Editor of Black Newspaper

Bennie G. Rodgers, 86, longtime executive editor and columnist for the St. Louis American, one of the leading black community newspapers in America. Born in Tutwiler, Miss., Rodgers moved with his family to St. Louis when he was 2. He attended public schools there and later Illinois State University. When he joined the American in 1945, blacks were not allowed to work in mainstream newspapers and those papers did not cover the black community. African Americans who wanted to be journalists worked at black newspapers or they didn’t work. Week after week, Rodgers chronicled race relations in St. Louis, and sometimes his writing helped alter the course of history, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported in a story on Rodgers some years ago. In 1946, Rodgers went to Washington University and asked why there were no black students. “No one told me why,” he said in an interview for the University of Missouri archives. But Rodgers found that before 1919, the school had indeed admitted black students. Six months after Rodgers’ article appeared, the university again opened its doors to African Americans. Kenneth Cooper, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Washington Post who worked as an intern and later a reporter at the American, said: “Bennie was my first editor and in many ways the best one I ever had. He had tremendous energy and a great amount of moral courage as a journalist.” On April 5 in St. Louis after a long illness.