An American newspaper story: Rosetta Miller-Perry 1934-2026
Rosetta Miller-Perry. She made a difference.
During this extended summer holiday week, consider the American spirit of Rosetta Miller-Perry. She was not about loud fireworks. She was about sincere faith. Miller-Perry was the founder of the Tennessee Tribune, an independent Black newspaper in Nashville.
She died on June 26 at the age of 91.
Miller-Perry served in the United States Navy and was one of the first African-American students to graduate from Memphis State University. She launched the Tribune in 1991 to focus on issues such as health, education, and voter registration.
Miller-Perry was unable to secure financing from area banks, so she invested $70,000 of her savings to start the newspaper. With a circulation of more than 150,000 in Tennessee, the newspaper became the state’s largest minority-owned newspaper. The Tribune also has an online platform. The weekly will continue its operation.
In November 2021, Miller-Perry continued to think outside the box by opening two stores at the Nashville International Airport. What independent newspapers open stores in major airports in the 2020s? She was still dreaming at age 87. That’s beyond the Spirit of ’76. In addition to selling copies of the broadsheet, the stores carry goods from as many as 40 local minority vendors. I included Miller-Perry in my 2022 book “Beacons in the Darkness (Hope and Transformation Among America’s Community Newspapers).”
Nashville airport store (D. Hoekstra photo)
“I always come up with crazy ideas,” Miller-Perry told me. “It’s difficult for Black newspapers. It’s difficult to get advertising. The hip-hop generation doesn’t read newspapers. Many of my readers are non-Black. So you need something else. You can’t depend on your newspaper for income.”
Miller-Perry worked closely with Dr. King and the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) during the 1960s in Memphis, Tn. She was boots on the ground in Memphis for the 1968 garbage strike. She sharpened her organizational skills. For example, in 2006 she published the names of registered voters in predominately Black Nashville districts who did not vote in federal elections which increased voter turnout from 35 percent to 65 percent.
“There’s nowhere to put anything for Black folks in Nashville,” Miller-Perry continued. “A lot of people come through that airport. Lots of Black organizations. We sell sweatshirts from (Nashville) Black colleges like Fisk (University) and American Baptist College. The other gift shops were only carrying Vanderbilt. But now they’re carrying Fisk and others. You see?”
Miller-Perry was born on July 7, 1934, near the Allegheny River in Coraopolis, PA. Her parents worked in the steel mills, and she spent the first four years of her life on her aunt’s houseboat. She briefly attended Howard University Law School and lived in Chicago, where she attended Herzl Junior College (which later became Malcom X College) and Cortes Peters Typing School while working for Spiegel’s mail-order store.
Miller-Perry joined the Navy in 1954. By 1960 she was hired by the United States Civil Rights Commission (USCRC) as a clerk typist, then as a field representative. She split her time between Memphis and Nashville, serving as Director of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. After working for the government for more than a quarter century, she retired in 1990—to become a publisher. Usually, it’s the publisher who goes off to retire.
Nashville mayor Freddie O’Connell believed so much in Miller-Perry he opened his campaign office at her Tribune Building when he sought re-election to the city council in 2019 and again when he ran for mayor in 2023.
The Tribune is in the former Universal Insurance building, 1501 Jefferson St , which was a staple of the African-American community. During segregation, Memphis-based Universal Life Insurance offered necessary financial services to the community. In 1923 Universal Insurance was the second African-American company in the United States to attain million-dollar status, according to the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County catalog of Historical Site Markers. Miller-Perry purchased and renovated the building in 1991.
“As a very successful businesswoman, she was proud of the expansion of her footprint at the airport,” O’Connell told Nashville’s WKRN-TV. “And while she loved the building in which she spent so many hours keeping the community informed, I always sensed she knew the building and Jefferson Street itself have unrealized potential. As a city, I hope we can do a better job of realizing that potential in her honor.”
My long-time friend Pat Embry connected me with Miller-Perry. He is the former executive editor of the Nashville Banner and former editorial director of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee. Embry worked with Miller-Perry as part of Leadership Nashville Alumni programming and directed a 20-minute video that included her and six other prominent local women for the Community Foundation’s Humanitarian Award.
“Rosetta walked it like she talked it,” Embry said on Sunday morning. “She refused to tolerate intolerance. She made a point of owning and running a newspaper that represented her community, North Nashville, with offices on Jefferson Street–the cultural nerve center of the African-American community in Nashville.”
Miller-Perry was a mentor to many journalists, ranging from Nashville based music writer Ron Wynn to Yuri Cunza, President and CEO of the Nashville Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Miller-Perry uplifted Cunza in 2003 when he launched the La Noticia newspaper in Nashville. “Rosetta welcomed collaboration over competition and believed that when one community succeeds, we all move forward together,” Cunza told WKRN-TV. “She understood the power of journalism to inform, unite and strengthen a community.”
My encounters were Miller-Perry were not in-depth, but her hopeful vision will remain with me. The news business is filled with so much bad news that Miller-Perry’s remarkable journey becomes overshadowed.
Every time I’ve been in the Nashville airport, I’ve picked up a copy of the Tribune and asked a clerk how Miller-Perry was doing. I was assured she was looking forward to the next day. She was going places. The airport is one of several places in Nashville where she will be remembered.
Rosetta Miller-Perry gave people wings.
Funeral arrangements are pending according to Lewis & Wright Funeral Directors in Nashville.
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