The Skanner News: Half a Century of Reporting on How Black Lives Matter

Editor's note: This essay was originally published in The Skanner News' 50th Anniversary special issue.

Donovan Scribes (fka Donovan M. Smith)My years at The Skanner News marked an era when the Black Lives Matter movement began  to sweep America. From the streets to the presidential debate stage, the cries for racial justice at the hands of the state reached a fever pitch. The names of young men gunned down like Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown acted as stand-ins for the countless many whose tragedies never reached the national consciousness.

When I assumed my seat in the newsroom, I understood the assignment. One of my early pieces was an interview with the public information officer for the Gresham Police Department, headlined, “What Does Gang-Related Mean?” I asked him about the criteria for using the label “gang-related” in public statements. For me, the term stood out – a recklessly coded stereotype for unfettered Black crime.

In journalism, on-the-record statements about racism are hard to come by. That’s why, simple as it may seem, it was a big deal that the officer admitted during our conversation that, “You get into something that’s more ambiguous [with the term “gang-related”], to be honest. There’s no criteria …”

The “get” was less a “gotcha,” and more a confirmation. As the officer went on, he explained he “was not a sociologist” and unsure why Black people had increasingly moved from North and Northeast Portland out to Gresham, and how ultimately the police role was to identify issues and “direct resources where they need to go.”

Police and community relations are certainly not a new conversation for the Black community. In the 50 years since The Skanner News opened its doors, it’s been there for the range of police-related tragedies that have been visited upon the community. Forty years ago, Black security guard Tony Stevenson was choked to death by a Portland Police Officer –  inspiring Portland police officers to print t-shirts that said “smoke ‘em, don’t choke ‘em.” The officers who made the shirts were suspended, but were later reinstated with back pay after a union arbitrator intervened; the officer who killed Stevenson was never even indicted. 

Fast forward to the choking death of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020. Every regular reader of The Skanner News already knew this story; many had lived it. Like other Black press institutions, this paper has been witness and advocate, informer and critic. But uniquely in one of the whitest parts in America, The Skanner News has always reported on Black life in the Pacific Northwest as not just a story, but the story, every single issue. 

I started this essay with the intent to write about the tradition of the Black press. Moreover, I wanted to give the proper props to The Skanner News, to whom I owe a great deal of my early professional development. I did not attend journalism school. I did not even finish college. The Portland Observer, and subsequently then The Skanner News, respectively, did what no other papers would have done with a 20-something-year-old like myself with a knack for prose, and an affinity for finding answers to the questions: “who” “what” “when” “where” “why” and “how” that have shaped the place my family has called home for generations. 

As I began trying to paint this page, I aimed to describe the tradition the Black press has emerged from. The tradition of calling into question power, while recognizing ours. The tradition that reflects back to us the beauty of our mundanity not as a political statement, but because sometimes our “everyday” is story enough. The tradition that has changed laws, been our eyes and ears when no one else cared to bear witness. It’s a tradition that calls us to remember the names of Ida B. Wells, WEB DuBois, and Portland’s own Beatrice Morrow Cannady. 

Black press, at its best, is Black power in action. 

Now, as we move to celebrate The Skanner’s 50 year anniversary, perhaps publishers Bernie and Bobbie Foster are wondering to themselves where the past half-century went. 

Those years represent thousands of articles, millions of words, and countless moments capturing the radical notion that Black life in the Pacific Northwest is not just a story, but it is the story, every single issue.  

View photos from The Skanner anniversary celebration here.