WSMV Channel 4 Bulger's Beat: Founder, visionary still leads community paper

A Nashville woman, who delivers the news every week to Middle Tennessee's black community, started the local paper at an age when most people start thinking about retirement.

Twenty-one years ago, at age of 56, Rosetta Miller-Perry decided the African-American community needed a newspaper of its own, and it had to be headquartered on historic Jefferson Street.

The big banks in town didn't like the idea and wouldn't give her a loan, so she put up $70,000 of her own money and went to work.

Today, she is still working at her Tennessee Tribune, where she is surrounded by the significance of her last 20 years on Jefferson Street.

Certificates, awards and trophies help define the gratitude.

"We inform the community about the good things of African-American life. We don't do the drug scene, we don't write about crime, only talk about positive things," Miller-Perry said.

The newspaper she created and still leads gives a weekly voice to African Americans.

Health updates, neighborhood issues and entertainment fill the pages for her 150,000 weekly readers.

"And we put the caption underneath the picture," she said.

Working for the Tribune can be a training ground for future journalists, but it requires commitment to the community.

"We don't just publish a newspaper, they have to be involved in the community. So, if you want to work for me, if somebody calls for a community event, it's the whole office," Miller-Perry said.

The library of archived papers preach the importance of the past. Samples include a Bill Cosby visit to Fisk University and reminders of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s time in Nashville.

But the past is just part of her focus.

"So you've gotta be proud of who you are, what you're doing and where you're going," she said.

That brings us back to Jefferson Street, which is no longer as vibrant as it once was.

But Miller-Perry and her paper fight for its future, well aware that new businesses may be the only way it survives.

"We don't want to wipe out our history. So if no black businesses come here, we all move to a majority area of town. We wipe out our history and we will not have history for us," she said.

Miller-Perry has been an achiever all her life. The newspaper and Jefferson Street have just helped fill the last 20 years.

Also on her life's resume, she is a mother of three, a U.S. Navy veteran and a law school graduate.

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