Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 16, 1993 TAG: 9302160150
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
BLACK VOICE AT VA. TECH
A group of black Virginia Tech students, worried that their voices weren't being heard in other university publications, have started their own newspaper.NationTime, named for a slogan from a conference for black leaders in the 1970s, is scheduled to hit campus this week.
"It's high time we had our own newspaper, anyway," said Danita Mason, a graduate student in education and the paper's cultural editor. "We shouldn't rely on anyone else to tell our perspective; and if we're not happy, we should build our own. We've had a problem in the black community with determination and doing for ourselves."
Mason and the editor-in-chief, John Curtis X, want to keep the paper run strictly by blacks and other groups that have been oppressed, such as Indians.
They are looking to the black community and black-owned businesses for support, they said.
"We don't mean to come across as being against white people, but we really need to show ourselves, as college students and black people, that we can do things on our own," said Mason, 25.
The editors decided not to ask Tech for funding, and some of the money for printing is coming from their own pockets.
"We're resigned to standing at specific locations and just handing them out, at least for the first issue," Mason said.
The paper, which will come out monthly, will be tabloid-style and will contain stories, profiles of historical figures, poetry and comments on culture.
Most of the students involved have had no experience in newspapers, Mason said, but she wanted it that way.
"We may not fall in the norm of what a paper is supposed to be, but it'll be creative," she said. "We're throwing ourselves in the water. We'll swim or we'll sink."
Students have been meeting and planning the paper since fall. Twenty students gathered at the first meeting in Tech's Black Cultural Center, and all of them have stayed involved.
They wanted it to be a group effort, Mason said, and just about everybody is in charge of something.
X, a senior in business education, and Mason had the idea independently.
Mason came to Tech from North Carolina A&T, a predominantly black school. She was surprised that there was no black paper at Tech, though there was a newsletter.
"We wanted something bigger," she said. "It was bad enough that it's 24-to-1 down here, but then to have no vehicle of expression . . . "
X said he spent his first years at Tech reading letters to the editor and stories in the Collegiate Times that he believed did not show the concerns of black people. Some of them, he said, reflected racism.
X tried to write his concerns in letters to the editor, he said, but he wanted more.
He realized that the black community needed to do something proactive. "We should have understood that early on."
In the end, Mason said, she expects people to accept the paper on campus. But at first, she said, it may be controversial, because whites could see it as an attack on them. That's not how it's meant, she said.
The goal of the paper, X said, is to give blacks a venue for speaking out and to enlighten those who read it.
The paper also is looking for submissions from people in the black community who don't live on campus, he said.