The day after the last issue of the Richmond Free Press, the former Confederate capital woke up without its most tenacious Black‑owned voice in more than three decades. The paper that had covered school board wars, police shootings, Black Lives Matter pushback and the eventual toppling of Confederate monuments ended its run with a different kind of headline: that of its own obituary.
For readers who grew up with the Free Press, the Feb. 12-14, 2026, edition was less a final issue and more the closing of a chapter in Richmond’s memory — one that began in 1882, when a group of formerly enslaved men launched The Richmond Planet and asserted that Black Richmonders would no longer be written about only by those who refused to see them as full citizens.
Origin Story: The Richmond Planet
The Richmond Planet as it appeared on Saturday, May 31, 1902 (Image via Wikimedia Commons)
On any given Saturday, the startup of the presses at 222 E. Broad Street announced a new edition of The Richmond Planet — and another act of defiance. The paper had faltered under its first editor, Edwin Archer Randolph, but 21-year-old John Mitchell Jr. took over in 1884 and, from his room in a boarding house, nursed the declining weekly into a weapon against corruption and the daily humiliations of Jim Crow. Born enslaved on Laburnum plantation during the Civil War, Mitchell fearlessly turned his paper into both a community bulletin and a staunch defender of Black society, challenging white supremacy long before such dissent was safe.
He reported on the scourge of lynching, publishing explicit anti-lynching editorials, including victims’ names and graphic imagery. He declared that opposing lynching and unjust legal executions was a universal moral duty. It wasn’t idle talk — Mitchell personally prevented several lynchings and frequently interceded on behalf of wrongfully convicted Black men and women, providing legal counsel and raising money for their defense.
Mitchell’s frustrations with the white power structure reached a boiling point in 1904, when he and fellow activist Maggie L. Walker called for a boycott of Richmond’s newly segregated streetcar system. “Let us walk,” he thundered in an editorial. “A people who will willingly accept discrimination ... are not sufficiently advanced to be entitled to the liberties of a free people.”
Mitchell was the driving force behind The Planet for 45 years, purchasing new equipment, contributing art and editorials, and eventually increasing circulation to make the paper modestly profitable. However, despite — or because of — his reputation as “the Fighting Editor,” Mitchell encountered financial troubles. In 1891, following The Planet’s opposition to the Robert E. Lee monument dedication the previous year, Hustings Court Judge Josiah Leake issued an injunction alleging Mitchell had committed financial malfeasance. In 1921, Mitchell was convicted of fraud at Mechanics Savings Bank, which he had founded. The case was overturned on appeal, but the legal expenses left him destitute, and the bank failed shortly after.
Even during stints on Richmond’s City Council and Board of Aldermen, Mitchell doggedly continued publishing The Planet until his death on Dec. 3, 1929, just a year after Virginia passed the nation’s first anti-lynching law. The paper continued for nearly a decade with no editor-in-chief listed.
Growth: The Richmond Afro‑American
In 1938, the Baltimore-based Afro American Newspapers purchased the struggling Planet and changed its name to The Richmond Afro-American-Planet. “Here is our hand, Richmond,” Editor J. Robert Smith announced in the first combined issue, printed on June 4, 1938. “We are fully conscious of the responsibility which the assignment as editor of the merged Planet and Afro imposes, and it shall be our aim to carry on in keeping with the well-established policies of these two journals.”
The paper’s name was shortened to The Richmond Afro-American in 1941, and it flourished, with circulation reaching upwards of 20,000 by the end of the 1940s. “In our heyday, The Afro was in every Black household in the city,” Editor John Templeton told the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star in 1983. “Either it was in the house or people talked about what was in it.” During the paper’s first decade, former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who from 1990 to 1994 was the nation’s first elected Black governor, delivered the Afro door to door.
The Afro adopted a measured journalistic approach distinct from the firebrand activism of Mitchell and The Planet, opting to serve more as an alternative civic institution. It nonetheless highlighted civil rights injustices, such as the 1960 Thalhimers sit-in protesting segregated lunch counters and the destruction of historical Black neighborhoods by highway construction, but the paper also offered job postings and social event reporting that promoted Black life, achievement and culture largely overlooked by mainstream white-owned newspapers.
In 1959, Prince Edward County closed its public schools rather than comply with court-ordered desegregation. The Afro covered the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Richmond to lead a nonviolent protest march of over 2,000 people from the Mosque (today’s Altria Theater) to the Virginia Capitol. “We must work for first-class citizenship, but never use second-class methods to gain it,” King said in the Sept. 19, 1959, article.
In 1965, with the paper struggling, Publisher Carl Murphy hired a dynamic reporter named Raymond H. Boone as editor to boost circulation. A native of Suffolk, Boone held a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Boston University and a master’s in political science from Howard University. He had begun his career in 1956 as a reporter for the Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot- Ledger and sportswriter for the Suffolk News-Herald.
His staff saw Boone as a successor worthy of John Mitchell Jr. “There are figures in life who change the way one feels about everything, and for me, Ray Boone was one,” recalls journalist and author Garrett Epps, who wrote for Boone at The Afro. “His independence, courage and humanity were a remarkable combination. These facts embody what Ray stood for. He was a community journalist and represented a community that included his enemies as well as his friends.”
The Richmond Afro shuttered on Feb. 12, 1996 — coincidentally almost 30 years to the day of the Free Press’ 2026 closure — and for a similar reason: loss of advertising revenue.
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(From left) Jean Boone stops by the desk of her husband, Richmond Free Press Editor and Publisher Ray Boone, at the paper’s former offices at West Broad and Adams streets in the mid-1990s. (Photo courtesy Regina H. Boone)
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Ray Boone Jr. and his mother, Jean Boone, in the Richmond Free Press’ offices on Franklin Street in 2015 (Photo by Jay Paul)
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The late founder and publisher of the Free Press, Ray Boone died in June 2014. A year later, his office remained just as he left it. (Photo by Jay Paul)
Local Leader: Richmond Free Press
Boone served as vice president of Afro American Newspapers from 1976 to 1981, then for nine years taught journalism at Howard University, but these sedate routines failed to fulfill his activist temperament. He returned to Richmond in 1991 and launched the Free Press the following year. It was less a simple job change than a bid for local, independent control over the adversarial, community‑rooted Black journalism he knew Richmond needed. “Simply put, the mission of the Richmond Free Press is to empower its readers,” he stated in the inaugural issue.
During its 1992-2026 run, the Free Press’ readership topped 135,000, broke many remarkable stories, and won more than 300 local and national awards for journalism and advertising, proving that a small, family‑run, Black‑owned outlet could frequently out‑report larger, whiter newsrooms on issues that mattered to its community.
In the mid-2000s, recalls civil rights attorney and former City Councilmember Sa’ad El-Amin, the Free Press kept the pressure on Virginia Commonwealth University and the state to remove the asphalt atop the African burial ground at 15th and East Broad streets in Shockoe Bottom. Later, when VCU attempted to repave the site, El-Amin led a legal fight to excavate the site just as the city was pushing for a new ballpark in the Bottom. With pressure from the Free Press and other activists, in 2011 then-Gov. Bob McDonnell authorized the transfer of the 3.1-acre site from VCU to the city. The pavement was removed, and the site is now a memorial.
“We got the governor’s attention through Boone keeping this in the paper,” says El-Amin, bemoaning the loss of the Free Press. “We are in deep trouble, because it’s always been the Black press that has taken on issues that the Times-Dispatch didn’t take on, or any other newspaper that came through.”
Former Managing Editor Bonnie Winston works with April Coleman, then vice president of production, at the Free Press’ offices on Franklin Street in 2015. (Photo by Jay Paul)
After Boone’s death in 2014, his wife, Jean Patterson Boone, and their children, Regina and Ray Jr., assumed leadership of the Free Press. “The paper was part of your routine; it was part of knowing what was truthfully happening in your community. There was a sense of family with it,” Regina Boone says of the Free Press. “You could see yourself in the newspaper.”
In 2020, the Free Press centered Black voices in its coverage of the removal of Confederate statues from Monument Avenue, reframing the debate from “heritage” to historical harm and community healing. Its editorials and reporting gave activists, clergy and ordinary residents a platform to articulate what the monuments meant to them, influencing public opinion and city leaders’ decisions.
Jean and Ray Boone, center, with Ray Jr., left, and Regina in the lobby of the Free Press in the early 2000s (Photo courtesy Regina H. Boone)
“[When I was] a rookie journalist for the [Virginia Union University] newspaper, the Free Press quickly became one of my go-to resources for information and inspiration,” says the Rev. LaKeisha Cook, executive director of the Virginia Interfaith Center for Public Policy. “The journalists at the Free Press never hesitated to amplify our fight for justice for all Virginians.”
“I am fortunate to have contributed freelance reporting to the Richmond Free Press from 2017 to 2020,” says Samantha Willis, editor-in-chief of the Virginia Mercury (and a former editor at Richmond magazine). “My focus on issues of importance to Black Central Virginians mirrored the paper’s longstanding mission to represent and reflect its audience with authenticity. I first learned the Free Press was by and for Black people because my grandparents, faithful readers, told me so. But that lesson was made most real for me as a contributor.”
For 144 years, Black Richmonders wrote their own stories, refusing to let their lives be footnotes in someone else’s narrative. From the ferocious activism of The Richmond Planet to the steady diligence of The Richmond Afro-American and the fearless columns of the Richmond Free Press, each newsroom demanded that Black voices be heard, in full and on the record. Those presses may have stopped, but the exacting standards they set for journalism in this city remain for the city’s remaining journalists — and whomever is resourceful (and brave) enough to start the next paper. —Dale Brumfield
Investigative journalist Dale M. Brumfield has written numerous books, including two about local media: “Independent Press in D.C. and Virginia: An Underground History” and “Richmond Independent Press: A History of the Underground Zine Scene.”
Raymond H. Boone, founding editor and publisher of the Richmond Free Press (Photo courtesy Regina H. Boone)
‘Drip, Drip, Drip’
Gentrification, the anti-DEI movement and a news industry in crisis contributed to the collapse of the Free Press
Calm turned to chaos when the tents and portable toilets showed up.
In November 2011, Ray Boone, late editor and publisher of the Richmond Free Press, did something no one saw coming: In the days after Richmond Police broke up an encampment of protesters at Kanawha Plaza downtown (remember Occupy Richmond?), Boone invited them to pitch their tents in his front yard.
They accepted. Hundreds showed up, creating a surreal situation that attracted law enforcement, including the police chief, and every media outlet in town. South Side Councilmember Reva Trammell even made an appearance, offering her support and handing out bottled water.
Not everyone was happy about the spectacle, especially the Boones’ neighbor: then-Mayor Dwight C. Jones. Turns out Ray and his wife, Jean, shared a driveway with Jones, whose administration had spent the previous few weeks chasing those same protesters out of city parks.
“You are following in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Thurgood Marshall and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” Ray Boone told a small group of protest organizers who gathered in front of his house on Nov. 15. “You are true heroes, and therefore we are just happy to have you here.”
It was a master class in advocacy journalism, a specialty of the Black press and Richmond’s unflinching editor — only this time, he was elevating mostly white 99 percenters. If the Free Press had become the gatekeeper of Black political power in Richmond, it could also help deliver a powerful, multiracial message of economic justice.
“My dad, and my mom, would always say that we are a newspaper for all people,” says Regina Boone, a photojournalist who worked at the family paper and spent more than a decade at the Detroit Free Press. “It’s not just Black people who are reading us.”
In mid-February, 34 years after printing its first edition, the Free Press stopped the presses for good. Richmond’s voice for the voiceless has fallen silent.
As is the case for all print newspapers, advertising revenues had been steadily declining. But the nail in the coffin came in January 2025, when Donald Trump took office for a second time and the anti-DEI movement began to wreak havoc on the bottom line, says Jean Boone, the paper’s longtime advertising manager. She took over as publisher after her husband died in 2014.
Ray Boone looks on as a worker puts up Christmas lights at the paper’s headquarters on Franklin Street in the early 2000s. (Photo courtesy Regina H. Boone)
Ben Chavis, chief executive of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, told NBC4 Washington last July that the anti-DEI movement has led many businesses to pull their ad dollars. Among the association’s 250 Black-owned papers, he said, more than 200 were struggling financially. Months later, during a diversity roundtable discussion in late January at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Chavis painted an even bleaker picture: Black newspapers across the country saw advertising revenues decline 80% in 2025.
Jean Boone says the Free Press experienced the “drip, drip, drip” of advertising losses over the last several years, but there was a sharp turn for the worse during the last 12 months. “I think as decision-makers on the advertiser side have seen what’s going on with entities that did not take a knee to the administration,” she says, “some ran scared, and some used it as a reason not to advertise.”
Losing the Free Press now is particularly troubling, says Julian Hayter, a historian and professor of leadership studies at the University of Richmond. The city’s residential renaissance of the past three decades led to widespread displacement of lower-income and middle-class Black families.
“Papers have struggled generally to maintain relationships with advertisers, doubly so for African American presses,” Hayter says, “but even more importantly, the Free Press relied on a community that no longer exists — or, at least, is dwindling.”
Decades of white and Black flight following desegregation have chipped away at the city’s Black neighborhoods, so much so that in 2020 Richmond became a majority white city for the first time in 50 years, according to census data. Today, both Chesterfield and Henrico counties have more Black residents than the city, according to U.S. Census projections.
“The African American communities during segregation turned inward. They were insular communities, but they were communities nonetheless,” Hayter explains. “You’ve got neighborhoods where Black people live in Richmond, but they’re not the communities that they used to be. It’s hard for a paper to draw on a community that has dislocated.”
Still, as local print newspapers go, the Free Press had a good run. Before its revival under VPM, Style Weekly ceased publication in 2021, just shy of its 40th anniversary, and the Chesterfield Observer, a weekly with a circulation of more than 70,000 pre-pandemic, shuttered in 2023 after 28 years. Meanwhile, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which had a print circulation of more than 100,000 in 2012, reported an audited print circulation of 18,129 in June of last year (the Free Press, in fact, had a higher print circulation, 18,835, when it announced it would cease operations on Feb. 12).
The RTD’s decline has been so dramatic that the paper vacated its headquarters, which once consumed an entire city block at 300 E. Franklin St., in early 2025. The paper, now with roughly a dozen full-time reporters, moved what’s left of its editorial and advertising operations to its production facility in Hanover County.
Losing the Free Press, however, hits different.
“I think that the Free Press had a unique role in metro Richmond that was largely neglected by other media,” says Tom Mullen, professor and director of public affairs journalism at UR. “I think for Ray [Boone], this was not just about selling newspapers; it was a calling. The Free Press was a shining example of journalism with a purpose. That voice is gone — for now.” —Scott Bass
News Editor Scott Bass previously worked for Style Weekly, the Chesterfield Observer and the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
