Almena Lomax, journalist and activist, dies

LOS ANGELES -- Almena Lomax, a journalist and civil-rights activist who launched the Los Angeles Tribune, a feisty weekly newspaper that served the African-American community in the 1940s and '50s, died March 25 in Pasadena, Calif. She was 95.

Her death came after a short illness, said her son, Michael, president and chief executive of United Negro College Fund.

Lomax was a leading figure in African-American journalism, known for her sharp opinions and independent spirit. She founded the Tribune in 1941 and was its editor and chief writer for two decades, achieving a circulation of 25,000.

The paper often bore the traces of what poet-playwright Langston Hughes, an avid Tribune reader, described as "impish" humor. But Lomax also had a reputation as a hard-hitting journalist willing to stir controversy with stories on such topics as racial discrimination in Hollywood and police mistreatment of blacks.

She started the Tribune with a $100 loan from her future husband's father, Lucius W. Lomax Sr., a gambler and businessman who owned the legendary Dunbar Hotel in Los Angeles. Lomax Jr. joined the paper as publisher in 1943 and married the editor six years later.

Lomax quickly earned distinction for her newspaper. In 1946 she won the Wendell L. Willkie Award for Negro Journalism with a provocative story challenging the stereotype of black men's sexual prowess. She was an early advocate of multiculturalism, hiring two Japanese-American writers who had been interned during World War II: Hisaye Yamamoto and Wakako Yamauchi, who went on to distinguished careers as a short-story writer and playwright, respectively.

In 1956 Lomax left her husband and six children for a week to cover the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., where she met its leader, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Tribune subscribers subsidized her trip, but her husband disapproved and the marriage began to crumble.

The couple divorced in 1959. The following year she closed the Tribune and left for Tuskegee, Ala., with her children, who ranged in age from 4 to 16, to cover the civil-rights movement. After her sojourn in the South, she became a copy editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, where she covered the kidnapping of Patty Hearst and the hunt for black revolutionary Angela Davis.