About The West Virginia weekly. [volume] (Charleston, W. Va.) 1933-1935
Charleston, W. Va. (1933-1935)

The West Virginia Weekly

The West Virginia Weekly was an African American newspaper that formed in Charleston, West Virginia in early 1933 and was created and edited by Earl K. Koger. The Weekly focused on the racial and socio-economic issues African Americans faced during both Jim Crow segregation and the Great Depression. Boasting that it was the "Official Negro Press of West Virginia," the Weekly provided a wide and dedicated range of content for its African American readers. The first five pages consisted of a front page usually covering significant national or local racial events. The issues here document a strong anti-lynching coverage by the Weekly, followed by a sports page, a page on the "social realm," and a last page for "the world of women."

The Weekly was also one of the known papers to subscribe to the era's only southern-based African American newspaper syndicate the Scott Newspaper Syndicate (SNS). Within the paper, this section was called the "SNS Feature Section" and formed the bulk of the Weekly's content and made the paper anywhere between 14 and 16 pages long. The S.N.S was created by William Alexander Scott Jr in Atlanta, Georgia with the goal of providing small Black newspapers across the South and Midwest cheap access to content. While subscribed to the SNS, the Weekly followed the news pages with a photo gallery called the Gravure Weekly, which highlighted gravure-style photos of culturally significant African Americans.

Earl K. Koger (1910-1995), the founder and editor of the Weekly, was a staunch civil rights activist throughout his long life. Koger's father was a formerly enslaved man named James Fountain Koger. James Koger escaped slavery in 1864 during the Civil War by taking advantage of encroaching Union lines into the South. He then opened up a saloon after the war and got involved in southern civil rights politics in the 1880s and 1890s when it was dangerous for an African American to do so. James Koger taught this racial and political consciousness to his ten children, and many of them, including Earl Koger, went on to have intellectual careers fighting for African American civil rights throughout the twentieth century.

Earl Koger founded the West Virginia Weekly in 1933; while short-lived, it was only one of his projects for civil rights advancement during his career. Koger went on to be the first Black insurance broker in Maryland; this allowed him the time and capital to publish Black history books for children during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 70s. From 1959 to 1972, Koger published a Black history coloring book, a music book, and a historical fiction book called Jocko that centered on enslaved Africans' perspectives during the American Revolution. The Weekly provided an entry for a career of literary civil rights activism for Koger that lasted for the remainder of his life.

The Weekly ended its run sometime late in 1935. Due to a presumed lack of funding during the Depression, the Weekly ended its subscription to the SNS sometime in 1934 and shrank to a four-page paper. Despite this setback, the last remaining issues of the Weekly were still dedicated to advancing Black civil rights, supporting New Deal economic policies, and covering the racial violence perpetuated against African Americans nationally and locally. The Weekly ceased publication sometime late in 1935.

Provided by: West Virginia University