1937-1993
Newspaper Publisher

First Black Owner.

When Robert Maynard bought the Oakland Tribune in 1983, he became the first black in the United States to own a major daily newspaper. But Maynard had a career full of firsts, from being the first black national newspaper correspondent to being the first black newspaper editor in chief.

High-School Dropout.

The son of immigrants from Barbados, Maynard grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York. Interested in writing from an early age, Maynard frequently cut classes at Boys High School in Brooklyn to hang around the editorial offices of the black weekly newspaper the New York Age. By the age of sixteen he had dropped out of school to work full-time as a reporter for the New York Age. In 1956 he moved to Greenwich Village, where he wrote freelance articles and met writers such as James Baldwin...