During the early 1950’s Rockford’s three daily papers, the Rockford Morning Star and the Rockford Register Republic and The Rockford Labor News did not publish many stories beyond “crime news” about or of interest to the Rockford African-American community. Mr. Joseph Scott Saunders, Jr. single-handedly created and produced The Crusader, in an effort to bring balance to Rockford’s news offerings and reporting of the African-American experience within our community. The weekly paper’s high editorial standards and well-written articles garnered a substantial readership and advertising agreements successful enough to sustain its production for the better part of a decade.

Through a generous donation from Mr. Saunders’s daughter, Eleanor Saunders Towns, the editions of The Crusader which had been donated to the Rockford Public Library by Mr. Saunders in the mid 1970’s have been digitized and are now proudly available to all through our website.

Rockford Public Library is proud to offer this valuable community resource to the public. This paper records history that was not reported on elsewhere and tells the story of many African-Americans in Rockford, like Mr. Saunders who served our community with their time, talents and labor.

We offer our sincere gratitude to Ms. Towns for making this offering possible and encourage you to read her letter to learn more about the man who created this valuable publication and those it served.

My thanks to the staff of the Rockford Public Library (RPL) for preserving and digitizing the bound volumes of The Crusader donated by my dad, Joseph Scott Saunders, Jr. I am especially touched that you chose Black History Month to publicize addition of those volumes to the Library’s website.

Joe Saunders, “Saunders,” as he gruffly answered the telephone, was The Crusader’s creator, publisher, ad-man, bookkeeper, layout guy, typist, reporter, columnist, circulation manager and deliverer, editor, receptionist, writer, and photographer. The genesis of this paper, like so many “community” and Regional newspapers, fulfilled my dad’s goal to disseminate positive news about and of interest to, in this case, Rockford area African-Americans. At that time, the Rockford Morning Star and the Rockford Register Republic, the two dailies that became the Rockford Register Star, and the local “rag,” the Rockford Labor News, published mostly crime news about area African-Americans whose name(s) were likely followed by the identifier, “Negro.” My father was determined to bring balance to “our” story.

His newsroom was half of the unfinished basement of our modest home at 1319 Blake Street. He constructed the L-shaped plywood counter on which he laid out the weekly paper with rubber cement and a wooden T-square – before the advent of offset printing. Other furnishings included a surplus government desk, a few miscellaneous chairs, the Underwood typewriter on which he used the two-fingered “hunt-and-peck” method faster than many of today’s “text-ers,” and a small stash of office supplies – likely “borrowed” from his day job. I don’t know what became of the first-generation Polaroid camera of which he was so proud. Riches, he had none.

His efforts garnered the attention of publishers of the dailies, partly because he was a damned good writer and, I presume, partly because he showed there was a potential market of readers and advertisers the dailies hadn’t targeted. He told me they offered to hire him as a reporter provided he assumed a nom de plume; I don’t know if they conditioned the offer on his giving up The Crusader, but he refused to hide his ethnicity or risk losing his editorial independence, advertisers, and subscribers in exchange for such a plum job for an African-American man in the ‘50’s. The news issues he published are distinguished by his “Pen Tracks” column on the top left of the front page; they were well-written, grammatically correct, and laid out according to newspaper standards of the time.

He produced the weekly paper from the early ‘50’s until he remarried and moved to Dayton, Ohio. There was a gap in production until a few of his now late circle of community advisors and helpers – headed by Mr. Bernice Johnson, published a later round, also called The Crusader. Before he left for Ohio, my dad had the foresight to bind the issues he published. I believe it was during the nation’s Bicentennial celebration that he donated them to the Library for whom his sister-in-law, the late Polly Anna (Frederick) Saunders worked. It is to her and her friend and coworker, Jean Lythgoe, we owe gratitude for doggedly protecting those now fragile copies. Last year I signed over any ownership rights I possessed in the paper to the Library my father clearly trusted to protect his legacy. While its facilities are equipped to preserve the collection for the long-term, I am pleased to donate his Underwood typewriter, a copy of this letter, and pictures to the Rockford Ethnic Heritage Museum.

Joseph Scott Saunders, Jr. was one of 15 children (10 boys and 5 girls) born in Lockport, Illinois to Joseph Scott Saunders, Sr. and Florena Amy Organ Saunders. A graduate of Lockport High School, he served as a Warrant Officer in the U.S. Army’s South Pacific theater. He retired twice: first, as a Clerk in the Rockford office of the U.S. Army Reserve, and later, as a postal employee in Ohio. He was an avid
lifelong reader.

Of the 15 siblings, Aunt Bea was a Teacher, Aunts Ruth and Jane were nurses, Uncle Jim (who also published a community newspaper, The Negro Voice) was a Journalism Professor at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri and Eastern Illinois University (EIU) in Charleston. EIU named Saunders Hall in honor of him. I believe Uncle Art played in some level of the Negro Baseball League. Uncle Fred was the first African-American supervisor at the Rockford Post Office. On her old XP computer Aunt Mabel, family historian, traced our roots to a slave owner in West Virginia; she said ancestors named Sanders moved from West Virginia to Lockport where they added a “u” to Sanders to distinguish them from a White family getting their mail. Aunt Mabel recounted that Uncle Tom went to Tuskegee University with two shirts – one he washed every day; he acquired an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He taught in the English departments of Lincoln University (Jefferson City) and Virginia State University, an historically Black public land-grant university in Ettrick, Virginia. His Doctoral Dissertation, “Moral Values in the Novels of Edith Wharton,” is in Pittsburgh’s Andrew Carnegie Library.

To my knowledge the Saunders siblings were hard-working, tax-paying Americans. The men were military veterans; most were active in their churches, and nobody went to jail. Not bad for a large, poor, Depression-era family of any race. Their accomplishments and commitment to God, country, race and family were by-products of seeds planted and well nourished by Florena Amy and Joseph Scott, Sr. Indeed, the Saunders’ were an important part of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation. “

Why should African Americans or anyone care about publication of a small newspaper serving subscribers in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin? It matters because newspapers such as The Crusader, The Negro Voice, and the larger Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier documented otherwise unrecorded bits of American history. It matters because a one-dimension historical record may not portray people whose gifts and talents are delivered in service to communities despite overwhelming odds, but instead feeds stereotypes of thugs, addicts, and charity takers. Like historical societies and obituaries, those “little” newspapers fill(ed) an invaluable archival gap in the chronicles of our nation. And why should we bother with the cost and trouble to digitize them? Because, even for the big guys, as print and delivery costs rise and circulation shrinks, we already see generations whose primary source of “news” is part of the electronic genre where “optics” trump in-depth reporting.

On behalf of my Dad and the public, I thank Rockford Public Library for keeping and sharing this marvelous community resource. I believe my father, who shunned public accolades, would be proud.

Sincerely,
Eleanor Saunders Towns