‘Publicitor’ Melvin Smith chronicled the community for decades in various newspapers.

The small but mighty CCC Newsette warmed hearts and heated up mailboxes across Evanston’s sizable Black community and beyond from 1971 to 1985. A project of publisher and community activist Melvin Scribner Smith, the newspaper was published weekly and went through many formats and incarnations. It was a rebirth of two earlier versions also led by Smith: the Evanston Newsette (1941-1942, 1946-1951), and a brief run of the Evanston Afro Newsette in 1968. It also briefly merged with the North Shore Examiner in 1976, but retained its name.

The CCC Newsette thrived for a decade and a half and was buoyed along by waves of local activism as well as the national Civil Rights Movement.   

The Shorefront Legacy Center and the Evanston Public Library have been working to digitize copies of the issues. Now any Evanstonian with an Evanston public library card can bask in lively and detailed accounts of the Evanston Black community’s courage, struggles, humor, debates, triumphs and valor, as reflected in the pages of the CCC Newsette. 

You can read the full story (and search through the database) in an article by Kristin Lems published in the evanstonroundtable.com web site at: http://tinyurl.com/bdzjc6xw.