Photo by Brandon Dill
Karanja Ajanaku
The death of Karanja A. Ajanaku this week hits particularly hard. A deeply respected journalist, he was a reporter at The Commercial Appeal for many years and later was associate publisher and executive editor at The New Tri-State Defender until his retirement in 2023. In his final Facebook post last month, he announced that liver cancer had put him back in the hospital, "with the conversation now including hospice aid. To my support team, be at peace! I am!" It was very much who he was to treat his illness as a journey and to be forthright and thoughtful about it while sustaining himself and his many friends with an outlook of affirmation. The tributes from his many friends and colleagues have been reflecting the impact he had not only as a first-rate journalist, but as an exemplar of wisdom and compassion. This story originally appeared in our March 2018 issue.
Karanja A. Ajanaku came to work for The Commercial Appeal in 1977 fresh out of journalism school at the University of Missouri. He knew nothing about Memphis except that it was where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. “That was it,” he says. “I just came in blank, trying to do the best I could do.”
There are few experiences that can teach you about a city as quickly and thoroughly as getting assignments from a Metro editor every day. Your reporting will take you anywhere in town to cover events, tragic and comic. You not only talk to people for a story, you ask colleagues about what and who is important, and you find your way around.
“I came in with a consciousness about the need to be active as an African-American person,” Ajanaku says. “And so I had that in my mind, but you’re just trying to make it, man. You’re just trying to make it.”
He was prepared enough when fate intervened. “I found myself one day, just by chance, in a car with a guy who was holding people hostage,” he says. “I’m the only one there and ended up doing the story and it thrust me forward and gave me a chance to do some things.”
Soon enough, he got a chance to cover City Hall. “I don't know that they had any African Americans to cover City Hall before,” he says. The Commercial Appeal had white reporters covering the white community for decades until King’s death, when it started to integrate the staff and its coverage.
When Ajanaku went to cover City Hall, other African-American reporters also got plum assignments: Otis Sanford on the federal beat and Jerome Wright covering police. “We were the three amigos, right?” Ajanaku says.
Early in his tenure at the CA, Ajanaku and other African-American staffers went to editor Mike Grehl to talk about ways the newspaper could better cover the African-American community. Grehl wanted a designated African-American reporter for that, although Ajanaku disagreed, believing coverage should be spread around. But he applied for the beat anyway, telling the editor, “I’m good enough that I can do something with it, but I’ve also got enough courage that, if it needs to die, I’ll tell you that.” He got the job.
In developing his reporting skills, Ajanaku — whose name and byline then was Leroy Williams Jr. — encountered philosopher and researcher Nkosi Ajanaku, who helped guide his thinking about who he was culturally. The young journalist came to see that his identity was both African and American, but not about skin color. He was able to regard himself and his community with fresh eyes. In 1986, he had his name legally changed to Karanja A. Ajanaku, a reflection of his heightened cultural awareness.
He was at The Commercial Appeal for many years and is now associate publisher/executive editor of The New Tri-State Defender where he continues his journalism that is, he says, “designed to provide verified information that people can use to be able to make decisions about empowerment. That’s what it’s about, verified information.”
That’s crucial to society on every level — global, national, local — but there are challenges coming from every direction. “We have all these other communication vehicles out there,” Ajanaku says. “They’re flooding the airways with all this information, most of which is not verified. It’s fake news, and that’s a problem. How you actually deliver the information is changing, with these phones and the internet and all. Those of us in the industry are having to make adjustments on the fly.”
The Tri-State Defender started in 1951 as an African-American newspaper and today it continues because the demand is there. “What we’re about is being innovative relative to what we have always been about,” he says, “and that is to be advocates, to be a voice for the African-American community. In 1951, the African-American community was hurting. It had a need for information about itself relative to the struggle for civic rights, political rights, human rights. And the more traditional papers weren’t providing that information for a variety of different reasons.”
So African-American newspapers thrived, “But then integration came in, and it affected the lifeline of African-American newspapers,” Ajanaku says. “Journalists had other options and chose to go to those options. And let’s say that we give the more traditional papers the benefit of the doubt: They could see the light. They reached out to bring people in to cover the community.”
But he’s optimistic about The New Tri-State Defender. “Memphis is a majority African-American city,” Ajanaku says, “and we are sure that if we provide the community with what it needs today, that they will respond relative to readership and support. And so we’re focused on the local: reporters and photographers interviewing, taking photos, talking to local people, producing local stories about local people involved in the unfolding of life around them relative to civics, to politics, basic human rights as it was before.”
Ajanaku sees a bigger challenge, however. “We’ve got people who are growing up that can’t read,” he says. “And many who can, can’t read in context. They can’t comprehend stuff.
“If you’re going to live in a democratic republic, you’re going to live where the individual has to be informed, and if he doesn’t have the tools to take in the information and make informed decisions, you’ve got a problem. It’s a greater threat than Russia.
“So I think that education is just where we have to go,” he continues. “It’s a life-and-death situation. We have to start funding education like we know that. And we have to start providing it at the earliest age possible, and we’ve got to broaden what it is that we're teaching.”
