Negro Correspondent

Biggest Negro newspaper in the world is the weekly Pittsburgh Courier. The Courier last year had 138,299 readers according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations. Its press run now is close to 170,000. Not more than about 10% of its circulation is in Pittsburgh; the rest is scattered over the U. S., ranges as far afield as the West Indies, China, Jerusalem.

Publisher Robert Lee Vann had just left the University of Pittsburgh with a law degree when he founded the Courier in 1910. Today he is a power in Pennsylvania politics, keeps a handsome home in Oakmont, Pittsburgh suburb. Gross income of the Courier in 1938 was over $500,000. Something like $40,000 of that went to Publisher Vann as profit.

Last week, like none but the greatest of white papers, the Courier had a war correspondent in France. He was a onetime Chicago postal clerk named Reno Walter Merguson, who fought with the U. S. Army in World War I, stayed on in Paris after the War as a tourist guide. He used to drive Negro travelers over the battlefields in an old automobile, send in items about them to the Courier. Presently Editor Vann gave him a full-time job as the Courier's European correspondent.

After 17 years in Paris, Walter Merguson speaks fluent French, lives with his mother in a Montmartre house which he owns. Thin, tall, well-mannered, he has seen most of Europe, before the war had visited both the Westwall and the Maginot Line. Last month Newsman Merguson scored a beat on the entire press of the U. S. with a story of the mobilization of French colonial troops. His cable to the Courier revealed that France was raising a black army of 2,000,000 soldiers, 500,000 laborers. Including the Senegalese fighters who were famed for valor in War I, it is the biggest Negro army ever assembled. One week after Merguson's dispatch appeared in the Courier, the New York Times carried a wireless message from Paris confirming it.

Like most of his white brethren, Walter Merguson has yet to see the front. So far he has had to content himself with visits to French colonial encampments. But he has influential friends in the Government (including the Ministry of Information) who are not blind to the service a Negro correspondent can render France's relations with her colonies. When black troops go to the front, Walter Merguson expects to go with them.

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