Almena Lomax, civil rights activist, journalist, and founder of the Los Angeles Tribune, died 25 March in Pasadena at 95.

Born Allie Almena Davis in Galveston, Texas on 23 July 1915 her parents’ efforts to escape the Jim Crow culture of the American South took her to first Chicago then Los Angeles.  After graduating from Jordan High School she spent a year-and-a-half studying journalism at Los Angeles City College.  In 1938 Lomax began working at the California Eagle before leaving two years later to focus on her increasingly popular twice-weekly news radio program on local radio station KGFJ.

In 1941, after borrowing $100 from her future father-in-law, hotel owner Lucius W. Lomax Sr., she started the Los Angeles Tribune.  Over the next two decades the Tribune established itself as a newspaper offering opinion pieces, political commentary, and stories focusing on the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the movie industry of Hollywood, and incidents of police racism in L.A.  At its peak the paper had a circulation of 25,000.  In 1946 she was awarded first prize in the Wendell L. Willkie Awards for Negro Journalism for her column challenging the stereotype of black men’s sexual prowess.  “She was a terrific writer,” recalled civil rights lawyer Leo Branton, Jr., “the only one of all the black newspapers at the time who really was fearless about exposing things as they were.  She didn’t soft-pedal anything.”

As evidence of her influence as founder and editor of the Tribune, Lomax was selected in 1952 to serve as a delegate to the Democratic convention.  In 1958 Lomax was instrumental in California gubernatorial candidate Edmond G. Brown’s victory as she helped deliver the state’s liberal vote to the Democrat.

After divorcing her husband, she closed the doors of the Tribune in 1960 and moved with her children to Tuskegee, Alabama.  In response to those who questioned her decision to move to the South at the height of the civil rights movement she said simply, "Negroes who lead, or can lead, who have any motivation at all toward bettering the world for mankind, need to go often into the teeth of Jim Crow and know it for its brutal, dehumanizing reality."

Upon returning to California, Lomax relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area where she became the first black person to work the San Francisco Chronicle’s city desk before moving to their rival, the Examiner.  As a reporter she covered the social and political changes in San Francisco during the 1960s and early 1970s, the kidnapping of Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hurst, and the search for black revolutionary Angela Davis.