Wilmington lost another historic building last month when the former home of longtime newspaper The Wilmington Journal, a landmark in the Black community, was torn down.
Located at 412 S. Seventh St. downtown, the building dated to 1903 and for most of last century served as the home of one of North Carolina’s oldest and most prominent Black-owned newspapers, which printed its first issue in 1927 and served the Port City’s African American community for nearly a century.
The Wilmington Journal has not published on a regular basis since its editor and publisher, Mary Alice Jervay Thatch, died in late 2021. Her passing warranted an obituary in the New York Times.
The paper’s website is no longer active, its most recent Facebook post dates to February and a phone number connected with the Journal is no longer in service. Messages sent to an email address and Facebook account associated with the Journal were not immediately returned.
Empty lot at 412 S. Seventh St. where the offices of The Wilmington Journal were located for decades. The 1903 building was torn down in November.
Before it was torn down, the two-story wooden structure where the Journal was located had sustained heavy damages from Hurricane Florence in 2018.
Paul Jervay Jr., writing for the N.C. Black Press Association Media Service last month, quoted Thatch’s daughter, Robin Thatch Johnson of Raleigh, as saying, “We are interested in rebuilding, and are carrying the publication of The Wilmington Journal on.”
Jervay is the nephew of late Journal publisher Thomas “T.C.” Jervay Sr., whose father, Robert Smith Jervay, founded the paper as the Cape Fear Journal in 1927 as a sort of spiritual successor to Black-run Wilmington newspaper The Daily Record.
The Daily Record, which was located on the same block as the Journal, was burned down in November of 1898 by a white supremacist mob that murdered dozens of Black people, drove untold others (including Record editor Alexander Manly) out of town and forced several elected officials to resign.
T.C. Jervay, who changed the paper’s name to The Wilmington Journal in 1945, was inducted into the N.C. Journalism Hall of Fame in 1999, six years after his death. He was Thatch’s father and Johnson’s grandfather.
In 2021, an online GoFundMe campaign and a telethon raised more than $95,000 for repairs to and purchase of the Journal’s hurricane-damaged building.
Jervay’s story said that despite the successful telethon, restoring the building would’ve cost upwards of half a million dollars, more than five times the amount raised to purchase it.
Efforts had been made to save The Wilmington Journal building until it was torn down in November.
The future of The Journal is uncertain, but the property where it was located remains in the Thatch family.
New Hanover County property records show the building was purchased by Robin Thatch Johnson in May 2021 for $93,000 from the heirs of Willie Jervay, who was the wife of T.C. Jervay. Ownership was then transferred to Thatch, Johnson’s mother, in August of 2021. Thatch died in December 2021 and the property is now owned by her heirs, with at least three creditors holding judgments against it.
According to city of Wilmington spokesperson Lauren Edwards, the city has been in conversation with the Jervay and Thatch families since 2015 about needed repairs to the building.
At an administrative hearing in April, the city found issues including a partial collapse of the roof and walls; extensive wood rot throughout the building; broken and missing windows; and the collapse of a floor on the second story. Foundation blocks were leaning and a wall had become detached from the foundation.
At the hearing, “the family stated their intention of demolishing the building,” Edwards said, noting that “this is not a city-funded demolition, and the case was not brought before the city council, though it would have been had the family not taken action to repair or demolish the unsafe structure.”
Mary Alice Jervay Thatch, who led the Black-owned Wilmington Journal since 1996, passed away in 2021.
Thatch, who was president of the North Carolina Black Publishers Association at the time of her death, was named publisher of the year by the National Newspaper Publishers Association in 2013.
This came after the paper’s decades-long crusade against the conviction of the Wilmington Ten, nine of whom were Black, in 1971 following violence and unrest driven by school desegregation. The Journal’s building was set on fire in 1971 and hit with a dynamite attack in 1973 after numerous articles and editorials decrying the conviction of the Ten as racially motivated.
The bombing destroyed many archived back issues of The Journal, much as copies of The Daily Record were systematically destroyed in the weeks following the 1898 coup and massacre.
The Wilmington Ten’s convictions were overturned in 1980, and all were given full pardons by then-N.C. Gov. Bev Purdue in 2012.
In addition to covering the Black community at a time when mainstream media in Wilmington, including the StarNews, mostly didn’t, the Journal led crusades against segregation; pushed for Black students to be admitted to University of North Carolina Wilmington predecessor Wilmington College; and demanded that the New Hanover County Public Library admit Black patrons.
Thatch took over as editor of the Journal in 1996. In 2004, Thatch announced she was selling The Journal, but a sale never occurred.
A newspaper vending machine for the Wilmington Journal in front of the Wilmington Sportsmen’s Club in Wilmington in 2020. The Black newspaper’s office building was recently torn down.
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The loss of the Journal’s historic building would appear to be a blow to efforts to start a Black historic district on Seventh Street. In 2022, community leaders including Kojo Nantambu, pastor of Wilmington’s Temple of Truth, Light and Life church, pushed for such a district to be centered around The Journal and Gregory Congregational United Church.
“We cannot just put up signs on the corner and say, ‘Oh, this is where the Wilmington Journal stood,'” Nantambu told the StarNews in 2022. “(It needs) to be there.”
Deteriorating structures in historic downtown have been an issue in 2024.
In January, the former Manor Theater at 208 Market St., which dated to 1941, was demolished less than half a year after being condemned. In March, the facade of a 1940 building on Grace Street collapsed.
In early August, a 1905 building on Princess Street suffered a partial collapse. And in late August, a Waffle House in the historic 1902 Elks Temple Building on North Front Street closed after the rest of the building was cited for multiple code violations.
This article originally appeared on Wilmington StarNews: Building that housed Black Wilmington Journal newspaper torn down