Rosetta Miller-Perry was an American journalist, newspaper publisher, and community media figure who founded and operated the Tennessee Tribune, an African American community newspaper based in Nashville that has served the Black community of Middle Tennessee since its founding and that represents the tradition of the African American press as one of the most important institutions in Black community life in the United States across more than a century. She died in 2026 at an advanced age, her career having encompassed the full spectrum of African American community journalism from advocacy to community service to documentation of Black civic and cultural life.
She was born in Tennessee and came of age in the African American community of Nashville, a city whose Black community has been one of the most significant in the American South, home to historically Black colleges and universities including Fisk University, Tennessee State University, and Meharry Medical College, and whose civil rights history includes the Nashville sit-in movement of 1960 that was one of the most disciplined and effective direct action campaigns of the civil rights era, producing leaders including John Lewis, Diane Nash, and James Lawson who would shape the national movement.
She founded the Tennessee Tribune as a vehicle for community journalism that would serve the African American community of Nashville and Middle Tennessee in the tradition of the Black press that stretches back to Frederick Douglass’s North Star in 1847 and that produced newspapers across the country that were both chroniclers of Black community life and advocates for the rights and interests of their communities in a media environment that the mainstream white press had excluded Black voices from or covered in stereotyped and distorted ways. The tradition of the African American press understood the newspaper as a community institution, not merely a commercial enterprise, and the owners and editors who built and sustained those newspapers understood their responsibility to the communities they served as encompassing both the journalism of documentation and the journalism of advocacy.
The Tennessee Tribune under her leadership provided coverage of Nashville’s Black community including the achievements of individuals, the activities of civic organisations and churches, the cultural and social events that mark community life, and the political and civic issues affecting Black residents of the city and the state. The newspaper also engaged with the political representation and economic development questions that determined the material conditions of the Black community, providing a journalistic voice that was explicitly committed to the interests of its community in a way that community newspapers of the Black press tradition have historically understood as their fundamental purpose. She was remembered by the Nashville Black community and by the broader African American press community as a dedicated publisher whose commitment to community journalism sustained an important institution. She died in 2026.