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- Karanja Ajanaku, a pioneering journalist in Memphis, has died at 70.
- Ajanaku was the first Black reporter assigned to cover city hall for The Commercial Appeal.
- He later became editor of the Tri-State Defender, a newspaper serving the Black community.
- Ajanaku championed diversity in newsrooms and advocated for education.
Motivated by what he described as “a consciousness about the need to be active as an African-American person,” Karanja A. Ajanaku was a pioneering, influential and essential longtime presence in Memphis newspaper journalism.
Writing under his birth name of Leroy Williams Jr., Ajanaku was the first Black reporter assigned to cover city hall for The Commercial Appeal, as the newspaper belatedly recognized the need for Black voices in print, in the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. here. He also launched the newspaper’s “minority affairs” coverage.
Ajanaku later became editor of the Tri-State Defender, enhancing the journalistic integrity of the struggling historic newspaper, which had been founded in 1951, precisely to serve the Black community that largely had been ignored by the major dailies.
“I see myself as an agent of change,” Ajanaku told Memphis magazine, in a 2007 interview. He said his adopted name of Karanja Aidoo Ajanaku means “the guide who puts things in place” and “sets things in order for free and wealthy people.”
Ajanaku died July 8 at his Midtown home, where he had been in hospice care due to liver cancer. He was 70 years old. For close to 50 of those years, he had been a professional journalist.
“He truly loved journalism and he loved what journalists had the ability to do,” said Ajanaku’s longtime friend, veteran journalist, educator and political commentator Otis Sanford. “He wanted to communicate with the community, explain the community and report that news, and he did that excellently.”
Born in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Ajanaku began working at The Commercial Appeal in 1977, shortly after earning a journalism degree at the University of Missouri. Before long, he was assigned to the newspaper’s “city hall” beat, covering the mayor, City Council and city government and politics in general.
Ajanaku’s arrival meant that The Commercial Appeal had Black reporters handling three crucial Downtown beats, including Jerome Wright, who covered police and crime, and Sanford, who covered federal courts — a triumvirate that soon called itself “the Three Amigos.”
“That’s who we were and that’s who we’ll always be,” said Sanford. (Wright, 74, died in January 2024.)
Sanford said the placement of Black reporters within those key news beats was “coincidental” — they were chosen because they were regarded as the best reporters for the jobs — but also intentional, in that their hiring was evidence of then-editor Michael Grehl’s “legitimate commitment to bring more racial diversity into the newsroom.”
“It meant a lot to all of us,” Sanford said of the “Three Amigos” experience. “It really meant that we were so close, not just as friends but as journalists. We saw ourselves as sort of plowing new ground at The Commercial Appeal, as African-American journalists at a place that didn’t always welcome African-American journalists. And we cherished that relationship.”
In more than 26 years at the newspaper, Ajanaku covered education, the stage legislature in Nasvhille, and numerous other major beats, while also serving as a deputy metro editor and in other key jobs.
Significantly, in 1981, he created the newspaper’s first “minority affairs” beat.
“Initially, I didn’t like the idea,” Williams said, in an interview. “I didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a Black affairs writer.” But he reconsidered, and determined the new so-called beat would improve coverage of the Black community.
Said Sanford: “He turned it into an outstanding part of the newspaper that didn’t just cover Black events, it explained African-American life to Commercial Appeal leaders.” He cited as particularly “groundbreaking” a series of profiles published under the title “Black Mosaic.” Explaining the concept in a 1983 column at the end of the series, Ajanaku wrote: “Blacks and whites each have some distinct traditions, likes and desires. The Black Mosaic has tried to bridge those differences and illustrate how they can be sources of strength instead of division; of understanding instead of hatred; of progress instead of stagnation.”
In 1986, Leroy Williams Jr. legally changed his name to Karanja Ajanaku — a decision that Memphis magazine characterized as “a reflection of his heightened cultural awareness.” By that time, he had traded the 1970s afro and wide ties with which he’d arrived at the newspaper for a dreadlocks hairstyle and colorful kente-cloth dashikis. He was to a large extent influenced by the philosophy of Nkosi Ajanaku, whose North Memphis-based “Ajanaku African American Research Institute” in the 1980s and ’90s generated both support and controversy with an “Ajanaku family” lifestyle and a teaching program that emphasized the importance of cultural identity while also disavowing affirmative action and other legislative initiatives that classified citizens by race.
“Karanja was trying to understand who he really was,” Sanford said. “And he didn’t feel as if he was someone named ‘Leroy.'”
In an interview in Memphis magazine, Ajanaku said the name change affirmed his recognition of his career-long sense of responsibility — “a consciousness about the need to be active as an African-American person.”
But if his talk could be heavy, Ajanaku never lost his light touch, his love of a joke, or his droll sense of humor.
In 2007, Ajanaku became executive editor of the Tri-State Defender, a newspaper aimed at Black audiences that was seeking to elevate its journalistic profile and rejuvenate its commercial fortunes. He never had the newsroom resources to restore the influence of the Defender in its heyday, but the job enabled him to continue his career-long commitment to be “a voice for the African-American community,” he told Memphis magazine, and an “advocate” for the importance of education.
“We’ve got people who are growing up that can’t read,” he said. “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.”
Ajanaku leaves his twin children, daughter Jamila Ajanaku, of Phoenix, Arizona, and son Karanja Ajanaku Jr., of Nashville; a sister, Jacqueline Broadus of Reno, Nevada; two brothers, Randy Williams of Kansas City, Missouri, and Ronald Williams of Leavenworth, Kansas; and six grandchildren.
Funeral information is incomplete at this time.
