The Roanoke Tribune is one of the longest continuously operating black community newspapers in the country and its late founder, like the paper, was a survivor.

The Rev. F.E. Alexander, who founded the paper in 1939, was born Fleming Pore in Christiansburg in 1888. He was one of eight children, but his mother died when he was an infant and he and his brothers and sisters were soon separated and scattered. When he was adopted, young Fleming took the last name of his foster father, Robert Alexander, and chose "Emory" as his middle name.

That information comes from the Dictionary of Virginia Biography which, according to his daughter, Claudia Whitworth of Roanoke, contains the most complete and accurate account of his early years.

The entry explains, "Badly treated as a child, he left Christiansburg as a teenager, walking across the mountains into West Virginia to join an older brother who worked in the coalfields."

The specific details of his motivation aren't known, but the image of a young man traveling on foot at the turn of the century from the New River Valley to a West Virginia coal camp typifies the kind of staunch independence and determination that would mark Alexander all his life.

"He was a fighter looking for a foe," Whitworth said. "That's how you had to survive in those days."

From West Virginia, Alexander moved to Kentucky. He learned the printing trade and set type at The Louisville Reporter and later The Atlanta World. When World War I broke out, he was sent to France with the Army's 802nd Pioneer Infantry. Upon his return to the States, he resumed his original trade and, within a few years, began to teach printing at Virginia Theological Seminary and College in Lynchburg, where he also ran a printing business.

It was while in Lynchburg that he encountered the pastor of Court Street Baptist Church, Vernon Johns, the civil rights leader and a contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr. The meeting proved to be a pivotal moment in Alexander's life: He was soon ordained to the ministry and when he became pastor of Rustburg Baptist Church in Campbell County in 1930, Johns delivered the sermon at his installation.

In 1935, Alexander found himself back in his hometown of Christiansburg when he was installed as pastor of the First Memorial Baptist Church; he later renamed the church Schaeffer Memorial Baptist (after the church's founder, Capt. Charles Schaeffer). He stayed in the New River Valley for 16 years before becoming pastor of the First Baptist Church of Buchanan, a position he would hold for another two decades.

But it was while Alexander was at Schaeffer Memorial Baptist, in 1939, that he started to publish the Roanoke Tribune, a weekly newspaper that served the Roanoke Valley's black community. To keep the endeavor afloat, Alexander used his own money from printing jobs, relied heavily on white advertising and, at times, even set the type himself.

"I'm sure he did not have a lot of support, yet he was able to stick to it," said then-Roanoke Mayor Noel C. Taylor in Alexander's eulogy in 1980. "He had great pride in publishing that paper.

"He accepted the struggle of publishing a black newspaper at a time when it was a very difficult thing to do. He was a man with a keen interest in community, who thought he could promote the progress of the community with his newspaper."

Over the years, the paper employed reporters in several Southwest Virginia towns and added a second office in Martinsville; during the 1950s, author and civil rights advocate Sarah Patton Boyle wrote a column for the Tribune titled By a White Southerner. Eventually, Alexander would start other newspapers in Charlottesville, Lynchburg, Martinsville and West Virginia.

Fuel-oil dealer and real estate broker A. Byron Smith, 86, got to know Alexander when he moved to Roanoke during the mid-1940s and he's been a Tribune subscriber for the past six decades.

"He did a nice job with the community along with his newspaper," Smith said. "He really was a man of the citizenry."

Like publishing, politics captured Alexander's attention, and he ran in local council elections during the 1950s and '60s. He believed governments in the Roanoke Valley should be consolidated and he was against rapid integration, a position that put him at odds with some of his fellow black leaders. Alexander filed a libel suit against 10 of them, including six fellow clergymen, in 1956. The suit was eventually settled out of court.

Although he was selected as the Negro Democratic gubernatorial campaign manager for the 6th District in 1958 and was active in numerous community groups, Alexander never won a seat on Roanoke City Council.

"His accomplishments were small and hard-fought, and I think he suffered more defeats than gains," Whitworth said of her father. But, she added, "He didn't regret anything."

After a 1971 car accident, Alexander retired from publishing and the church. He died in 1980 at the age of 92. His funeral was held in Christiansburg at his old church, Schaeffer Memorial Baptist, and he was buried in Blacksburg.

The Roanoke Tribune -- which bears the logo "Making and recording black history since 1939" -- is still published each week by his daughter and by his grandson, associate editor Stanley Hale.

"He has two generations of his family running the paper now," Smith said. "So I think that's a good job when you can inspire your family to take over and carry on. I give a lot of credit to him."

Hale said their plans for the future are "just to hang in here and get it on the street, and do whatever it takes to keep it alive."

"Much like Bill Gates' Windows operating systems, you literally can't communicate or interface the social and cultural life of black Roanoke (or black Roanokers living elsewhere) without belonging to the Tribune network," wrote Reginald Shareef, a political science professor at Radford University, on roanoke.com in 2004.

"It's just a story of survival ... and not success and achievement and all the big, bright things people like to hear," Whitworth said. "It's a story of survival and that's what we're still doing."