Heciel Nieves Bonilla, News Editor
“East Suffolk Cagers to meet Courtland Wednesday Afternoon” read the first headline in the Library of Virginia’s record attributed to Raymond Boone, founder of the now-shuttered Richmond Free Press.
The article was published Jan. 20, 1953 and is an initial touchpoint for the career of Raymond Boone, a native Virginian, who established himself as a pillar of the community, reporting in Richmond and nationwide.
At the time of that publication, Raymond Boone attended East Suffolk High School in what is now the City of Suffolk, Virginia, but in 1954 was part of Nansemmond County. He was 14-years-old.
The short piece appeared in the still-active Suffolk News-Herald, but Raymond Boone also spent his high school years writing for a school newspaper he founded.
At a meeting of the school’s press club on Oct. 28, 1952 recorded in the Suffolk News-Herald, Raymond Boone shared a sentiment he would carry throughout his career. He told the group a news reporter “should be, in general, tactful, energetic, accurate, ambitious, aggressive and truthful.”
It was a time of legally sanctioned segregation in Virginia, and much of his continued work for the News-Herald appeared in its “Colored News” section. His wife Jean Boone, an accomplished publisher and activist who ran the Richmond Free Press after his death in 2014, said it is hard to square this appearance with the man she came to know in adulthood.
“It’s sort of hard for me to really wrap my head around the fact that he wrote for something that was called the “Colored Pages,” because he was such a strong proponent of not segregating people or things,” Jean Boone said. “He saw the larger picture and did not let the segregation aspect of it stop him from writing.”
Raymond Boone worked across the journalism profession — as a reporter for the Quincy Patriot-Ledger in college, a White House reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American, an editor for its Richmond subsidiary and eventually the whole newspaper chain, and an international correspondent for the National Newspaper Publishers Association — in addition to sitting on the Pulitzer Prize Committee for Journalism, according to Richmond Free Press.
Jean Boone recalled the first publishing of the Richmond Free Press in 1992, shortly after Raymond Boone’s time teaching at Howard University.
“There were times early on in the first year when, on Saturdays, we would ride around the city to see how many boxes were empty to see if people had picked them up,” Jean Boone said. “And we expected people to read it, and we expected people to think it was important to them. But at the same time, when you had that happen, it was a very, very good gratifying feeling.”
Raymond Boone passed during a time when many local papers had or were starting to move primarily to online publishing, but the Richmond Free Press continued to print a physical copy every Thursday — something he thought better served their often lower-income, substantially marginalized readers.
“Our readers were so diverse and many did not have access and do not have access to the internet,” Jean Boone said. “Maybe through their phones, but even that is not a terrifically wonderful experience to read.”
Jean Boone expressed disappointment with the city’s primary daily newspaper of record, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, for the nature of its coverage during the Richmond Free Press’ run.
“We always felt that they did not serve the community well,” Jean Boone said. “People called it the ‘Times Disgrace,’ as a way of putting their spin on how badly the daily paper was covering Richmond, whether it was race-based or not, it just was not a strong daily paper.”
The RTD historically supported segregation and massive resistance and wrote negatively about civil rights leaders, though it has since expressed regret for doing so. As of 2025, it no longer operates out of the City of Richmond.
The RTD hired its first Black columnist, Michael Paul Williams, in 1992 — the same year the Richmond Free Press was founded. Williams recently wrote an opinion piece describing Raymond and Jean Boone as having carried on the legacy of abolitionist newspapers in the city with their paper.
“We need all media hands to combat the lies — particularly the pernicious DEI falsehood that is choking off revenue for the Free Press and other publications,” Williams wrote. “That lie is based on a zero-sum mindset that can’t see inclusion beyond the myth of concurrent white harm.”
Jean Boone, along with others who knew him, remembers Raymond Boone as a tough boss — someone who had a particular idea of how an article or issue should turn out and pushed staff to meet those expectations and raise their own.
Raymond Boone mentored his daughter Regina Boone, who has since led a photojournalism career both in and out of the Richmond Free Press. She said her father meant for the RFP’s reporting to reach beyond the Black community in Richmond and to be of the same caliber as any larger publication.
“My dad was hard on me just as he was hard on everybody else,” Regina Boone said. “My dad was an old-school newspaper man, old-school journalism.”
Raymond Boone wrote several op-eds and took personal action on issues as an editor. During the Occupy Richmond protest movement in 2011, he allowed protesters to camp on his lawn next to the Mayor’s home at the time to “demonstrate their first amendment rights,” according to NBC 4.
He repeatedly cited the first amendment as a core part of the paper’s mission.
Regina Boone described remembering her father’s words at several points in her career in journalism — urging her to cover her community and keep up a standard of quality. She recalled covering the fury in Richmond during the summer of 2020 over the confederate monuments on Monument Avenue.
“We didn’t drive on that street,” Regina Boone said. “We were taught from day one about how evil they were, and my dad editorially was always the one who was calling for them to come down.”
Regina Boone said she clearly remembers the day the Robert E. Lee statue came down — her father’s advice echoing in her mind.
“I had to sit on the curb for a second,” Regina Boone said. “I just started crying because I thought of my father and what he had fought for editorially for these statues to come down, and now they were down, and I just kept thinking, ‘Wow, what would he say? What would his editorials be?’”
Virginia Defender editor Phil Wilayto also contributed to the Free Press as a staff reporter in the early 2000’s, and named Raymond Boone’s passing as another in a series of other prominent Americans involved in news and community organizing.
“King Salim Khalfani, Bill Martin, Silvester Turner — a whole generation is passing along at a time when we’re facing the equivalent of a right wing dictatorship. So It’s a blow,” Wilayto said.
Wilayto recalled the difficulties the Richmond Free Press encountered in obtaining advertising for a community and primarily Black newspaper, pointing to a particular attempt to solicit advertising from a local suburban shopping mall.
“We received information that there was a meeting to discuss advertising and someone suggested the Free Press,” Wilayto said. “And someone else said, ‘Why’d we wanna advertise with them? We don’t want those people out here.’”
Wilayto remembers Raymond Boone as a “newspaper man in the old style” and someone who exerted a singular vision over his newspaper. He is also skeptical that any existing paper, including the Defender, could fill the gap of reporting for Richmond’s Black community on the regular weekly basis the way the Free Press did.
“He was gonna continue getting that paper out no matter what, come hell or high water. And that’s what you need,” Wilayto said. “That’s what you need to survive in the newspaper business.”