ERNIE PITT: The veteran Winston-Salem newspaper owner kept issues of the city's Black community front and center.

• Author: Infanzon, Vanessa
• Position: Pillars of North Carolina

Charisma and certitude led Ernest Pitt to start a four-page weekly in Winston-Salem as the city's only Black-owned newspaper in 1974. He'd been frustrated that no one would publish his article about why Black law students at North Carolina Central University were passing the bar at a lower rate than their white counterparts.

So he started The Chronicle in Winston-Salem with no money or investors. Unsure of his ability to be editor-in-chief and publisher, he begged Dbubisi Egemonye, an African shop owner on Chapel Hill's Franklin Street, to take the publisher title. Pitt says he needed emotional support.

For more than 40 years, The Chronicle has tracked the Twin City's Black community, earning Pitt, 76, national recognition as a leading publisher. In April, Pitt was inducted into the North Carolina Media and Journalism Hall of Fame.

The Raleigh native moved to Greensboro with his family when he was in elementary school. He graduated in 1964 from James Benson Dudley High School and started as an architecture student at North Carolina A&T State University but left to enlist in the Army. As a member of the transportation corps, he was stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey, after serving one tour in Vietnam.

Pitt admits to having a wild side. He went to prison a couple of times in his early 20s. While he was locked up, he earned an associate degree from Rockingham Community College, Gov. Jim Hunt eventually pardoned Pitt, and Pitt later was a commencement speaker at the Reidsville college.

After earning his two-year degree, he entered UNC Chapel Hill, where he credits admissions counselor Hayden Bently "Benny" Renwick with giving him a chance. Pitt graduated in 1974 with a degree in journalism.

When he and his former wife, Elaine, started The Chronicle that same year, Pitt was a full-time education reporter at the Greensboro News & Record. They struggled to sell ads for their paper, so he enrolled in a sales seminar in Wheaton, Illinois. The only Black man in the class, Pitt learned not to take rejection personally.

Contracts with Flow Motors and Crown Drug Stores helped provide enough revenue to enable Pitt to leave the Greensboro paper in 1978 and focus full-time on The Chronicle. In addition to the weekly paper, he printed college and high school papers and published the Black College Sports Review, an insert included in 200 Black newspapers featuring sports highlights from historically Black colleges and universities.

Beyond his publishing work...