Linda Greenhouse, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Supreme Court reporter, said in St. Louis last week that Justice Samuel Alito elaborately reinterpreted a 1990s precedent to “provide to a veneer of legal analysis on what is at its core a religious tract” overturning Roe v. Wade.

Greenhouse added that the “metastasized precedent” Justice Alito created is now being used by conservative judges to limit individual rights, such as those of transgendered children and their parents restricted by a Tennessee law.

Greenhouse made the comments at Washington University Law School on Jan. 15 where she was the featured speaker at the 13th Annual First Amendment Celebration of the Gateway Journalism Review. The talk was co-sponsored by the WashU Law Public Interest Law & Policy Speaker Series and the Weidenbaum Center on Economy, Government & Public Policy.

Greenhouse said that “the little-noticed but potentially significant doctrinal move that Alito made” in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Health Organization  could be used by conservative judges to limit rights of individual bodily autonomy.

In Dobbs, the Supreme Court struck down not only Roe v. Wade, decided in 1973, but also Planned Parenthood v. Casey in which the court reaffirmed Roe in 1992 with all five of the justices in the majority having been appointed by Republican presidents. 

Greenhouse said, “Adherence to precedent is often described as an important, perhaps essential, element of judicial legitimacy. It reassures us that judges, and justices in particular, are ‘doing law,’ in Justice Elena Kagan’s phrase, and not simply freelancing by enshrining their policy preferences in the pages of United States Reports.  A rule of precedent provides stability and predictability: the law that meant one thing yesterday will mean the same thing tomorrow. It offers fairness: like things are treated alike.”

But that doesn’t mean that precedents are never overturned. They have been overturned more than 240 times, Greenhouse said. Brown v. Board in 1954 overturned Plessy’s “separate but equal” doctrine and constitutional protection of gay marriage overturned another precedent. 

Trump justices key to overturning Roe

In overturning Dobbs, “the role played by the three Trump-appointed justices… is too obvious to require elaboration,” Greenhouse said.  “Nonetheless, Justice Alito needed to say something in Dobbs other than that he finally had enough like-minded colleagues to accomplish his long-held goal.”

The 1991 decision of Payne v. Tennessee set out a kind of checklist for when precedent was subject to being overturned.

Alito skipped over some points on the checklist that stood in his way, Greenhouse pointed out. For example Payne said that a closely divided court was one indicator of a precedent that could be overturned; but Roe was decided 7-2 

Another factor on the Payne checklist was reliance. Alito maintained he was “unable to find reliance in the conventional sense” in Casey’s acceptance of Roe as precedent. He dismissed Casey as “novel and intangible” and insufficiently “concrete.” 

Casey had found reliance in Roe because “people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail.” 

Alito emphasized Payne’s factors of consistency and workability and pointed out that many of the federal appeals courts disagreed on how to apply Casey’s standard that voided abortion regulations that imposed an “undue burden” on a woman’s abortion decision. 

Judges chosen for their willingness to overturn Roe

But Greenhouse pointed out that disagreements among the appeals courts resulted from “the steady stream of abortion obstacles that hostile legislatures were continually serving up to the federal courts.

“Alito’s description of inconsistency and unworkability obscured the central fact that the circuits that resisted finding any burden to be ‘undue’ had been stacked with judges chosen for their expressed or assumed opposition to the abortion right. The problem was neither Roe nor Casey. It was a revanchist judiciary, of which Samuel Alito himself is a star member.”

Alito added to the Payne checklist “a consideration of his own devising,” said Greenhouse –  “the nature of the court’s error.”

 Some precedents “are more damaging than others,” he observed. And Roe and Casey were among the most damaging of all, “deeply damaging,” in fact, for having “usurped the power to address a question of profound moral and social importance that the Constitution unequivocally leaves for the people.” 

 Alito turned to a 1999 right to die case, Washington v. Glucksberg, in which the court unanimously decided that physician-assisted suicide was not one of the liberties protected by due process in the 14th amendment.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, himself a staunch conservative, wrote in Glucksberg that due process “specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition and implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” 

Justices in the Glucksberg majority made clear in cases that followed that, “History and tradition guide this inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries,” as Anthony Kennedy wrote in the same-sex marriage case. Kennedy added that while Glucksberg’s analysis “may have been appropriate” in the specific context of that case, it was “inconsistent with the approach this court has used in discussing other fundamental rights, including marriage and intimacy.” 

History and tradition freezes rights in time

Alito agreed in Dobbs that some rights not mentioned specifically in the Constitution are protected by due process. But he said any such right must be “deeply rooted in this nation’s history and tradition” and ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.”

As examples he cited Loving v. Virginia’s protection of  interracial marriage and Griswold v. Connecticut’s protection of contraception – even though those practices were not deeply rooted in the nation’s history or tradition when they were recognized.

But the right to abortion, Alito declared, was “critically different from any other right that this court has held to fall within the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection of ‘liberty.’ ”  Abortion, Alito declared, was “fundamentally different” from the rights recognized in those cases. “The existence of the rights at issue in (contraception and same-sex relations) … does not destroy a ‘potential life,’ but an abortion has that effect.”

Greenhouse concludes, “It is here that Alito unmasks himself: the problem isn’t history, tradition or the concept of ‘ordered liberty.’ It is the fetus.”

The reliance on Glucksberg is like “placing a veneer of legal analysis on what is at its core a religious tract,” she said.

Chief Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton applied the same construction of Glucksberg in his decision in 2023 upholding a Tennessee law that prohibits medical treatment for minors suffering from gender dysphoria who seek hormonal treatments that can delay puberty.   

Sutton said the transgender teens and their families  “never engage with, or explain how they meet, the ‘crucial’ historical inquiry to establish this right. [‘crucial’ from Glucksberg] There is, to repeat, no such history or tradition. Grounding new substantive due process rights in historically rooted customs is the only way to prevent life-tenured federal judges from seeing every heart-felt policy dispute as an emerging constitutional right.”

Greenhouse pointed to the Sutton decision as significant, saying, “The use that an influential appellate judge made of the metastasized precedent foreshadows how Glucksberg will be used in the future.”

Greenhouse pointed out that locking women’s rights in history and tradition froze their freedoms in a time when women couldn’t vote.

Supreme Court not corrupt

Greenhouse made a number of specific observations about the U.S. Supreme Court during her discussions with the school’s law faculty and in a question-and-answer session:

• Even though some liberal audiences think the U.S. Supreme Court is “corrupt,” it isn’t. Justice Clarence Thomas’ acceptance of gifts from Harlan Crowe isn’t significantly different from Justice William J. Brennan Jr.’s, acceptance of gifts from wealthy Washington philanthropist Charles E. Smith. In each case the gifts were in six figures.

• The most serious ethical issue on today’s court is Justice Thomas’ failure to recuse himself from cases involving the Jan. 6 riot, despite his wife’s emails to the White House during the post-election period.
• Chief Justice John Roberts thought he had written a perfectly balanced decision in the Trump immunity case this past spring and was genuinely surprised by the strong criticism he received.
• Justice Brett Kavanaugh often sounds as though he is considering both sides of a legal argument, but almost always comes down on the conservative side.
• The most interesting of the Trump appointees is Amy Coney Barrett, who asked tough questions of a lawyer representing Idaho in an abortion case and who joined with the chief justice and the three Democratically appointed justices in refusing to put off Trump’s criminal sentencing.
• The most fraught issue that might come up between the court and Trump might be Trump refusing to obey an order or opinion of the court.
• Greenhouse once objected to journalists identifying justices and judges by the president who appointed them, but no longer does because of the White House’s strict political vetting of judges before appointment results in a more partisan bench.
• When Greenhouse was a young reporter covering the New York legislature and courts, she appreciated a veteran judge’s willingness to take her into his chambers and explain a difficult point of law. Most judges won’t do that.

William H. Freivogel is the publisher of GJR.

Newspapers are dying.

Young people aren’t reading them. Predatory hedge funds are buying them up, laying off reporters, milking them for profits and cutting home delivery. The result is that democracy is losing its eyes and ears and maybe its conscience. 

That was a theme of Rick Goldsmith’s new documentary on the predatory consequences of Alden Global Capital’s acquisition of newspapers from Chicago to San Diego to Baltimore.  

But there was also a more positive message that emerged from the discussion of the future of journalism that followed Goldsmith’s screening of his documentary Nov. 11. That message: Nonprofit news organizations are popping up across the nation, often in places where the secretive Alden hedge fund was dismantling legacy, commercial news organizations. 

Brant Houston, the Knight Chair in Investigative Reporting at the University of Illinois, pointed out the rapid growth of nonprofit news organizations. While daily newspaper circulation has shrunk from 60 million in 1990 to about 20 million today, 400 nonprofit news organizations have emerged in the past 14 years to begin to fill the void.

In Chicago, where Alden bought the Chicago Tribune, an already successful neighborhood nonprofit, Block Club News, expanded and public radio station WBEZ acquired the Sun Times. In San Diego, Alden’s acquisition of the San Diego Union Tribune led to greater collaboration between two nonprofits, Voice of San Diego and inewsource. And in Baltimore, the purchase of the Baltimore Sun led directly to the Baltimore Banner nonprofit newsroom.

Goldsmith was at Webster University Nov. 11 to screen “Stripped for Parts: Journalism on the Brink.” The screening highlighted GJR’s 12th Annual First Amendment Celebration and was part of the 32nd Annual Whitaker St. Louis International Film Festival. 

Goldsmith, known for his documentary about Daniel Ellsberg “The Most Dangerous Man in America,” received the first Rose F. and Charles L. Klotzer award for Free Speech in Service of Democracy. Klotzer, who founded the St. Louis Journalism Review 53 years ago, was present for the ceremony. Klotzer turned 98 this month.  

The audience included a score of St. Louis area high school students from Kirkwood, Webster, Lift for Life, Crossroads and St. Mary’s H.S. Also in attendance were a dozen former Post-Dispatch reporters and area journalists as well as judges, lawyers, GJR contributors and people active in public life. Funds raised pay for the publication of GJR’s weekly newsletter and quarterly magazine now hosted at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland should act on the contempt case against Steve Bannon, Justice Stephen Breyer should retire, Democratic senators Diane Feinstein and Patrick Leahy are getting old, the filibuster should be retained but reformed and former Attorney General Eric Holder was too slow to release the report clearing former Ferguson Officer Darren Wilson.

Those are some of the newsy comments that MSNBC/NBC commentator Claire McCaskill made Wednesday night at a First Amendment celebration sponsored by the Gateway Journalism Review. The former Missouri senator was interviewed by Jo Mannies, retired political reporter for St. Louis Public Radio and the Post-Dispatch and by GJR publisher William H. Freivogel. Listen to a recording of the entire interview.

The focus of the evening was the First Amendment, media literacy and democracy and McCaskill’s transition from elected public official to political commentator.

The media is failing because the business model is failing, the former US senator said.

“I think the media is failing in that they are falling into a business model, which is not their fault, they’re trying to make money,” she said. “People are going to cable news outlets for affirmation, they’re not going for information. They’re going to feel righteous and correct.”

McCaskill said the meager core of journalists who are still toiling away, who have editors, and actually have to report factual information, are doing amazing work right now. There is just not enough critical mass anymore. 

Cable news outlets are a bunch of silos, Mannies said. There is the CNN silo, Fox silo, MSNBC silo. She asked McCaskill why she chose to join MSNBC, which is an admittedly liberal news organization. 

“The reason that I went with MSNBC was because I felt comfortable there,” McCaskill said. “Frankly, their willingness to give me a lot of latitude in my contract, both in scheduling and how much I appeared and where I appeared, was also important.” 

Mannies asked McCaskill for suggestions regarding how the average viewer is supposed to know which outlets are “crazy town,” and which ones are trying to get the facts straight.

“I recommend to people that they watch a little bit of everything,” McCaskill said. “I think reading is really important, and I’m just not talking about links on Facebook, I’m talking about whether it’s online or old fashioned paper, reading where there are editors, where reporters must run their stories by editors.”

She said she is a big believer that people should get their main news from places where there are editors, not on Twitter or not on Facebook, but places where reporters are still expected to play it straight. 

People pretending to be news outlets online has been a real problem, she said. These outlets that have started newspapers, that aren’t really newspapers, put up a banner online to make it look like a newspaper and create a name that sounds like a newspaper. (GJR probed a network of these pseudo-newspapers in Illinois.)

“Then, they print garbage,” McCaskill said. “And before you know it, depending on how sensational the garbage is, how much it makes you afraid or makes you angry, it’s everywhere. It’s around the world, and it’s not even a newspaper.” 

A media literacy advocate, Jessica Brown, asked how, in “post-truth” age, can a media literate electorate be developed? 

McCaskill said she believes most people who are taking college courses in media literacy already realize it’s a problem, so the question is how to reach the people who don’t take those courses. 

“I think kids need to be taught what is going on,” she said. “Why is TikTok not reliable? Why being an Instagram star should not be your goal in life? What is an editor? What is straight journalism? How can you recognize it?” 

McCaskill said if she was in charge of the world right now, she would require a media literacy class in 7th grade for every public school student in the country. 

“I think we’re at that point in our democracy, that it is that important,” she said. 

Frustration with Garland

McCaskill is frustrated that Attorney General Garland has not announced what he is doing with  Congress’ criminal referral for Bannon refusing to testify about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.  

McCaskill was responding in part to a question from Michael Wolff, former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court, who asked if Garland had been a judge too long to be an effective prosecutor.

“As someone who was the state prosecutor, I have very little respect for the molasses-like speed of the federal law enforcement apparatus,” McCaskill said. “What would they be investigating? Either they are going to do it or they aren’t, either he is going to appoint a special counsel or he isn’t.

“If I were still in the Senate, I would be pounding my podium for Garland to make a decision and move so we can get this thing going.  There is no excuse for him not to announce what the DOJ is doing with the contempt that they have been sent by the White House representatives.” 

McCaskill told for the first time a story about her frustrations with former Attorney General  Holder’s slowness in releasing the federal investigation explaining why the Justice Department was not charging  former Officer Darren Wilson in the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. The killing triggered months of protests and strengthened the Black Lives Matter movement.

McCaskill said the Justice report says exactly what the Grand Jury said in St. Louis County that there was plenty of evidence that Brown reached into Wilson’s police car and wrestled to gain control of his service revolver.

“Eric was so worried, I think, about the impact it would have that he held it until they finished the pattern and practice,” she said. The pattern or practice investigation found compelling evidence of unconstitutional police practices.

Both the report clearing Wilson and the pattern or practice investigation were released at the same time. She said the New York Times reported the pattern and practice investigation and buried in the story that there was no basis for any action against the police officer for the actual shooting.

“So, in one fell swoop, they undermine the effectiveness, in many ways, of the law enforcement community in St. Louis County for many, many years to come,” McCaskill said. 

McCaskill said she called the White House to complain and was told the president didn’t interfere with the Justice Department.

That hands off approach “got blown up during Trump’s years,” McCaskill said. “There was no line. He saw that lawyer as his lawyer. It is outrageous what he tried to do with the Department of Justice. So, I think there is a desire to get that line back to normal, to get it out of the political realm and back to the calling balls and strikes.”

She thinks Garland is reacting to the Trump abuses by trying to get back to traditional norms. But she said she would continue to be critical of Garland until he acts on Bannon.

Breyer should retire now

Dale Singer, a former Post-Dispatch editorial writer and reporter for St. Louis Public Radio asked if Justice Breyer should retire to preserve rights like those recognized in New York Times v. Sullivan.

McCaskill did not hesitate. “I think he should retire,” she said. “I think he should retire tomorrow.”

She added, “We have some really old Democratic senators,” pointing in particular to Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy and California’s Diane Feinstein. “I love Diane, but she’s very old, she’s the oldest (Democratic senator). I love Pat Leahy, he’s very old. If anything happened to either one of them then we’re no longer the majority. So I wish Breyer would retire so that we could make sure we at least hold on to three seats (in the Supreme Court) as far as values I worked for for 30 some years.”

Should Feinstein retire? “Diane blew me away. She was hyperprepared. She wasn’t staff driven. …..I think she has struggled lately. Her husband’s in very bad health. I don’t know what it is about that place that people don’t want to go home. But I’d like to take them aside and say come on out here, it is pretty nice….I’m having a hoot now….I think they get so used to the deference and the routine….I think many people stay too long.”

Retain but reform filibuster

“All of  my friends in the very progressive camp of the Democratic party…they forget there’s a 50-50 Senate,” she said. “They get so mad about the filibuster and about Joe Manchin. You only get to a majority in the U.S. Senate if you elect some moderates. There aren’t enough bright blue places to elect 55 or 53 Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warrens.”

 “….I was there when we stopped them defunding Planned Parenthood. It would have happened if it wasn’t for the filibuster….I was there….when because of the filibuster we were able to stop funding of the wall.

“…It sounds great to do away with the filibuster as long as we’re in charge,” she said. “If we are no longer in charge, it won’t feel so good. It will be helpless to stop anything.”

She said there is a need to reform the filibuster.  

“Somebody shouldn’t be able to call the cloakroom from a bar downtown and say ‘I object,’” McCaskill said. “They should have a standing, talking filibuster.”

McCaskill said voting rights should be carved out as an exception. Appointments are now an exception to the filibuster. She believes voting rights could legitimately be couched as such an essential in the democracy.

“If we do away with the filibuster, it will swing back and forth,” McCaskill said. “There will be no really big long-term change because it will become just whoever is in charge. I’m not sure that is what the Founding Fathers wanted.” 

 Integrity has been undermined

When people used to run for office, integrity was a pretty important value, McCaskill said. 

“People would believe what you said,” she said. “Donald Trump took that and turned it on its ear. He basically played to people’s cynicism and their sense of grievance.” 

The main thing that has changed with the advent of the internet, McCaskill said. She doesn’t know whether it was Trump, the internet or an unhealthy combination of the two. 

McCaskill said next Tuesday’s gubernatorial race in Virginia would be important because the Republican candidate is trying to have it both ways – courting Trump voters without embracing Trump. She said it would be interesting to see if he can thread that needle.

Mannies asked: With the media backdrop of the silos, did polarization of the media affect Missouri’s polarization? 

The Missouri Legislature, during the beginning of COVID-19, legalized brass knuckles, McCaskill said. 

“That moment was just a defining moment for me about how far we had fallen in terms of representation in Jefferson City prioritizing, I think, the issues most Missourians want them to care about,” she said. “The reason that is happening is because the Republicans did something very effectively, not just in Missouri, but in the country, and that is they weaponized cultural issues.”

In the past, McCaskill said in Jefferson City, there was a lot of time spent on the meat and potatoes of what state government is supposed to be doing and the services it’s supposed to be providing. 

“Republicans don’t talk about stuff anymore, they don’t really even try to legislate on that stuff anymore,” she said. “It’s all about cultural stuff.”

McCaskill said she wants Democrats to do a better job of bringing up cultural issues on their side of the equation, including abortion rights and gun control.

In regard to other cultural issues that could be helpful to Democrats, politically, McCaskill said the main one is voting. 

“They want to keep you from voting,” she said. “The freedom to participate in our democracy is a cultural issue. And I think it is one that could be really good for our party.” 

“The other thing is it’s going to motivate a lot of people to vote because what those guys haven’t figured out, that are pushing all this voter suppression stuff, Black and Brown Americans know what they’re doing,” she said. “They know they are trying to keep them from voting. And you know what is going to happen psychologically, it’s going to motivate them to vote more, I really do believe that.” 

McCaskill said she was surprised one of the Republican candidates for the Senate in Missouri  “isn’t trying to take a traditional Republican role…saying I believe in conservative values but not all this crazy talk.” McCaskill referred to the Trump-like rhetoric of the candidates, including Mark McCloskey, whom she referred to as that “crazy gunwaving St. Louis West End gun lawyer.”

McCaskill suggested that Democrats may have to wait a cycle or two to win statewide political office but added that the nomination of Eric Greitens, might open the door sooner.

Emily Cooper is a graduate student at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where she studies Professional Media and Media Management. You can follow her Twitter @coopscoopp

Dr. Donald M. Suggs has spent his lifetime accomplishing one achievement after another. He was the first in his family to complete high school. He is an oral surgeon-cum-civil rights advocate, art collector, and newspaper editor and publisher. 

As executive editor and publisher of The St. Louis American Suggs is chief producer and promoter of the 93-year-old weekly newspaper — not just keeping the American alive but also striving to adapt and change as it provides vital information for people throughout the St. Louis metropolitan area. All people. Blacks, whites and people of other ethnicities have come to trust the American to tell news and feature stories as seen through an African American lens.

Suggs is this year’s recipient of the Gateway Journalism Review’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He will be honored Oct. 27 at the magazine’s annual First Amendment Celebration.

An influencer of public thought, Suggs sits on more than two dozen boards of directors or trustees, ranging from the Barnes-Jewish Goldfarb School of Nursing (emeritus member) to the Urban League of Metropolitan St. Louis.

When he’s not shifting from Zoom meetings with his newspaper staff to those of the myriad of other organizations he supports, he’s writing pointed editorials and overseeing  page production for Wednesday afternoon deadlines.

The Suggs of today has come a long way from where he started. 

Donald Marthal Suggs was born Aug. 7,1932, to Morris and Elnora Suggs. His father was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, and grew up in Kentucky. His mother was born in Montpelier, Mississippi.

The couple met and settled in East Chicago, Indiana, where Morris Suggs worked in a steel mill, their families having joined others who were part of the Great Migration from the South to the industrial centers in the North.

The couple had three children: Donald, Loretta and Walter.  

Though he grew up in the age of segregation, the young Suggs was raised in an integrated environment of the small, factory town. He attended public schools with the children of Eastern European and Hispanic immigrants. 

“I had a ‘mixed’ kind of upbringing,” he told GJR, adding that he learned to “code switch” at an early age. 

His father, he said, was a voracious reader.

“He was intellectually curious.”

Early influences

Growing up with Black newspapers such as The Chicago Defender and the Pittsburgh Courier in his home, the young Suggs followed his father’s lead and also developed an intellectual curiosity.

In high school, with his then-best friend, Donald Peters, Suggs started a newspaper — The Galloping Gossip. 

But it wasn’t until much later that he would return to that first passion for sharing news.

After high school he spent a year working while taking classes at an extension program of Indiana University. He went on to enroll full time at the university, earning his bachelor’s degree in dentistry and his doctorate of dental surgery — D.D.S. He was one of two Black students in his graduating class when he completed graduate school. 

It was while he was a student that he began learning about, and developing an appreciation for, fine art. During his high school years, he spent summers with his paternal grandparents in Chicago and visited places like the Art Institute. 

On visits to New York, he began exploring art even more. 

“New York was my North Star,” he said.

He came to St. Louis for an internship in 1957 and medical residency a year later at the historic Homer G. Phillips Hospital. 

Suggs chose Phillips — known as a training ground for a generation of Black physicians — over an internship in New York “because I thought Blacks were in charge.”

It was also in St. Louis that he turned his focus on the burgeoning civil rights movement. 

As he started on the activism trail, however, Suggs said initially he was viewed with suspicion. 

“I had two fights: one with our political opponents and also with those on the inside, who were suspicious that I was a plant,” because of his speech, mannerism and advanced education.   

During this time, he met two men who would become his closest friends for the coming decades.

The Joneses

Mike Jones was a sophomore at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, in 1968, when he met Suggs.

“Donald was a revolutionary oral surgeon,” Jones said. 

“He drove a Volkswagen and collected African art. He was leading the Poor People’s March.”

In fact, Suggs served as the St. Louis chairman of the Poor People’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The historic 1968 event was organized to call for economic justice in the United States. 

Under Suggs’ leadership, St. Louis sent busloads of people to Washington, D.C., joining more than 200,000 others from around the country who had come to hear from civil rights, labor and religious leaders. The march had been planned by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. for the summer five years after he delivered his  “I have a dream” speech. But King was assassinated that April and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy carried on with the march. 

Jones said he was introduced to Suggs by a college friend during Jones’ days as a student-activist. 

“Take away the movement, Donald and I would have never met,” Jones said. 

“He had a profound effect on me. He nurtured my intellectual development.” 

Jones has served on the Missouri Board of Education, and was deputy mayor for development of the City of St. Louis and a senior policy advisor for the St. Louis County executive. Today he is a regular opinion writer for the American. 

“Without the American,” Jones said, “the Black community [in St. Louis] would be totally ignored.” In the American “there is a forum for Black perspective and Black voice.” 

Virvus Jones, who is not related to Mike, met Suggs when the young surgeon was balancing his dental practice, cultural pursuits and activism. 

“Doc always had an interest in history and politics,” Virvus Jones said. At Suggs’ home at the time in University City, “there were these African sculptures … He showed me how Picasso copied a lot of African art.”

A Vietnam war veteran and former St. Louis comptroller, Virus Jones is the father of St. Louis Mayor Tishaura Jones. Though Virvus Jones for years contributed to the American’s “Political Eye” opinion column, he stopped as his daughter, a former St. Louis treasurer and Missouri state representative, rose in politics. 

Suggs’ passion for art and politics grew along with his family. 

He is the father of Dawn Suggs who is the American’s digital and special projects director, Dina Suggs, who lives in New York and Donald Suggs Jr., who died in 2012, and grandfather of Delali Suggs-Akaffu. 

“I was attracted to the artistic community, [but] I didn’t have talent,” Suggs said. 

What he did have was connections, which led him to establish the African Continuum, an organization that brought to St. Louis what he called “serious, non-commercial artistic endeavors:” musicians, theater performances and fine artists.

He also helped establish the Alexander, Roth, Suggs Gallery of African Art, with locations in St. Louis and New York City.  

Running a newspaper

The St. Louis American was established by Nathan B. Young in 1928. N.A. Sweets sold advertising in the early days before taking over in the mid-1930s. Sweets went on to run the paper with his wife, Melba Sweets, until 1981. 

When the Sweets family stepped down, the paper was purchased by business partners Dr. Benjamin Davis, Clifton Gates and Gene Liss. 

After Davis died a few years later, Suggs joined the other partners. He eventually bought them out and assumed control of the paper in the mid-1980s. 

“He always loved the American because it was well written,” said Fred Sweets, son of N.A. and Melba, and a former photographer at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“He is committed to quality journalism.” 

The American today

Yet another Jones — Kevin Jones — started out selling advertising for the American almost 30 years ago. Today he is the paper’s chief operating officer, in charge of advertising, circulation and supervision of the business staff. The American currently distributes about 50,000 papers each week through about 700 locations in Missouri and Illinois. 

Kevin Jones described Suggs as a visionary and extremely energetic. 

“He’s up at the gym when I’m still asleep,” Kevin Jones said. “It’s hard to work with him and not be that energetic. It rubs off.”

Kevin Jones said he believes one of the keys to Suggs’ success is that “he listens to people.”

“He’s always one to listen to ideas for changes. He takes my ideas and enhances them and takes them to the next level.” 
These days, Suggs is looking toward the future and working to ensure the American remains strong not just in print, but online and across social media platforms. 

The paper continues to be celebrated by its peers. 

Among recent honors, the American in September won 33 statewide awards in competition against newspapers with circulation of 5,000 or more, from Missouri Press Association in its 2021 Better Newspaper Contest. The awards include the first place award for general excellence, which the American has won seven times. 

But for Suggs, 89, the work goes on. 

“In the next two years,” he said, “the American has to be reset. To thrive we must be sustainable.” 

And he wants to continue the tradition of raising up talented journalists. 

“We want to have the kind of reputation that people will want to work here because it is a professional community newspaper. We want this to be a desirable destination.”

Linda Lockhart has worked as a reporter and editor at several news organizations around the Midwest, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and St. Louis Public Radio. From November 2020 through February 2021 she served as interim managing editor at The St. Louis American.