Creed C. Black, 1925–2011

last updated 8 January 2015

Newspaper publisher Creed Black wasn’t afraid to take on sacred cows, and none was more sacred in Lexington, Ky., than the University of Kentucky’s basketball team. After the Lexington Herald-Leader published an investigative series on illegal payments to players there in 1985, one angry reader wrote, “May the sprays of a million polecats fall upon your presses and linger there through eternity.” The paper won its first Pulitzer for the series.

Born in eastern Kentucky, Black was 5 when his father was killed by lightning, said The New York Times. He edited his high school paper in Paducah, Ky., before joining the Army and fighting in Europe in World War II. Black earned degrees from Northwestern University and the University of Chicago, and then embarked on a peripatetic career as a newspaper editor that took him to Nashville; Savannah, Ga.; Wilmington, Del.; and back to Chicago. After a stint as an official in the Nixon administration, he became an award-winning editorial page editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

As a “hard-nosed publisher” in Lexington, Black ordered a complete overhaul of operations, said the Herald-Leader, and encouraged the paper to “look aggressively” at both the coal industry and used-car salesmen. The paper’s Sunday circulation had increased by 61 percent by the time he left, in 1988, to become president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. In his 10 years in that post, said The Miami Herald, the “wickedly witty and Southern gracious” Black quadrupled the foundation’s endowment, turning it into “a billion-dollar philanthropic powerhouse.”