By NAN Staff Writer
NEWS AMERICAS, NEW YORK, NY, Sept. 1, 2022: Add black newspaper editor to the resume of Britain’s Prince Charles.
This month, the Prince guest edited an issue of The Voice, one of Britain’s largest Black-interest publications that also covers the Caribbean. He also wrote an introduction discussing his history with U.K.’s Black community.
“The Black community is a source of inspiration to me,” it reads, per the tabloid. “You have welcomed me into your communities with wonderful enthusiasm and I am grateful that you have always been candid with me about the issues you continually face and how I might help.”
The issue features the Prince and Mia Mottley, the PM of Barbados on the cover and also contains an interview with Idris Elba, who has been open in the past about how the support from the Prince’s Trust helped him launch his acting career. It also spotlights on Baroness Doreen Lawrence, a British-Jamaican activist whose teenage son, Stephen, was murdered in the early 1990s, and announce that Charles has helped to organize a new scholarship in Stephen’s honor, according to the Daily Mail.
Before his death Stephen was passionate about architecture, and in September 2000, Charles paid tribute to his memory in a lecture urging more young people to pursue architectural careers. In 2018, he was represented by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at the first annual Stephen Lawrence Day event, and this April Charles invited Baroness Lawrence to his charity’s headquarter’s Dumfries House for a meeting to honor her son and discuss a collaboration.
When the collaboration was announced over the weekend, Charles praised The Voice in a statement. “Over the last four decades, with all the enormous changes that they have witnessed, Britain’s only surviving black newspaper has become an institution and a crucial part of the fabric of our society,” he said. “This is why I was so touched to be invited to edit this special edition.”
The newspaper’s editor Lester Holloway pointed out that Charles’s interests made him a natural choice for the guest editing-role. “Our readers may be surprised at the parallels between the issues which The Voice has campaigned on for four decades and the work the Prince of Wales has been involved in over the same period, often behind the scenes,” he said. “In past decades these causes were once scorned and ridiculed, but today they are widely acknowledged.”
The Voice was founded in 1982 and is the country’s only operating national Black newspaper, to commemorate its 40th anniversary edition.
