The Informant, an African-American newspaper based in Buckingham County, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

The publication’s owner and operator, 87-year-old Charles W. White, said the paper only reports what he terms, “good news” regarding the community.

He said the paper has about 1,100 subscribers and his children assist in the publication process.

Margaret White, Charles’ wife, has spent the last 30 years working alongside her husband on the advertising side of The Informant.

“It’s been very enjoyable working along with him, beside him with the paper seeing how much enjoyment he gets out of it,” Margaret said of working with her husband.

Margaret said her work was very rewarding, noting the friends she’s met through the business.

According to Charles, the newspaper was started following an interview regarding a book he had published in 1985, “The Hidden and the Forgotten: Contributions of Buckingham Blacks to American History.”

“I’ve always been interested in local history, and local, primarily, African-American history,” Charles said. “That was because of some teachers I had in both elementary school, high school and college.”

Charles said he came to Buckingham in 1955 to teach building grades at Carter G. Woodson High School.

“I noticed first that some of the children, the students that I had, did not know who Carter G. Woodson was and some of these students lived right in the same neighborhood where Carter G. Woodson was born,” Charles said. “Some of them actually had his last name and one or two of them were actually distant relatives.”

Woodson was an African-American historian, author, journalist and founder of the Association for the Study of African-American Life and History.

In his writings, Charles began to find interesting tidbits in other publications and footnotes that particularly mentioned African-Americans in Buckingham County. He started collecting the information around 1974 and he began to put it in a paper or book form.

“My cousin interviewed me on the radio station in Charlottesville and his father heard him,” Charles said.

Charles said he didn’t know he was being interviewed by his cousin at the time.

His cousin’s father would eventually get in touch with Charles, seeking to publish a story about the Charles’ book in The Charlottesville Tribune, a newspaper he owned in Charlottesville,

“So I did,” Charles said. “Consequently, I began to ask him questions about his paper and I was just interested.”

Charles said after talking with the man for about an hour, he got ready to leave and the man said, “Boy, why don’t you start a paper over there in Buckingham?”

“He was 95-years-old at the time and still publishing papers, and I didn’t take much stock in what he was saying,” Charles said. “I began to think about it as I was driving home by myself. And I crossed the James River in Scottsville and I said, ‘I’m going to do it.’”

Charles said Margaret was shocked when he told her about his idea.

“At our own expense, we put out a four-page paper with some interesting human interest stories and what not about things going on in Buckingham, Cumberland and Prince Edward, might have had something in it about Charlotte, I don’t know,” White said. “People were surprised at some of the stuff I had in that first paper and they began to take out subscriptions.”

Retired educator and Buckingham County resident Joseph Scruggs said The Informant has had a positive effect in the community as far as highlighting many of the accomplishments and even historical aspects within the African-American community that sometimes does not make the mainstream media.

“The Informant has done a good job of bringing those things out. I think it’s done a good job of bringing to the forefront contributions of especially a lot of local African-American citizens here in Buckingham,” Scruggs said.