DeKalb History Center honors five local trailblazers

For the seventh year as part of its Black History Month celebration, the DeKalb History Center recognized county trailblazers. This year’s program—held Feb. 6 at the Historic DeKalb Courthouse, which houses the History Center—honored women in media. Carolyn Jernigan Glenn, publisher of The Champion Newspaper—the program’s presenting sponsor—presented awards to five colleagues in the news industry.

“I have a personal connection with each of these recipients. It feels like reunion time,” said Glenn, a past recipient of the History Center award.

Award recipient Rashan Ali wasn’t on hand to receive her award personally, but noted in remarks read by her mother, Joyce Godfrey, “I’m probably right at this very moment doing the very thing you are giving me an award for.” Godfrey and her husband Buck, a record-setting DeKalb County coach, accepted the award on Ali’s behalf.

Ali is described in the program as “a formidable multimedia personality within the sports and entertainment industries.” Her career has included co-hosting The Ryan Cameron Show on V-103 FM and hosting Streetz 94.5’s The Streetz Morning Grind. She has acted in the motion pictures 3 Can Play That Game, The Gospel, and Trois 3. Ali is the author of the children’s book Piper Sky’s Pink Popsicle Shoes.

Glenn described award recipient Jennifer Ffrench-Parker as her “sister-girlfriend in print journalism.” Ffrench-Parker has been editor and publisher of award winning CrossRoadsNews for 19 years. Before cofounding the newspaper with her husband Curtis in 1995, Ffrench-Parker was a reporter and assistant metro editor with the Atlanta Journal Constitution, a business writer with the Charlotte Observer in North Carolina and the Times Herald Record and Wall Street Transcript in New York. She also worked for the Jamaica Daily News in her native Jamaica.

Ffrench Parker thanked the center for putting her “in the company of illustrious women.” She said that as a journalist her goal is always to provide the public with information in time for them to act on it. “I let them know when something’s coming.”

Glenn said of 11 Alive Morning News anchor Karyn Greer, another award recipient, “Most people have no idea how much she volunteers in the community. She is constantly giving her time and talent in community service.”

A native of Chicago, Greer started her broadcast career at a station in Champlain, Ill., where she quickly became an on-air reporter. After time at a station in Charleston, S.C., Greer came to Atlanta in 1989, where she anchored and reported for the newly formed WGNX news team. In 1999, she joined WXIA-TV 11 Alive News, the Atlanta NBC affiliate.

In talking about her busy life and careers Greer lightheartedly quoted Mother Theresa, “I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle; I just sometimes wish he didn’t trust me so much.”

Glenn called another award recipient, her longtime friend and media associate, Steen Miles “a rare gift to the community.”

“Whenever I’ve needed something, she’s always been there,” Glenn said of Miles, who until recently wrote an award-winning weekly column for The Champion Newspaper.

During her days as a broadcast journalist, Miles was a three-time Emmy Award-winning reporter-anchor for WXIA-TV 11Alive. She capped her 30-year broadcast career, which started at a station in her native South Bend, Ind., with a position as managing editor at 11Alive.

She was elected to the Georgia Senate, where she represented the 43rd District 2005-2007 and chose to run for lieutenant governor rather than seek re-election the Senate.

“I could go around this room and have a story about my associations with nearly everyone here. DeKalb is my family,” Miles said.

“We’ve always been able to come together on issues that affected our industry,” Glenn said of fellow newspaper publisher Valerie J. Morgan, another 2014 History Center award recipient.

Morgan is editor-in-chief of On Common Ground News Inc., which provides print and online coverage in DeKalb, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry and Rockdale counties. She and her husband Glenn Morgan founded the newspaper in 1995 “as a way to enlighten, enrich, and educate the community,” according to the award luncheon printed program.

In 1993 Morgan was recruited by the Atlanta Journal Constitution, where she helped launch the CityLife news section of the paper and served as edition-chief for specialty magazines published by the AJC during the 1996 Olympics.

Morgan said she has always been driven to gather and report news. “Last week when everybody else was trying to get out or the snow storm,” she said, “I was trying to get in it.”