A leading voice in Black independent journalism served as managing director of the iconic Bermuda Recorder newspaper, chronicling the lives as well as the news of a Bermuda largely ignored by the establishment of the day.

Lefroy Brownlow Sinclair Place, who would have turned 108 today, joined the newspaper as a teenager.

The Recorder had been founded in 1925 by his father, Alfred Brownlow Place, with supporters Henry Hughes, David Augustus, Joaquin Martin and James Rubaine.

Mr Place’s tenure at the newspaper, which moved from Angle Street to a headquarters on Court Street in Hamilton, spanned four decades of Bermuda’s history.

He told The Royal Gazette in a 2022 interview, just before his 106th birthday, that the Recorder offered the first chance for Black Bermudian readers to get ”news of themselves”.

The newspaper was inspired in part by the political activist Marcus Garvey, the Jamaican founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.

The Garveyite movement notably emphasised Black self-sufficiency, and Mr Garvey’s views made him unwelcome in Bermuda.

When he visited the island by ship in 1928, Mr Garvey was not permitted to disembark — speaking instead to a crowd gathered at the Hamilton waterfront, with Mr Place among the witnesses.

Mr Place also counted himself among followers of the movement, and explained: “We were looking for leadership, because we didn’t have any Black leadership.

“So, we followed the Marcus Garvey movement. In doing so, the movement in Bermuda grew quite rapidly.”

Mr Place’s newspaper career included the collapse of Bermuda’s racial segregation, the emergence of trade unionism, the political and civil advances of the 1960s including universal adult suffrage in 1968, and the more radical 1970s culminating in the bitter social unrest of 1977.

He retired from the Recorder in 1979, and went on to work at the Corporation of Hamilton for 30 years until his retirement at the age of 85.

Mr Place married Sadie Marguerite Bassett in 1940. The couple had three children: Brownlow Tucker-Smith Place, Glenda Walker, and Charlene Tyrrell.

His wife died in 1999, just shy of 60 years’ marriage.

Joan Dillas-Wright, the President of the Senate, spoke among tributes to Mr Place today in the Upper House.

She said Mr Place once informed her that they were related as they chatted during a wait in a doctor’s office, when he told her that her mother was his cousin.

“He was incredible, when you talk about his memory,” Ms Dillas-Wright said. “A fine gentleman.”

She said Mr Place lived “a very long, very full life”.

• Lefroy Brownlow Sinclair Place was born on July 24, 1916. He died on July 23, 2024, aged 107