Miami Times publisher built family dynasty
Rachel Reeves was her father Garth’s daughter.
And, at the same time, she wasn’t quite her father’s daughter.
But she was a Reeves, a member of a black-owned family newspaper dynasty built in Miami nearly 100 years ago.
Reeves, who died Thursday at 69 after battling a long illness, is the daughter of Garth Reeves Sr. and the granddaughter of the late Henry Reeves, the Bahamian printer who founded The Miami Times newspaper in 1923.
Through the Reeves’ dynasty — Henry, Garth Sr., and Rachel — The Miami Times is approaching 100 years as the pre-eminent voice and watchdog for Miami’s black community.
“It is with heartfelt sorrow to hear of the passing of Rachel Reeves, my cherished friend and a community icon,” said Miami-Dade County Commission Chairwoman Audrey Edmonson. “As the publisher and CEO of The Miami Times, she led Miami’s largest African American newspaper in the South.”
But Rachel Reeves didn’t initially see herself as the successor to her now 100had year-old father who, for nearly 25 years, served as The Miami Times’ publisher, assuming the mantle from his father, Henry, in 1970.
When Garth Sr. announced his retirement in 1992 and made it official in 1994, the one-time printer’s helper, civil-rights activist, publisher, and civic leader admitted he didn’t see his daughter as The Miami Times’ publisher. He had groomed his son, her brother Garth Jr., for that role.
But in 1982, Garth Jr. died at 30 of colon cancer. Garth Sr. stayed on to run The Miami Times and when he envisioned retirement, he figured on selling the paper.
“Really, I thought at one time of hanging it up. I guess I’m a chauvinist, because I didn’t think Rachel could handle it,” Garth Sr. told the Miami Herald in 1992.
Rachel, too, hadn’t seen herself at the helm of the paper. She studied English literature at Bennett College in North Carolina and had no real interest in writing for a newspaper.
A young Rachel Reeves even commissioned a Reeves family portrait in 1980, painted against the masthead of The Miami Times. That painting would hang in Garth Sr.’s Liberty City office for decades.
That painting, however, only included the three generations of Reeves men.
“At that time, that’s where I was,” she told the Herald 12 years later in 1992 as she prepared for her position as publisher and chief executive officer.
At 41, in 1991, she had two mild strokes while at a newspaper convention in Atlanta with her father.
Yet she overcame her health obstacles with the same determination that she poured into the business.
A Miami native, born May 22, 1950, Reeves followed her own talents. After graduating from college, she had steadily risen at The Miami Times in the advertising department before becoming business manager, the position she held when she earned her father’s title.
Miami historian Dorothy Jenkins Fields — founder of the Black Archives, History and Research Foundation of South Florida — grew up alongside Reeves. “I’ve known her all my life,” she said. “Our families were pioneers in Miami’s Colored Town.
“She was an astute businesswoman who learned the craft from her father and her grandfather. She was a nononsense newspaperwoman — and she enjoyed it immensely.”
Her style was different from that of her grandfather, whom she greatly admired, and of her brother, who sought his dad’s role.
But her dad, who confessed he sought his son’s advice over his daughter’s, came to realize after his son had died that it was his daughter whom he had really relied on.
“He would never give me a direct answer,” the elder Reeves told the Herald, speaking about his son. “He’d walk out of here and walk into Rachel’s office. Rachel gives him the answers. A half-hour later he comes back and says, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, I think we should do this ...’ ”
Father and daughter had long envisioned that a Reeves name would remain atop the paper’s masthead. She wanted that for her son from the moment Garth Basil Reeves was 3. The 29-year-old is now at the helm.
“Rachel was profoundly brilliant, just profoundly brilliant,’’ said South Florida Times publisher and owner Robert Beatty. “Her business savvy was second to none and the result of those two factors culminated in the extension and the broadening of her father’s and her grandfather’s legacies at that newspaper. So she did what was expected of her by her father. And, I daresay, she did even more.”
But, as Garth Reeves learned in 1970 when he assumed Henry Reeves’ position, and what Rachel Reeves learned in 1992 when she agreed to do the same when her dad stepped down, nothing comes easy.
Reeves’ survivors include her father and her son. Family friend Bob Edwards said services will be at 10 a.m. Thursday at The Historic St. Agnes Episcopal Church, 1750 NW Third Ave. in Overtown.