The Louisville Leader was a weekly newspaper published in Louisville

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

, Kentucky

Kentucky

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

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History

The Louisville Leader was a weekly African American newspaper founded by I. Willis Cole in November 1917. By the 1930s, Cole employed twenty people and had a circulation reaching 20,000.

Cole died in February 1950 and his wife tried to continue to publish the newspaper until it eventually stopped that September.

In 1954, the Louisville Defender

Louisville Defender

Louisville Defender is a weekly newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky. It was founded in 1933 by Alvin Bowman of Louisville and John Sengstacke of Chicago. It joined The Louisville Leader and Louisville News as African American newspapers and the city. Frank Stanley Sr...

had called the Leader "one of the largest Negro newspaper organizations" in Louisville.