Message from Dr. Ron Daniels, President IBW

Our beloved Don Rojas is stepping down as the exemplary Director of Communication and International Relations for the Institute of the Black World 21st Century and retiring to his beloved Grenada with his wife and partner Karen. The Global Black Community and Progressives Worldwide owe a debt of gratitude to Don Rojas as one of the true revolutionaries of our time, who has dedicated his life to the liberation of people of African descent and oppressed people everywhere. In addition to our salutes and tributes, our goal is to raise a minimum of $75,000 on his 75th Birthday to support the Black World Media Network as his Legacy Project. This is the least we can do as our collective expression of gratitude for his life of service.

Yes, I would like to contribute to BWMN, Don's legacy project

THE BIO OF A TRUE REVOLUTIONARY

Don Rojas is the Director of Communications and International Relations for the Institute of the Black World 21^st Century (IBW), and for the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC). He is also the General Manager of the Black World Media Network (BWMN) his “legacy project” under the IBW umbrella which was launched in Black History Month 2022.

Before joining IBW in 2013, Rojas served as Executive Director and CEO of Free Speech TV, a Denver-based, multiplatform, national media network and before that as the general manager of Pacifica Radio’s WBAI in New York City.

List of Accomplishments:

Rojas possesses a unique combination of communications expertise, experiences and skills spanning a long career in print, broadcast and Internet media as well as international diplomacy. Over the course of his career he has traveled and worked extensively in the USA, Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean.
He developed and launched UWI-TV, a cable TV and Internet service offering a variety of content that reflects the myriad of daily activities on the UWI’s campuses spread across Jamaica, Trinidad, Barbados and several other Caribbean countries. He also developed and launched the multimedia Web site (org) that complements the UWI-TV cable service.
He was the former press secretary to the late Prime Minister Maurice Bishop of Grenada from 1979-1983 and the first press secretary to any Caribbean head of state.
In the mid-1980s he worked in Prague, Czechoslovakia, as a senior executive at the International Organization of Journalists and was responsible for servicing media workers organizations in the Caribbean, Central America and North America.
He led the New York Amsterdam News as its executive editor in the early 1990s. The Amsterdam News is the largest and most influential African-American newspaper in the nation.
He was the general manager of Pacifica Radio station WBAI in New York from 2002-2005 and led the station to record membership drives.
He established a communications department for the NAACP (National HQ) in the early 1990s and became the first director of communications for the country’s oldest and largest civil rights organization.
He was recently featured in a chapter in the book “The Black Digital Elite—African American Leaders of the Information Revolution” by John Barber. The book contains chapters of other black media pioneers such as Richard Parsons, CEO of Time-Warner, Robert L. Johnson, founder of BET and William Kennard, former chairman of the FCC.
In 1999 he was named one of the ‘Silicon Alley Dozen’, a group of Internet CEOs pioneering new media developments in New York City.
In 1996 Mr. Rojas launched and ran The Black World Today, a pioneering news and commentary site on the Web.
In the mid-1990s he was contracted by the National Council of Churches (NCC) to co-ordinate a very successful media campaign to draw the nation’s and the world’s attention to a spate of hate-motivated arsons of dozens of African-American churches throughout the southern states of the USA.
He has interviewed presidents and prime ministers of African, Caribbean and Latin American countries as well as civil and human rights leaders in the USA and around the world.
He was the only African American journalist to cover the first summit meeting between Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev in Geneva in 1986.
He created the first Internet Radio Network (Black World Radio) targeting people of color with news, commentaries and musical entertainment.
He taught courses and lectured on the history of journalism and on minorities in the media at Long Island University’s School of Journalism, and guest lectured on Caribbean and Central American politics at universities in Canada, Europe and the USA.
He assisted the President of IBW, Dr. Ron Daniels, in organizing and then participated in a historic Symposium in Washington DC in October, 2013 on the subject of “Democracy & Development in Africa and the Caribbean.”
Rojas has edited four books of history and critical commentary about Grenada and the Caribbean.