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BIOGRAPHY:  Al-Nisa Banks

For the past twenty years, Al-Nisa Banks has served as editor and publisher of The Buffalo Challenger, the largest African American newspaper in the State of New York outside of New York City.

At the age of four she moved to Buffalo with her parents, Billie and the late Eula Banks, who migrated from East Texas, where she was born. The eldest of six children, she grew up in the Black Rock section of the city in the Jasper Parish Housing Projects.

A 1965 graduate of Riverside High School, she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Paine College (a UNCF School) in Augusta, Georgia. Al-Nisa was among the first ten students in the college's history to be named to Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities. It also was there that her writing and journalism career began. She served as editor of the college newspaper for two years, and in her senior year, won national competition in the Reader's Digest College Essay contest.

Al-Nisa was the second African American to ever hold the position of general assignment reporter for the Augusta Chronicle newspaper. She returned to Buffalo in 1971.

Prior to taking the helm at The Buffalo Challenger, she worked in various administrative positions and began studies towards her Master's degree at the University at Buffalo. In addition to working as an educator (she headed and developed the curriculum for the first Freedom School in the city in the early seventies), her media experience includes working as an assistant media librarian, television commercial copywriter, news reporter for the Courier Express, and editor and co-founder of Buffalo After Dark Magazine.

She began her career at The Buffalo Challenger as a volunteer in 1979. Today she is part owner and majority stockholder. Al-Nisa is the recipient of nearly one hundred awards and citations both locally and nationally as a result of her work at The Buffalo Challenger. In 1980, she was among several black publishers from around the country honored at the United Nations for fair and objective reporting by the UN's Black American-Arab Friendship Committee. Locally, she was named one of the Citizens of the Year by The Buffalo News Magazine.

The subject of numerous feature stories in area publications, Al-Nisa has appeared extensively on local radio and television. Her national exposure includes appearances on Tony Brown's Journal and in Essence Magazine. She has traveled widely throughout the United States, West Africa, Haiti, and other parts of the Caribbean.

In addition to constantly striving to improve the scope and quality of The Buffalo Challenger and maintain it as a viable business, a relevant institution, and much needed alternative voice for Buffalo's black community, Al-Nisa is an avid student of the healing and internal arts, and hopes to one day be able to further serve humanity through the practice of alternative medicine.

She is the mother of two daughters, Leah and Shola.