Tracey Alston, a pioneering Black media executive and entrepreneur, founded a female-owned Chicago-based marketing agency, Danielle Ashley Group, and co-founded a national faith-based health initiative that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of health screenings in underserved communities.
Through her work at Danielle Ashley Group, Alston in 2008 co-founded First Ladies Health Initiative, a far-reaching effort that seeks to destigmatize screening for various diseases and illnesses in underserved Black and Hispanic communities.
Started specifically to encourage testing for HIV and AIDS, the initiative now includes screenings for diabetes, breast cancer and mental health among other things, and has completed more than 700,000 health screenings and engagements across the country.
“You’ve heard the term many times in life about a person that they never met a stranger, and that would be Tracey,” said First Ladies Health Initiative co-founder Jamell Meeks.
“No matter what she had going on, no matter what the event was, no matter what was happening even with her personally, she just never met a stranger, and she just had a way of breaking you down with a smile,” said Meeks, wife of retired Salem Baptist Church senior pastor James Meeks. “She could talk to anybody in a room and I was always amazed at that.”
Alston, 64, died of natural causes on Feb. 25 at her Orland Park home, said her daughter Marquise Alston-Allison. A breast cancer survivor, Alston had been dealing with Alzheimer’s disease.
Born Tracey Daniel in 1961 in Gary, Alston grew up in Gary and graduated from William A. Wirt High School. She got a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education from Indiana State University and then a second bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from Columbia College Chicago.
Alston began her career working for a small, now-defunct Harvey-based jazz radio station, WBEE-AM. She started as a sales representative at WBEE and worked her way up to sales manager and then national sales manager.
Mark Ruffin, a onetime music director at WBEE, recalled Alston’s enterprising nature and her aptitude for sales.
“I remember Tracey being the only employee who really made the station’s general manager, Charles Sherrell, happy,” Ruffin said. “While her internal and external beauty was overflowing and radiant, she made him happy because she made him money. She was one of those people who (jazz musician) Gil Scott-Heron writes about in his song ‘Madison Avenue.’ Tracey could sell sand to a man living in a desert and tuna to Chicken of the Sea.”
By 1986, Alston became WBEE’s co-owner at just 24 years old. That made her one of the youngest African American women in the country to own a radio station.
According to Alston’s family, during her tenure at WBEE, she drove a 70% increase in sales. Clients included a large grocer, churches and a South Side night club, Ruffin said.
“She had a sparkling personality,” said former WBEE host Rigaud “Rigg” Chicoye.
After leaving WBEE, Alston became national sales manager at Johnson Publishing Co., which produced Ebony and Jet magazines. Alston managed a $5 million budget and doubled revenue expectations alongside her team.
In that role, she also encouraged local radio stations to play rap music, including championing the music of rapper and actor Common, then known by the moniker Common Sense.
With a deep understanding of marketing to Chicago’s underserved communities, Alston in 1993 took the next step in her career, forming Danielle Ashley Group, a full-service marketing agency specializing in community-based outreach. The firm took its name from the middle names of two of her three daughters.
Alston’s firm grew rapidly. In 1994, the agency won its first major contract: handling public relations, event strategy, media buying and grassroots outreach for John H. Stroger Jr.’s successful electoral bid to become the first Black president of the Cook County Board.
Alston expanded Danielle Ashley Group’s client list to include Walgreens, Exelon, SoftSheen-Carson, the Illinois Department of Transportation, Blue Cross Blue Shield, the Illinois Lottery and NICOR.
Her work helped define what became known as culturally competent marketing — or campaigns that build trust with underserved communities while also providing major clients with the outcomes they desire — long before the expression gained widespread use.
For example, a major campaign of more than $1 million that IDOT awarded to Danielle Ashley Group involved the $1 billion reconstruction of the Dan Ryan Expressway in 2005. It was aimed at putting a positive spin on an obviously disruptive project that ultimately, state transportation leaders believed, would benefit residents of the South Side.
“We are a multiracial company, but our charge, our specialty and our pulse is on the African-American community,” Alston told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “Clients call us because they understand the buying power that exists within the African-American community and the research and the data that we provide — information on what African-Americans are looking to purchase, what African-Americans consume, read, how they shop.”
As it grew, Alston’s firm gained recognition. In the early 2000s, Inc. magazine ranked it No. 48 on its list of the country’s fastest-growing Inner City 100 companies, while Crain’s Chicago Business identified Danielle Ashley Group as one of the area’s 100 fastest-growing private companies.
Alston made use of her communications acumen in her volunteer work for her longtime church, Salem Baptist, now widely known as House of Hope after its worship center’s name.
Long before the COVID-19 pandemic spurred houses of worship to begin streaming services online, Alston — as part of Salem’s media ministry — persuaded leaders to air services live. Salem became one of the first churches in Chicago to broadcast its services, which expanded its reach well beyond its in-person congregation.
Alston and Meeks formed the First Ladies Health Initiative in 2008 as a response to the impact of HIV and AIDS in Black communities. The national, faith-based public health organization has worked to break the stigma and normalize conversations around health within the church by having pastors and their wives — their “first ladies” — publicly stand before their congregations and show themselves being tested for HIV.
Alston already had been handling outreach efforts in the Black community for Walgreens, which became a title sponsor of the initiative for more than 15 years.
“It started with us trying to find a way to get HIV testing into more churches,” Alston told the Tribune in 2013. “We know that women get things done, so I said, ‘What about the first ladies?’”
Locally, the initiative eventually expanded to about 40 churches from various denominations across the city. The initiative also has expanded to Gary, Cincinnati and Los Angeles.
Today, two of Alston’s daughters are co-executive directors of the initiative, which has more than 100 church partnerships. The group has been recognized by the White House Cancer Moonshot initiative and the American Heart Association.
“She accomplished all these firsts because she wasn’t afraid,” Meeks said. “A lot of people may have an idea, but fear stops you and it can be many forms of fear — fear of failure, fear of people laughing at you, fear of success. (Even) if she was afraid to do something, she always tackled it, and never stepped back and let it tackle her.”
Alston also founded The Educational Network, an initiative aimed at boosting youngsters’ awareness of their cultural education. Its flagship program is a Black history calendar called “Our History Today! An African-American Journey.”
Alston expanded the concept into a broader, nationally distributed educational platform offering lesson plans, assessments and interactive tools highlighting contributions from Black, Latino, Asian American, Native American and female leaders in U.S. history.
In all, The Educational Network has raised more than $400,000 for historically Black colleges and universities, Alston’s family said.
“She didn’t just build organizations, she built trust in communities that are often overlooked,” Alston-Allison said. “Everything she did was rooted in making sure people felt seen, informed and cared for.”
Alston also served as a board member of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and was a volunteer at Children’s Memorial Hospital and La Rabida Children’s Hospital.
In addition to her daughter, Alston is survived by her husband of 38 years, Marcus Alston; two other daughters, Taylor Alston-Cleveland and Morgan Alston; one grandson; and two brothers, Thomas Daniel III and Cullen Daniel.
Services were held.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
