Sonny Driver Day 2023

Congratulations and kudos to Sherri Darden, the owner and publisher of Scoop USA, for keeping the legacy and spirit of our esteemed ancestor Richard "Sonny" Driver alive and flourishing since his transition in 2017.

- Junious Stanton

On Saturday, August 19, 2023, she held the second annual celebration of Sonny Driver Day, a community-centered the life and works of Sonny Driver. The day-long event took place on the block where the original Scoop USA office was located, the 900 block of Watts Street, which has been renamed Sonny Driver Drive.

It was a fitting tribute to the life and the love Sonny Driver had for his people, this region, and his six decades of providing information, news, and a platform for the marginalized and disenfranchised in the Delaware Valley area. Scoop USA was for ordinary people, the working class, not those Sonny called the muckety-mucks; it was a grass roots unpretentious, down-to-earth, tell-it-like-it-is newspaper designed and focusing on the Black community in the beginning, mainly concentrating on entertainment.

Sonny used to get upset when anyone called Scoop USA a bar paper. He would always correct them and tell them Scoop was an entertainment paper. That's because Sonny was one of only two African-American booking agents in Pennsylvania, and Scoop USA promoted the happenings and goings on in the Philadelphia area entertainment world. Back in the day, nightclubs featured live entertainment from local and nationally known Jazz, Blues, and Rhythm and Blues artists. Being a booking agent, Sonny helped promote the venues that featured live entertainment in his newspaper, and the nightclub scene was where the action was. Over the years, he transformed the paper into a vehicle for the community, focusing on the issues, news, and challenges facing our people. The paper is still fulfilling that role today.