BLACK JOURNALISTS at the DAWN of the 21^ST CENTURY

Philadelphia was a nucleus of black professionals in mainstream journalism. Wayne Dawkins presented evidence and recent history from his books, “Rugged Waters: Black Journalists Swim the Mainstream,” and “Black Journalists: The NABJ Story,” Feb. 9 at the Belmont Mansion.

By WAYNE DAWKINS

2/12/2008

AT THE END of the 20^th century, Philadelphia was the nucleus of black professionals in journalism. Want proof? In the early 1970s, this city had three-well read African-American journalists, reporter Acel Moore of the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Chuck Stone of the Philadelphia Daily News, and columnist Claude Lewis of the Philadelphia Bulletin.

In December 1975, Stone was elected the first president of the National Association of Black Journalists. Of the 44 men and women – founding brothers and sisters – who created the association, eight of them had Philadelphia-area ties [Reginald Bryant, Marilyn Darling, Sandra Dawson, Joe Davidson, the late Mal Johnson, plus Lewis, Moore, and Stone]. NABJ’s most prominent ancestor is the Association of Black Journalists, or ABJ, established here in 1973.

Stone [Photo] is profiled in a new book [2007] called “Missing Pages,” by the late Wallace Terry, author of “Bloods,” his oral history of blacks and the Vietnam war.

HERE IS AN EXCERPT:

In November 1981, Stone was called into a Pennsylvania prison by authorities to help negotiate a peaceful end to a standoff with armed prisoners. Stone was called because he developed a reputation as the man crime suspects surrendered to in order to ensure their safe travel into police custody.

At Graterford, said Stone, “I walked down the hallway and sat down. The door opened. It was Jo-Jo holding a double-barrel sawed-off shotgun. Pepper Williams had a .38. The brother on the left – Newsome – has a single-barrel shotgun. The other brother had a .22. Four guns trained on me.

“I sat facing death and thought, God, that’s a pretty gun. So shinny.

“I looked up at Jo-Jo’s intense, dark eyes.          

 “Asalaamu alakum, brother.”

The prison standoff ended peacefully.

Journalist/friends Angela Dodson and Mike Days moved from Kentucky to New Jersey in the mid-‘80s so Days could commute to Philly for work as a Wall Street Journal correspondent, and Dodson could commute to New York to work as a copy editor with the New York Times. The couple still reside in Trenton in a Victorian house many black journalists affectionately call the NABJ “bed and breakfast,” or “Underground RR.” Mike Days, a child of North Philly, is now the editor of the Philadelphia Daily News. The name of the Daily News’ feature section, YO! was named by my late wife in the early ‘90s.

[What were the big stories of that era? I recall the Free South Africa movement, W. Wilson Goode’s two mayoral terms and MOVE disaster, Philly sports. The Philadelphia region was also mineral-rich with stories about black history and culture. …

NOW, HERE’S A “Philadelphia Fire” moment.

In December 1990, a Philadelphia Inquirer editorial recommended that poor women be encouraged to use the contraceptive implant called Norplant. Vanessa Williams [Photo], an Inquirer reporter, was among the staff members who challenged the opinion in the editorial. Williams, at the time president of the local NABJ chapter, even debated the editorial page editor on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Today, it is unlikely you will see in-house media debate that feisty.

Also during that time, Will Sutton, Williams’ colleague, and now my colleague at Hampton, assisted the Inquirer and Daily News’ parent company with a diversity plan that meant 50 percent of the hires from 1991-1995 would be racial minorities and white women in order to increase the minority news staff from 13 to 18 percent. The result was numerous hires of journalists of color, despite it happening during a national recession.

While the local press struggled to move from desegregated to diversified newsrooms, Philadelphia continued its tradition as home base of a robust black-owned press. In the 1980s, there was a brief and exciting experiment called The National Leader, a weekly edited by Philadelphia journalists and NABJ founders Claude Lewis and Joe Davidson. The paper lasted about two years and folded in 1984 because of a lack of capital.

The Philadelphia Tribune publishes, and at age 124 this year, [1884] it is the oldest black newspaper still publishing in America. My Courier-Post colleague Irv Randolph became managing editor in the early 1990s, and he raised the editorial quality of the paper. The Tribune is special because it published twice a week instead of weekly. Then, it had the audacity to add a Sunday edition in this saturated media market.

In 1991, Chuck Stone retired from the Daily News, and traveled south to serve as a distinguished journalism professor at the Univ. of North Carolina. Stone’s columnist successor was Elmer Smith, who I met 10 years earlier in at an NABJ convention. Smith was a refugee from the just shuttered Philadelphia Bulletin, and was trying to figure out his next move. He was picked up by the Daily News and he was given a new beat – boxing. Smith was a very good beat writer, and he even has a cameo in a “Rocky” movie as himself. As a general columnist, readers have been treated to Smith’s wry humor and razor-sharp analysis.                        

In 1995, the year NABJ held the national convention here, Arthur Fennell of WCAU-TV was elected president. He is still visible in this region as a journalist with Comcast, CN8.

Now let’s fast forward a decade later to the present. These times we now live in are volcanic.

Knight Ridder, the gigantic, publicly traded media company that owned the Inquirer and Daily News, no longer exists. It disintegrated in 2006. A private company owns both newspapers and the new owners cut jobs in order to curb expenses. When news people were let go at the Inquirer, a lot of black journalists were let go, out of proportion with the overall size of the paper. How much, some of you may be wondering? Eleven percent of the Inquirer’s newsgathering staff was African-American, but 23 percent of the 71 journalists who were let go were black. The union and the management accused each other of causing the problem. Months after those difficult cuts, the Inquirer made some promotions that affirmed the impact black journalists must have in this city.

Harold Jackson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was appointed editor of the editorial page. While in that position he brought in George Curry as a columnist. [Curry is the take-no-prisoners editor of the late, great Emerge magazine, and later editor of the National Newspaper Publishers Association news service.] Jackson also promoted Melanie Burney to editorial writer. [Burney and I go back a ways. When I was a reporter in South Jersey, she was a college student who did “stringing” at night to get in journalisms’ door. Push through she did, moving on to the Associated Press and then to the Inquirer.

Why am I saying all of this?

Philadelphia has a remarkable black journalism tradition that should be celebrated and honored. Thomas Morris Chester [Photo], for example, covered the activities of Civil War soldiers on the Virginia front for the Philadelphia Press in 1865.

 HERE IS AN EXCERPT from a 1989 book about Chester:

He was one of the first reporters to enter the Confederate capital with the victorious Union forces led by black troops of the 25th Army Corps … the fact that black troops were the first to enter Richmond, in spite of efforts by some to deny them that distinction, struck Chester as symbolically significant. Aware of the irony and eager to thumb his nose at the Confederacy, that ultimate expression of oppression, exploitation and human misery, Chester deliberately chose to write his first dispatch at the desk of the Speaker of the Confederate House.

Charles Carleton Coffin of the Boston Journal and Charles A. Page of the New York Tribune later recalled what transpired when a paroled Confederate officer entered the chamber and found Chester seated in the Speaker’s chair. Flying into a rage, he ordered Chester to leave the room. Unperturbed, Chester looked up briefly, then continued writing. The irate officer rushed Chester but was greeted by a well-placed punch that sent him tumbling. Chester adjusted his sleeves and returned to his desk.

The rebel demanded a sword from a Union officer who was standing nearby. The officer refused, but offered a clear space for a fair fistfight, which the chagrined Southerner declined.                

IN THE MODERN ERA, black journalists, did great work that served this community well. Now, we’re in the post-modern period – that’s a reality I teach to my mass media students. In post-modern America, big, established companies are imploding. New companies are forming. Furthermore, smaller ventures that take advantage of digital technology are rearranging the media landscape.

Last summer for my NABJ Journal article, Will Sutton told me that “We could be producing the last crop of black journalists to work for traditional daily newspapers and broadcast news as we watch newsprint-produced news disappear.” 

A stable reality is that Philadelphia is 45-percent black; 60-percent people of color when Hispanics and Asians are added to the human gumbo.

This community evidentially needs talented black journalists to report the news and tell remarkable stories, and, we need engaged consumers and citizens who will reinvigorate our democracy.

Are you ready to participate?  

Dawkins is an assistant professor at the Hampton University Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications. He is a founding member of the Trotter Group, www.trottergroup.org

 Photo credits: NABJ.org, upenn.edu, maynardjie.org, Afroamcivilwar.org