Longtime Staffer Patrik Henry Bass Also Out

Clyburn to Step Down from FCC after 8 Years

Chow Leaving Asian American Journalists Group

April 4, 1968, as Told by White Reporters

Short Take

Longtime Staffer Patrik Henry Bass Also Out

Editor-in-Chief Vanessa DeLuca and Editorial Projects Director Patrik Henry Bass of Essence magazine have been let go in a restructuring, sources told Journal-isms on Thursday.

DeLuca, who became editor-in-chief in 2013, had been with the company for 15 years, and Bass, best known as the magazine’s books editor but also an organizer of the annual Essence Festival, had been with Essence for 18 years. A source who did not want to be identified said that Bass learned of his dismissal in a telephone call as he was riding the “R” subway train in New York.

Michelle Ebanks,  president of Essence Communications, issued this statement:

“As we forge our new path as an independent company, ESSENCE remains committed to its authentic vision — highlighting the beauty, power and magic of Black women.  We are also committed to continually evaluating how we need to transform and evolve to best serve the interests of Black women around the world in a more elevated and comprehensive way.

“This includes addressing the needs that align with our future as a fully-integrated, cross-platform content company that reflects the diverse range of who she is, where she is, and how she lives. To ensure that we have the infrastructure necessary to support this path forward, we are realigning our editorial team structure to include more content integration and audience development across all platforms, including digital, social, video, live experiences and the magazine. ”

Ebanks sent this message to the staff :

“As you’re aware, we’re transforming our company to ensure we are positioned to successfully address the demands of an evolving industry. I am writing to inform you of changes to our editorial team and wanted to share with you that ESSENCE Editor-in-Chief Vanessa De Luca and Editorial Projects Director Patrik Henry Bass will be leaving the company.  We will not be replacing these roles moving forward and will share more with you in the coming weeks regarding our realigned structure.

“In the immediate term, Digital Content Director, Yolanda Sangweni, and Executive Editor, Jacklyn Monk, will oversee content and operations across all platforms — including digital, social, video, live experiences and the magazine.

“Vanessa has a diverse and accomplished history with ESSENCE.  She first joined the company more than a decade ago as the magazine’s Beauty and Fashion Features Editor and went on to serve as Lifestyle Editor and Executive Editor.  During her 5-year tenure as Editor-in-Chief, Vanessa sharpened ESSENCE’s journalistic focus and the brand’s creative vision by developing new multi-platform editorial franchises, including the Woke 100. Committed to bringing ESSENCE content to life, she created programming for the ESSENCE Festival and other live experiences.

“As part of this transformation,  ESSENCE Editorial Projects Director Patrik Henry Bass will also be leaving the company. Patrik has contributed tremendously to ESSENCE’s editorial legacy over nearly two decades.  He joined the company as Books Editor and served as Features Editor before expanding his role as Editorial Projects Director.  In this capacity, he co-programmed the ESSENCE Festival’s Empowerment Experience and edited a variety of successful ESSENCE books, including The Obamas in The White House and Black Women in Hollywood: A Salute to Trailblazers at the Oscars, among many others.  . . .”.

In January, Time Inc. announced that it had sold Essence Communications, publisher of Essence magazine and operator of the festival, to a newly formed black-owned company that was giving the all-female Essence leadership a stake in the business.

Essence Ventures, created in 2017, is led by Richelieu Dennis, a Liberian-born entrepreneur who sold Sundial Brands, parent company of Shea Moisture and related personal care products, to consumer goods giant Unilever in November.

The 2013 announcement naming DeLuca, then named Vanessa Bush, as editor, said, “Bush recently introduced ESSENCE’s #HeIsNotASuspect social media campaign aimed at reducing racial profiling of young African-American men. She has spearheaded numerous editorial franchises including ‘Guns Down’, ESSENCE’s multi-part series addressing gun violence in our communities and ‘Where Smart Starts’, a year-long initiative around education.

“During her tenure, ESSENCE launched a new Twitter program, #ESSENCEDebates, and Essence.com introduced the innovative Beauty Matchmaker tool. In addition, under her leadership, the 2013 ESSENCE Festival’s ESSENCE Empowerment Experience daytime programming enjoyed record-breaking attendance; bringing ESSENCE content to life around the pillars of family, health, relationships, beauty, careers, personal empowerment, activism, and more. . . .”

Bass joined Essence under Editor in Chief Susan Taylor and has worked with eight of Essence’s nine editors-in-chief.

The Essence Festival’s “Empowerment Experience” Bass co-programmed featured such names as Al Sharpton, Oprah Winfrey and Iyanla Vanzant.

Clyburn to Step Down from FCC after 8 Years

“FCC Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn announced plans to step down from the agency Tuesday, ending an eight-year tenure focused on the needs of low-income and minority communities,” Margaret Harding McGill reported for Politico on Tuesday.

“Clyburn, an Obama nominee who joined the FCC in 2009, made the announcement at an FCC meeting. She did not say what she plans to do next but said she would depart the commission before its next scheduled meeting on May 10.

” ‘I’ve done all I know to do. And it’s time for me to serve in another way,’ she said.

“Clyburn was part of the Democratic majority that approved the net neutrality rules in 2015, and has been a vocal critic of their repeal in December by the agency’s Republican leadership under Chairman Ajit Pai. The rules required internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon to treat all web traffic equally as it passes through their networks. . . .”

McGill also wrote, “Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has already recommended Geoffrey Starks, an assistant chief in the FCC’s enforcement bureau, to the White House to nominate for Clyburn’s seat when she departs, POLITICO reported last month. Presidents traditionally defer to the Senate minority leader when filling opposing-party seats on the commission. . . .”

Jamie Lovegrove and Schuyler Kropf wrote for the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., “In an interview with The Post and Courier later Tuesday, Clyburn said she only decided to step aside hours earlier.

” ‘I was not 100 percent sure when I woke up this morning that this was the day,’ Clyburn said. ‘I felt relatively confident. But it just goes to show you there’s never the perfect time but the right time.’ . . .”

Brian Santo wrote March 14 for fiercetelecom.com, “Reps. G.K. Butterfield, Yvette Clarke and Bobby Rush are on record supporting Starks’ appointment. The Joint Center [for Political and Economic Studies], a political think tank, has also recommended him. . . .

“Starks has been with the FCC since 2015, serving in the Investigations and Hearings unit. Prior to that, he worked at the Department of Justice for nearly three years.

“Starks has left barely any public record, undercutting the ability to even speculate about what to expect from him as an FCC commissioner, beyond some assurance that as a current employee of the FCC he might be expected to hit the ground running. . . .”

• National Hispanic Media Coalition: Commissioner Mignon Clyburn’s Departure From the Federal Communications Commission Is a Huge Loss to Latinos and All Americans

Chow Leaving Asian American Journalists Group

Kathy Chow, executive director of the Asian American Journalists Association, is resigning after eight years, she and AAJA President Yvonne Leow announced on Thursday.

“I have accepted the position to be the first female Executive Director of the American Association of Cosmetology Schools, a national association with 94 years of success advancing the beauty and wellness profession,” Chow said. She added, “Together we have accomplished a lot including launching Media Institute, securing the largest foundation funding the organization has ever received for programs such as the Criminal Justice Project, the Heartland Project and enhancing professional opportunities for the membership. . . .”

In the Heartland Project, AAJA partnered with the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association “to increase media coverage of racial minorities and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities in Nebraska.”

Chow was director of the nonprofit Hands On Sacramento when she was named to the executive director position in 2009. Before that, Chow worked for six years at the Sacramento Bee in public affairs, where she was introduced to AAJA programs and values through the Bee’s sponsorships for the journalism group.

AAJA, which today says it has 1,429  members, had left its 2009 annual convention with a projected $237,000 deficit, but produced a $358,085 surplus in 2010.

Chow’s appointment was the association’s second try at replacing Rene Astudillo, who held the post for 10 years.

It hired Ellen Endo, who was president of the Little Tokyo Business Association and a veteran of 24 years in the television business, in December 2008, but Endo and AAJA parted over “philosophical differences over AAJA’s vision and direction.”

April 4, 1968, as Told by White Reporters

Valentine: ‘Sending Black-White Teams to Blowouts Was an Important Journalistic Policy.’

Levey: ‘I Couldn’t Have Looked More White, or More Establishment, if I Had Tried.’

Smothers: ‘I Was Shocked’ When the FBI Showed a Photo They Took of Me

Two weeks ago, this column presented accounts from three African American reporters who covered the events of April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, prompting urban uprisings in Washington, D.C., and around the nation.

White journalists had a somewhat different experience, also affected by race.

Here are two accounts by Paul W. Valentine and Bob Levey, Washington Post reporters at the time. They are followed by a coda from Leon Dash, and a remembrance from Ronald Smothers, a black journalist also with the Post then. Smothers recalls when the FBI interviewed him with an eye toward charging activist Stokely Carmichael with incitement to riot. 

Valentine: ‘Sending Black-White Teams to Blowouts Was an Important Journalistic Policy.’

By Paul W. Valentine

The night of Martin Luther King Jr.‘s assassination, the Post sent Leon Dash and me to Memphis, so I was not in D.C. That evening, I had just gotten home from work when I got a call from the night city editor, Bill Brady, who said — and I remember his words to this day — “Pack your duds. You’re going to Memphis. King just got shot.” Brady didn’t even know if King was alive or dead.

I took a taxi to National [Airport] where I met Leon and Bill Burton from Post accounting, who gave us each a couple of hundred dollars in cash (no credit cards in those days), plus two tickets to Memphis on Trans-World Airlines (no more TWA today, either). The Post had a policy of sending a black-white team whenever there was a blowout in those days, each to cover his side of the street.

Leon had been recently hired by the Post with limited experience in the South (He was from New York). I had covered King (and knew some of his lieutenants) when I had worked for the Atlanta Journal in the early ’60s before coming to the Post.

In Memphis, Leon and I stayed at the famous Peabody Hotel, one of the few integrated hotels in the city, and covered our respective aspects of events there, pooling our notes at the end of each day and phoning them into the national desk. Despite my acquaintanceship with some of King’s aides, tensions barred access for me, so Leon did most of the reporting on that front, and I spent much of my time covering the police and City Hall.

There was such an intense, if temporary, level of what I felt was distrust and anger, even alienation, with the white establishment among some of King’s lieutenants in the immediate aftermath of the assassination that they were not willing to deal with relatively minor guys like me.

My recollection was that Ralph Abernathy, King’s lieutenant, issued periodic statements to Big TV for general consumption, but the lesser aides whom I knew in Atlanta would not talk one-on-one with me. The King entourage was staying in a different hotel, and the one or two aides I got through to on the phone discouraged me from coming over to their hotel to talk. The King aides I knew in Atlanta were second-tier guys — logistics people, not policymakers, not Andrew Young or Abernathy. Two I remember were Hosea Williams and a preacher named James Orange. I knew them on an occasional basis when they would tell me about plans for marches, demonstrations, etc.

The Post practice of sending black-white teams to blowouts was an important journalistic policy. I assume (since I was not privy to the inner thinking about this) that it was a practical consideration, an effort to maximize information-gathering by putting the best-suited reporters where they could be most effective. It was not unlike sending a science reporter to a climate change conference or a religion writer to the Vatican — but in a volatile racial setting.

The rioting, such as it was, remained limited, with the cops and National Guard keeping the city tightly buttoned up.

Paul Valentine, 83, was a Washington Post reporter from 1965 to 1999.

Leon Dash adds:

After King’s assassination, later on April 4, “I was able to make it into a planning session led by Bayard Rustin and King’s aides.

“Rustin asked me to identify myself. When I told him I was a Washington Post reporter, I was genuinely surprised he did not throw me out. They were planning the march in Memphis that followed King’s assassination, which I think was a day or two before the funeral march in Atlanta.

“I don’t believe a white reporter would have been let into the hotel room. It was all black people in that room. I can only speculate that they felt that because I was black, I needed to be there. Bayard Rustin was clear that [on the march], they wanted to keep black youth away from any [objects] that they could pick up, such as rocks. (There had been rioting in Memphis the week before). He paid attention to those kind of details.”

Levey: ‘I Couldn’t Have Looked More White, or More Establishment, if I Had Tried.’

By Bob Levey

On the evening of April 4, 1968, I attended a performance of “The Pajama Game” at the National Theater. If anyone can tell me what happens in the second act, please do, because I never saw it.

During intermission, the news about Martin Luther King swept the crowd. I sprinted the 10 blocks back to the Post, assuming I’d be a backbencher on whatever the story turned out to be. I was only 22 years old, and had been at the paper only six months. I had never had a page one byline.

I was also sure at first that the story would be Memphis only. Yes, there might be some candlelight vigils in Washington, or some church services. I suspected I’d be covering some of them.

But after two hours of lounging around the city desk, as 14th and U burst into turmoil, followed by more of same on H Street NE and 7th Street NW, I was dispatched in a car equipped with a two-way radio. My assignment was to monitor what was going on in other parts of the city and relay notes to the city desk.

I decided to check out Seventh Street SE, near Pennsylvania Avenue. This neighborhood, just a few blocks from the Capitol and the Library of Congress, was as close to integrated as any in Washington at that time. So I thought I’d be able to take various kinds of temperatures.

I drove at 5 miles an hour north on Seventh, past a Safeway. It was being looted by dozens of people.

They were of all ages—kids, young men, even grandmothers. I parked across the street, watched through the front window (it had not been smashed out) and took notes.

All of a sudden, three police cars arrived, sirens screaming. Six cops darted into the store, guns drawn. The looters fled in every possible direction. One looked as if he had a gun (it was hard to tell because the light was so dim).

In any case, I decided to stay right where I was, hunched down in the driver’s seat of a plain-Jane, cream-colored Plymouth sedan. It couldn’t have looked more like a cop car if it had tried.

After about five minutes, the cops had scared all the looters out of the store. They made no arrests. They got back into their three cars and left.

Something made me stay there. I was soon glad I did.

One by one, the looters returned. They finished ransacking the store. One guy even tore apart one of the shelves and was carrying it down the street — long shards of metal banging against his thighs. Another looter passed right beside my Plymouth. He had torn open a sack of Wonder Bread and was stuffing huge wads of white fluff into his mouth, as fast as he could, as if he had never had a meal.

I waited another minute. Then I filed my notes to the city desk by radio. I had no idea that they’d appear on page one the next morning, under my byline. I suspect the editors liked the detail because it was so first-hand.

I never went to bed that night. The next afternoon, as the city tried to figure out what had just happened and what might happen next, I was assigned to the southern span of Seventh Street, just above New York Avenue.

Then and now, a police station sits just two blocks away. It was a bright spring day. I was wearing my press credentials around my neck on a lanyard and checking my notebook. Stupidly, I was still wearing the jacket and tie I had worn for “Pajama Game.” I couldn’t have looked more white, or more establishment, if I had tried.

In fact, the entire four days of the post-King riots were a lesson for me in how big the gulf was between the races. I must have tried to interview 50 African Americans during that time — some participants in the disturbances, some merely spectators. None would talk to me. It was if it was they were saying, “It’s our party, and you’re not invited because of your white skin.”

I’ve thought about white privilege for a long time, and I’ve experienced it all my life. But it had never been flipped around on me as it was then.

As I flipped through my notebook, a man walked up to me and asked if I wanted to buy some 45 RPM records. He had obviously just liberated them from a store nearby. I said no thanks.

He looked at my press tags and went into a rant about how much he hated the Washington Post. I was barely listening.

Then all of a sudden I was looking at a knife with about a five-inch blade.

Right on the front steps of a police station.

That’s how utterly mad the city was that day.

The man said he’d be glad to use the knife on me — that was how much he hated the newspaper. Somehow, I dredged up the presence of mind to tell the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

I said, “If you use that on me, you’ll be sorrier than I’ll be.” He grunted and walked away.

I’m still drawing breath.

Bob Levey, 72, was a Washington Post columnist from 1981 to 2004 and joined the paper in 1967.

Stokely Carmichael warns of retaliation in the streets for murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the day after King’s assassination. (Credit: YouTube)

Smothers: ‘I Was Shocked’ When the FBI Showed a Photo They Took of Me

By Ronald Smothers

On the night the riots started, I was sent to the scene around the area of 14th and U streets to report on the scene and phone my reports back to rewrite people back in the offices of the Washington Post. As a young black reporter with the Post, it was common practice in such situations to have black staff on the scene phoning in what they saw.

It was understandable chaos. Crowds were forming and they were angry at the news that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. I began to see people breaking windows of a men’s clothing store and, as I recorded what I was seeing in my notebook, I saw a large group of people heading north on 14th Street. At the front of the crowd was Stokely Carmichael, the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I quickly fell in with the group as they headed north and worked myself toward the front.

When the growing crowd was about one block north of 14th and U, I had reached the front and could clearly see Carmichael as they advanced. In the middle of the intersection a block north, a man emerged from the crowd toward Carmichael, thrusting a handgun in the air. Carmichael saw him and immediately reached up and yanked the gun from the man’s hand. As they stood there in the intersection, Carmichael raised the gun in the air and shouted to the group. “You don’t have these. Go home.”

He repeated that exhortation two or three times. The crowd did not disperse but appeared to follow him as he turned and crossed the street and started heading south on 14th street, shouting to people to go home. I followed along for a ways until I could get to a telephone booth, peel off and phone in what I saw. I recall being questioned by my editors several times during the night about that encounter. It was not until the next day that I realized why. The New York Times had reported a different version of that encounter that had Carmichael pulling out a gun and exhorting the crowd to more violence. The Post had stuck with what I had reported.

This became more significant in the waning days of the rioting when Justice Department and FBI investigators said that they were launching an investigation into whether Carmichael had incited people to riot in those early hours. Prominently cited in those reports of an investigation was the New York Times’ erroneous version of the very encounter I had witnessed.

Shortly after the rioting had ended, a Post editor came to me to tell me that the FBI wanted to talk to me about what I had reported that night about Carmichael’s actions and words. He made it clear that I could refuse to be interviewed by the investigators, who were apparently looking into the inciting-to-riot charges. The Post was not insisting that I submit to the interview. I concluded that it was important for me to talk with them, and so I called the agent whose name he had given me. At first they wanted to interview me at my home, but I said that I would come to their offices.

A day or two later, I went for the interview and was ushered into a bare interview room, where I waited until two agents came into the room. One was carrying a fairly thick file. At the start of the interview I made it clear that I was there to talk about and basically repeat to them what I reported to the Post that night.

I explained that I was aware of the inciting-to-riot investigation and felt a responsibility to reinforce what I had seen and reported that night. They didn’t respond, but instead one of them opened the manila file they had brought with them. It contained 8-by-10 inch black and white photographs of riot scenes, and they began asking me if I had seen this or that thing happen.

I repeated that I was there to talk specifically about the incident involving Carmichael, but they continued showing me picture after picture. At the bottom of the stack of pictures was one depicting me coming out of SNCC offices flanked by Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who succeeded Carmichael as chairman of SNCC.

I figured that it had been taken on some other occasion when I had been with the two men in the course of reporting on events and stories in which they were involved. I was shocked. I remembered many SNCC members I had encountered at the office jokingly saying “Smile” as we exited the office. I never understood those comments until that point. They had been referring to the FBI surveillance under which they operated.

I became nervous and agitated at the turn of events in the interview. I told them that I had nothing more to say, and I left.

Ronald Smothers, 71, worked at the Washington Post from June 1967 to June 1968 before going on to a 35-year career with the New York Times.

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View previous columns (after Feb. 13, 2016).

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