Assaulted Minneapolis Reporters Have No Regrets
Star Tribune reporters Howie Padilla and David Chanen, assaulted by a group of African Americans in North Minneapolis after an 11-year-old boy was wounded in a police shooting, said they didn’t regret the decisions that led them to the wrong place at the wrong time, the newspaper reported.
Padilla, who is Mexican American, and Chanen, who is white, were treated at area hospitals. Padilla suffered a slight concussion and his teeth were damaged; one of Chanen’s elbows has a small break. Each has large bruises, cuts and nose damage.
Several other reporters and camera crews had bottles and rocks thrown at them and their vehicles Thursday. A bus was damaged as it drove through the area, and three riders received minor injuries from flying glass after objects were thrown at the bus.
Store owner Abraham Awaijane, who whisked the reporters into his store, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, “I don’t think of [my action] as heroic. I was trying to help someone – that’s a humane thing.”
Also in the Pioneer Press, Tim Gleason, dean of the University of Oregon’s school of journalism and mass communication, offered two explanations for why journalists become targets. “One can’t ignore the simpler answer which is these reporters just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Gleason said. But he suggested race can play a role in such incidents. “White reporters can easily become a symbol of the white establishment,” Gleason said. Thursday’s incident involved mostly white journalists entering a mostly black community. “Does the minority community view these papers and TV stations as part of the community or as not representing their communities?”
Meanwhile, Minneapolis is wound tight after three back-to-back police shootings involving black people this month, the Pioneer Press reported Sunday, adding that police and community leaders fear a snap from any faction at any moment.
Bryant Gumbel’s Son Tries to Put False Arrest Behind
Twenty-four hours after his false arrest, Bradley Gumbel, the 23-year-old son of anchor Bryant Gumbel, tried to put the ordeal behind him by flying to a resort in Palm Beach, Fla., for his father’s wedding Saturday to longtime girlfriend Hilary Quinlan.
Young Gumbel was nabbed in a mugging on New York’s upper East Side because he matched a description of the suspect and was identified by the victim. But Gumbel had an alibi – he was on a date when the mugging occurred, and prosecutors dropped the charges, reports the New York Daily News.
But the question still needs to be asked, says Newsday columnist Ellis Henican, “How often do people, especially young black men, get swept up in these one-witness identifications – then end up in prison for crimes they didn’t commit? What role do the police play in facilitating injustices like these?”
The case is reminiscent of that of Earl Graves Jr., then 37, son of the Black Enterprise owner, who was yanked off a Metro-North commuter train in 1995 by police officers looking for a black suspect. Metro-North ran ads in three New York papers, including the New York Times, to apologize. Metro-North police were looking for a black man, 5 feet 10, with a mustache. Graves is 6 feet 4 and clean shaven, Jet magazine reported at the time.
Publisher Val McCalla Dies, Gave U.K. Blacks a Voice
Val McCalla, the publisher and founder of Britain’s most successful black newspaper, the Voice, has died at age 58 after fighting a liver illness. He arrived in the East End of London in 1959 at age 15, from a poor neighborhood in Jamaica, and worked as an RAF pilot and accountant before spotting a niche market that transformed British journalism, the Guardian reported.
McCalla recognized that young British-born black people had no voice in the mainstream press. He launched the Voice in 1982, operating from a small hut and paying young reporters with only the promise of a Chinese meal at the end of the week.
Earlier this year, critics questioned whether the paper continued to speak for the black community after Editor-in-Chief Mike Best called for the police to stop and search more suspects to halt the rising tide of gun crime. His call won unanimous praise from conservatives in the white press, the London Independent reported in March.
Lawrence Young Leaves Male Heir
Lawrence Young, the managing editor of the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif., who died at age 47 on July 20 after an apparent heart attack, fathered a son who was born last Friday.
Lawrence Jamal E. Young II, Young’s only son, entered the world at Dallas Presbyterian Hospital Friday at 7 pounds, 6 ounces, and was 20 inches long. Mom, Dallas Morning News reporter April Washington, and son were reported doing well. “They were going to be a family — Lawrence; April; ‘Jamal,’ as they called him; and Autumn, April’s daughter,” said Cheryl Smith, the regional director of the National Association of Black Journalists.
Asian Journalists Party Near Lee Harvey Oswald’s Perch
Andrea Nguyen stands before the infamous Corner Window of the former Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, barefoot, with a sombrero hanging down her back and pink sandals in her hands, reports Susan Feeney in the Washington Post.
“To be honest, I did not realize that this was the place,” she says. “I was shocked.” The recent University of Houston graduate said she had hopped a shuttle bus to the event sponsored by the Asian American Journalists Association during its recent convention, not quite sure where she was headed. It was at the Texas School Book Depository on Nov. 22, 1963, at 12:30 in the afternoon, that Lee Harvey Oswald crouched and fired the shots that killed President Kennedy.
Cynthia Tucker’s Zeal Getting the Better of Her?
As editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, syndicated columnist and frequent guest of PBS’ “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” Cynthia Tucker is probably the nation’s best-known black woman editorial page editor.
But her opinions seem be be taking her in directions few would have predicted.
In her latest column , her zeal to applaud the victory of Denise Majette over Cynthia McKinney in last week’s Democratic congressional primary leads her to assert flatly that few black Americans share the views of Jesse Jackson.
“Indeed, few black Americans share the beliefs of McKinney or the controversial political figures who came south to campaign for her, including the incendiary Louis Farrakhan and even the self-promoting Jesse Jackson. They no longer constitute the core of the black political leadership class,” she writes.
And when the former H. Rap Brown, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, was convicted of murder in the case of a deputy sheriff and his partner, the Constitution asserted March 14 that “Al-Amin will die in prison, probably many years from now. His passing will be noted by a paragraph or two on a back page of a newspaper, noting his one-time prominence as a black activist and also his terrible crime. And that’s how it should be.”
And Elaine Brown, who chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977 and now lives in Atlanta, reserves perhaps her strongest language for Tucker in her new book, “The Condemnation of Little B” (Beacon Press) in condemning “this new trend of indicting and punishing black children as ‘superpredators.'”
“Moderate” Denise Majette Voted for Alan Keyes
Speaking of Denise Majette, the former judge was touted by the news media as a moderate Democrat as she defeated Rep. Cynthia McKinney in last week’s Democratic primary. But two years ago, she voted in the Republican primary, and for conservative Alan Keyes.
Until Sunday, this fact had apparently been reported only by the Georgia gay newspaper Southern Voice, which was concerned that “the former U.N. ambassador and current talk-show host repeatedly called homosexuality an ‘abomination’ and cast himself as the choice for conservative Christians.”
Majette told the Southern Voice then, “It was an opportunity to vote for a black man for president, a historic opportunity I think most of the district’s constituents understand. And the views that I hold with respect to gay and lesbian and transgender issues are different than what he holds.”
On Sunday, Jack E. White, former Time columnist who started today as writer-in-residence at Howard University, asked Majette about that vote on BET’s “Lead Story.”
“First of all, the way I vote as an individual will be very different from my capacity of representing people from my district,” she said. “My allegiance will be with the people from the 4th District . . . Yes I did (vote for Keyes).”
Latina Gets Turn on “This Week” Roundtable
Evelyn Hernandez, opinion editor of New York’s El Diario/La Prensa, joined the news discussion roundtable on ABC-TV’s “This Week” program on Sunday, most likely the first Latina to sit in the chair. “This Week” has put people of color in a roundtable seat all summer. Prior to that, the show “had a group of people who always turned out to be these white middle-age guys. We are insisting that the pool be expanded,” ABC News spokesman Jeffrey Schneider told Journal-isms in June. Michel Martin of ABC-TV’s “Nightline” has had the most appearances in the rotation this summer. Hernandez is a former president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.