Elder Statesman Urged Knowing One’s History
Vernon Jarrett, legendary Chicago journalist who counted Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and Chicago Mayor Harold Washington among his heroes, died Sunday in the University of Chicago Hospitals of cancer. He was 82.
[Added May 30: The birth date on his driver’s license would make him 85. See subsequent column.]
“Vernon came out of Tennessee determined to go the distance and to go the distance his way,” said Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of “Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America,” in the Chicago Tribune.
“He had a strong sense of history and felt intellectuals ought to be involved in politics,” Bennett said. “He thought people, of all races, needed to be involved in a struggle to take control of their own lives.”
Jarrett was a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, its second president and president of NABJ-Chicago. Members called him the conscience of the organization on the NABJ e-mail list this morning.
“NABJ meant everything to Vernon Jarrett, and he meant all that and so much more to NABJ,” said Herbert Lowe, a Newsday reporter and NABJ’s current president. “Just as important, what Vernon meant to black journalists, meant to black America, meant to America, meant to journalism, meant to Chicago, meant to the world will never be forgotten. There simply can be no overstating his legacy.”
Jarrett worked at the Chicago Defender in the 1940s, “started contributing to the Chicago Tribune in 1970 and became the Tribune’s first African-American syndicated columnist. In 1983 he moved to the Chicago Sun-Times and remained there until 1994,” the Tribune wrote.
“He broke into broadcasting in 1948 with Negro Newsfront, radio’s first daily newscast produced by African-Americans. For many years, he hosted a Sunday-morning talk show on WLS-Ch. 7,” a station for which Jarrett produced nearly 2,000 broadcasts.
“He was a senior fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and taught history and journalism at other local colleges.
“In 1977 he founded the Afro-Academic Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO), an intellectual competition for high school students. Under the sponsorship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ACT-SO has awarded tens of thousands of dollars in college scholarships.”
An inspiration to younger black journalists, he considered it essential for journalists to know black history and would give presentations to members of the William Monroe Trotter Group of African American columnists on the life of DuBois, the scholar, activist and editor of the NAACP’s The Crisis.
“He used journalism as a way of ensuring that the achievements of blacks would never be forgotten, and the struggles of blacks would never be ignored,” DeWayne Wickham, a columnist for USA Today/Gannett News Service, a former NABJ president and a leader of the Trotter Group, said in an NABJ news release today.
“More than just a journalist, Vernon was also an historian whose late-night stories about the places he’d been and the people he’d met were told with the rhythmic voice and unquestionable authority of a griot. His departure from this life leaves a gaping hole in the ranks of those men and women who are true champions of our race.”
“No one could ever clear a public meeting of mendacity like dear Vernon Jarrett,” wrote Tom Morgan, another former NABJ president, on the NABJ list. “Vernon was fearless and taught me early on that right is might. I’m sorry now that I never told him that I considered him a mentor to me. From him, I learned passion toward NABJ. He showed me what NABJ could be and, what it ought to be. Aside from NABJ however, Vernon loved his people. Everything he wrote or spoke about exhibited an abiding love for Black folks, especially the young. A titan has passed and his influence will be felt for many years. I will miss his candor and his humor.”
In 2002, when the NABJ board chose a group he headed over a rival one to be the organization’s Chicago affiliate, Jarrett told Journal-isms that one of his first priorities would be sending black journalists into the schools to help children make public presentations of the works of historic black journalists Frederick Douglass, DuBois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.
“We’re going to have young people read aloud to their parents once a month at least from the great literature of black people,” Jarrett said. “It’s almost criminal that those who have lived well through journalism” are not giving back to the community, he said.
“He was a legend of rare vintage,” said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was at the hospital when Jarrett died, Gary Wisby reported in the Chicago Sun-Times.
Jackson said he was with the hospitalized journalist the night in March when Barack Obama won the Illinois Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. “That was exciting to him,” Jackson said. “He demanded that his son get him an absentee ballot.”
Angelo Henderson to Help Revamp Defender Chain
The company that last year bought the Chicago Defender, Michigan Chronicle, New Pittburgh Courier, Memphis Tri-State Defender and Michigan Front Page has hired Angelo Henderson, a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1999 while at the Wall Street Journal, to help upgrade the African American newspapers, Clarence Nixon, the president and CEO of the company, told Journal-isms today.
As part of the planning, the company, Real Times, plans focus groups in Chicago Wednesday and Thursday, with six panels representing “every element of the Chicago community,” Nixon said. “We must compete with the biggest and the best,” he continued. “I can’t think of any logical reason why we can’t do that.”
Henderson, whose title is associate editor, said his job is to “deal with the content-related issues; trying to build an African American Knight Ridder or Gannett. If it’s going to exist, this is the entity.”
He said his role will be to “assess the journalistic effectiveness of each newspaper, assessing key staff, providing mentoring and coaching to key staff and interns as well as assisting the Real Times Editorial Board and publishers in numerous projects.”
Henderson left the Detroit News in December, where he been special projects reporter, to pursue the goal of his own media business. In addition to having established that company, Angelo Ink, LLC, Henderson co-hosts “Inside Detroit,” a morning radio show on Detroit’s WCHB-AM that created controversy when Henderson started reading all the crimes committed over 24 hours. In addition, as an ordained minister, Henderson was named in January as associate pastor of worship, vision and emerging ministries at Detroit’s Hope United Methodist Church.
“I feel I was only using part of what the Lord had given me,” Henderson told Journal-isms today. “Everything is still journalism, whether it’s news on the radio, [or] the entrepreneurial thing with the black church; it’s transforming the community, changing the world.”
Henderson has this to say to reporters at mainstream newspapers: “if there’s a story you really want to do, take some vacation time and cover the conventions for us. We can put the same story on the front page of each of those” papers, he said.
Nixon said the company is looking for journalists with experience in television and radio in addition to print, and said the pay would be competitive.
“Each of our communities thinks [it is] unique,” when the issues of education and crime, and the resulting ecomomic impact, are the same, he said. The papers, which have a combined weekly circulation of 100,000 to 125,000, will be looking for reporters to target those issues.
Nixon said he is aware of criticism of standards in the black press and has created new ethics and other policies to address those criticisms.
As for a timetable for the makeover, Nixon said, “I have a board of directors who are impatient.” Those interested may contact Nixon at cnixon@chicagodefender.com
Kathleen McElroy, From Times AME to Dining Editor
Kathleen McElroy, who with the departure of Managing Editor Gerald Boyd last year became the highest ranking person of color in the New York Times newsroom, has changed jobs: from associate managing editor for weekends, in charge of news coverage for the Sunday and Monday newspapers, to dining editor, a Times spokeswoman confirmed today.
McElroy had been a deputy sports editor when named to the associate managing editor’s job in 2002.
“She is now the new dining editor and as such, is on the same level as Charles Blow, our graphics editor,” Catherine J. Mathis, Times spokeswoman, told Journal-isms. Blow, like McElroy, is African American. “Her new position is one that she sought. She loved her other job but this is a rare opportunity. This was her dream job given her passion for food, editing and New York City,” Mathis said.
Ben Holman Retires as U-Md. Journalism Prof
Ben Holman, a professor at the University of Maryland’s College of Journalism who began his career in 1952, retired with the end of the semester, according to Dean Thomas Kunkel.
Holman, 73, who was director of the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service from 1969 to 1977, and who worked 10 years for the old Chicago Daily News, has been a faculty member at Maryland since 1978. He will continue to teach one course next fall and another in the spring of 2005, Kunkel said.
“The reduced schedule will allow him to put more time into his memoirs,” Kunkel told the faculty. “And anyone who knows Ben knows those memoirs will be fascinating.”
“He served as a guest columnist for the Dallas Morning News, covered the Olympics in Barcelona for 200 black-owned newspapers across the nation, and served as a board member of the Washington Association of Black Journalists,” according to the University’s Web site. He is also a former CBS News TV assignment editor and ex-NBC-TV producer/correspondent.
Holman’s faculty colleague Alice Bonner told Journal-isms that, “Holman’s voice and insights are laced throughout the mid-1960s discourse on race and news media, especially during the years between the Watts rebellion of 1965, which made newsroom integration necessary, and the Kerner Commission Report of 1968, which made it urgent.
“In a post-Watts 1965 speech at the University of Missouri that was echoed in Kerner findings three years later, he charged that journalists had popularized the term ‘Negro Revolution’ but failed to cover the racial crises as such, thereby encouraging white complacency while black resentment grew. He accurately predicted that Northern cities would be the major battlegrounds for coming uprisings, declaring, ‘It is an opportunity for members of the news media to unravel and chronicle this great struggle. . . . It is a responsibility as great as any in the annals of American journalism,'” Bonner recalled.
“In 1967, at a Columbia University conference, as spokesman for the federal Community Relations Service [he was assistant director of media relations from 1965 to 1968], Holman said progress on press desegregation was ‘abysmal,’ running ‘at least a decade behind the rest of the nation.’ While other business addressed racial issues with ‘radical and revolutionary things, . . . all I hear from the media is “Is he qualified?” As long as you sing that song you are not going to reach the poor Black people in the ghettos of the country,'” she quoted Holman as saying.
“He made history living the subjects he taught long before he began his long-running career as a journalism educator,” Bonner concluded.
Eugene Kane Hears from Cosby on Column
Columnist Eugene Kane of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel heard from Bill Cosby after criticizing comments attributed to the comedian-actor-philanthropist at a Washington ceremony last week commemorating the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education.
“Based on a report in The Washington Post that Cosby mocked the language of poor blacks and blamed them for dragging down the rest of society, I chided Cosby for his harsh views and even called him a ‘curmudgeon,'” Kane wrote.
“Mr. Kane? First, what I want to say is this is not an argument, this is a discussion,” Kane quoted Cosby as saying.
“Cosby said many of his comments in Washington had been taken out of context.”
Kane wasn’t the only journalist to whom Cosby took his case. In the New York Times on Saturday, Felicia R. Lee, writing about the controversy prompted by the remarks, reported:
“Mr. Cosby said yesterday that what was left out of those comments, first reported by The Associated Press and The Washington Post, was that he began his remarks by talking about what he said was a 50 percent high school dropout rate among poor blacks. The National Center for Education Statistics, a federal agency, says that in 2000 the dropout rate for blacks was 13.1 percent. Mr. Cosby’s publicist, David Brokaw, said it was Mr. Cosby’s understanding that the rate was 50 percent in some inner-city schools.
“Mr. Cosby’s remarks, which also included the observation that not all incarcerated blacks are political prisoners (‘people getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake, and then we run out and we are outraged’) were meant to frame the complexities of black struggle 50 years after Brown, Mr. Cosby said, when so many legal barriers have fallen.”
Other black journalists weighing in included syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald; Cary Clack in the San Antonio Express-News, Colbert I. King in the Washington Post, Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Village Voice and Jabari Asim on washingtonpost.com.
Rodgers, Hawaii Black Reporter Win Local Emmys
Barbara Rodgers of the Bay Area’s KPIX-TV was awarded the Governors’ Award for lifetime achievement Saturday night at the the 33rd Annual Northern California Area Emmy Awards. Hawaii’s only black television journalist took home three.
The region includes TV stations from Fresno, Calif., to the Oregon border plus Hawaii and Reno.
Jacqueline McLean of KGMB-TV, who says she is the only black journalist at the Aloha state’s television stations, won three awards for her investigative reporting: for a stories on paper waste, the underground car business and on driving under the influence.
Rodgers’ station said, “The Board of Governors’ Award is the highest Award a local chapter can bestow . . . The award can be given to an individual, a company or an organization for outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences or management of television; which is either of a cumulative nature, or so extraordinary and universal in nature as to be beyond the realm of the awards presented in the categories of achievement.”
A special tribute was given to Faith Fancher, the KTVU FOX 2 reporter who died of breast cancer last year.
