1) Peggy Peterman Fought Inside and Outside
Peggy Peterman spoke for many black columnists when, on a 1995 panel at a National Association of Black Journalists convention, she complained that opinion page editors were pushing them aside in favor of black conservatives. “I don’t believe African Americans who speak to poverty and racism and sexism and bigotry — and the filth that’s going on in Congress or any other place, state or local — are going to be able to write like they used to,” she said during this era of Newt Gingrich. ?You’re almost extinct,” she told the roomful of black opinion writers, according to an account in Editor & Publisher. “The conservative voice is the one they’re looking for.”
?In an impassioned call to arms, Peterman urged her colleagues to be ?confrontational? about getting the progressive point of view across,? Tony Case reported in the magazine.
“You’ve got to write our version of the unwed mothers, our version of who’s bringing drugs into our communities,” she said. “You’ve got to write about Newt Gingrich.?
Her editor, Philip Gailey, told Case that Peterman?s comments were “shallow” and “reactive,” and that if opinion pages were failing any group, it was the working class. Yet after Peterman retired, the paper established a scholarship in her honor.
“I believe that they recognized, perhaps, that I was a thorn in their side for justice,” she told Journal-isms in 1997, when this column was in the NABJ Journal.
Peterman died yesterday after a struggle with heart disease at age 67, the St. Petersburg Times reported.
Peterman might not have won every battle, but she spoke with authority in the newsroom in part because she had credibility outside it.
In 1962, this daughter of a Tuskegee, Ala., civil rights activist wrote a letter to the editor of the Times that detailed the discrimination her son had experienced when he was a mere 5 days old. She had been refused diaper service; the business owner told her he didn’t clean “colored diapers.” Peterman replied that she didn’t have colored diapers, just white ones.
Three years later, the paper hired her to write for its ?Negro news page,? which went only to black neighborhoods.
?Soon after starting at the Times, Peterman began to work for the abolition of the Negro news pages. . . . She detailed her reasons in a 14-page memo,? the Times? Nancy Waclawek wrote in 1989 after Peterman won NABJ?s Lifetime Achievement Award, nominated for that honor by former St. Petersburg newsroom colleague Vanessa Williams, now at the Washington Post.
?She also said that she would not return from maternity leave (her son John, a junior at Florida A&M University, was born in June 1967) to work for the Negro page,? Waclawek continued.
?In May 1967, the page was abolished. Peterman returned to the Times as a features reporter.? And so it went. Peterman became known as a mother hen to other black reporters inside the paper.
Outside the building, Peterman was long involved with the Louise H. Graham Training Center in St. Petersburg, which works with severely emotionally handicapped black children. She was president of the local chapter of the black sorority Delta Sigma Theta.
The Rev. Wayne Thompson, pastor of the First Baptist Institutional Church in St. Petersburg, told Waclawek that Peterman worked with him on youth motivation workshops and seminars to make “sure that every black child got a good start. Even the just-average student — she was always seeing more in them than they saw in themselves.”
She founded an annual Black History Pageant in 1978, and in 2002 became a full-fledged minister of Bethel Community Baptist Church. Her outside activities seemed to give her strength for the fight inside. ?Her presence was just an encouragement to me,? Denise Amos of the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote on the NABJ listserve today. ? I knew she’d broken open doors that I then stepped through and that she was in the vanguard of some of the uphill battles women and journalists of color were encountering there.?
?I join the Times editorial board on Aug. 30, and I feel very strongly that I’m following in her footsteps — walking through doors that she had to break open by sheer force of will and talent,? wrote Eric Deggans, the paper?s television critic.
?At a time when so many people are complaining of diversity fatigue and accusing us all of biased agendas, Peggy’s life and legacy are an important reminder that there’s real, measurable progress that comes from a lifelong struggle to bring diversity to the newsroom. I see it reflected in the faces of every black journalist now working at the Times,” continued Deggans, who is also the local NABJ chapter president.
?We are her children. And I only hope that our work to bring others up behind us continues the proud legacy she started, back when journalism didn’t even know how badly it needed us,? he told his NABJ colleagues.
2) Earl Byrd Lived Some of Black Men?s Challenges
In 1992, Peggy Peterman told Mary Ann French of the Washington Post that she constantly encouraged young blacks to get into journalism.
“I tell them that when they see the chief of police, they see something else than what the young white journalist sees,” she said.
Earl Byrd could have attested to that. Byrd was imprisoned about three times on substance abuse or fencing-stolen-property convictions, sentences served both before and after he worked at the old Washington Star in the early 1970s, hired under a special program for people who were in drug rehabilitation, a mentor recalls.
?He was among the strongest writers, the more so because he actually lived some of the most critical challenges facing African American men and never shied away from the most unblinking self examinations,? remembered a Star colleague, Kenneth R. Walker, who now writes from South Africa.
Byrd went on to write for the Washington Times, free-lanced for magazines and weeklies, and most recently wrote for the Afro-American newspapers in Baltimore and Washington. Sometime in between, Byrd worked nights with D.C. youths deemed uncontrollable, but was fired after about a year when his employer discovered his criminal record, according to Renthena Byrd, his wife of 37 years and his sweetheart since their days at Baltimore?s Booker T. Washington Junior High School.
Byrd died Aug. 3, two days after his 63rd birthday. The cause of death has not been determined, Renthena Byrd told Journal-isms today from Baltimore.
?Earl had three loves: music, women and writing, mistresses all, who battled for his time and attention,? the memorial-service obituary read. ?When he was 15, he played saxophone in area nightclubs, always the lover of jazz. But Earl was born to write, and found his niche -? features on jazz, columns on women. He used writing to enthrone his other loves.?
But Byrd also used his talent to warn others against following in all of his footsteps. In the Baltimore City Paper two years ago, he described life ?during my prime, 25 and at the top of my game as a player in a corrupt life centered around narcotics, when I was cut down and sentenced to three buffaloes running wild — 15 years in the Maryland State Penitentiary.
?Very few of the kids who desire a lavish lifestyle financed by drug money and inspired by a hip-hop culture of aggression and attitude achieve their dreams. Youngsters today want to be independent of a racist society that has never had African-American interests at heart. So with drugs as the perfect justification, they become outlaws,? Byrd wrote.
?Prison is an occupational hazard, the price one pays for an outlaw life of supposed independence. These kids don’t understand that education is the key to freedom in America. Most hustlers, instead of buying out designer boutiques with fabulous women on their arm, struggle to buy groceries.
?But once behind bars, the psychology of confinement kicks in. To justify this living horror, cons brag how they didn’t buckle under racist rule. ?I rather be a man in prison than live like a coward in the street,? a sap might crack. ?Damn right, I got paid. I was a motherfucker out there. And when I get out it’s on.?
?It is this image — not the one of the beautiful black man who loves and guides his children and supports his family — that causes the collective grief. We have to change that.?
?Earl took to journalism right away,? recalled Ron Sarro, the journeyman reporter to whom Byrd was assigned when he arrived at the Star. ?He liked people, so he could elicit information to tell their stories. He could empathize with them. He had a gift for writing.
?Earl Byrd was an example of a raw talent that could be developed if people just took the time. He is an example of how African Americans were cheated early on. There were two school systems back then. Maybe, just maybe, if he were the recipient of the same resources, his life might have been different,? said Sarro, who is white.
But priorities have changed. Paul Delaney, who knew Byrd had been at the paper but had moved from the Star to the New York Times by the time Byrd arrived, said of Byrd, ?the biggest impact of his life and career was his example as a journalist with drug problems being given a break. I believe he relapsed back to drugs, but what the Star did in supporting [him] was difficult to duplicate.
?I know of several other black journalists with drug problems or criminal records who were refused breaks. The New York Times,? where Delaney became a senior editor, ?certainly would not have hired Earl, though it gave a break to a white photographer, already on staff, with a heavy drug problem.
?I admired Earl.?
Earl Byrd: 1941-2004: Byrd never disappointed the people (Sean Yoes, Baltimore Afro-American)
Lawyer: Pierre Thomas? Case Unlike Co-Defendants?
Pierre Thomas, the black journalist among five reporters held in contempt by a federal judge for refusing to name confidential sources in the Wen Ho Lee case, differs from the others in that he is the only journalist in the case who reported information ?that we know is true,? his lawyer tells Journal-isms.
Lee is the nuclear scientist once accused of being a spy. As Neely Tucker reported in the Washington Post Thursday, ?U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson said that reporters for the Associated Press, the Cable News Network, the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times must tell attorneys for Wen Ho Lee the names of federal officials who gave them confidential information about the former nuclear-weapons scientist. The judge fined the news organizations $500 a day each until they provide the names, but said payments can be delayed pending appeals.?
However, Charles D. Tobin, Thomas? lawyer, told Journal-isms that Thomas? report was that Lee had downloaded information from his agency?s mainframe computer. Since Lee pleaded guilty to that charge, ?that?s the only thing we know is true. What he [Thomas] reported is indisputably the truth.?
Lee was indicted on 59 counts but later pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling information on nuclear weapons. He is suing the government under the Privacy Act over leaks of information about him. For his lawsuit to proceed, he must first identify who might have divulged the information, as the New York Times has explained.
Thomas worked at CNN when his report was aired but now works for ABC. Nevertheless, CNN is financing his defense, Tobin said. ?CNN has funded a defense of several former reporters and contributors when reporters? privileges are under attack,? Tobin said, quoting CNN, adding that the network says it ?will continue to do what they can to see that the reporters get the protection that they need.?
Meanwhile, the Asian American Journalists Association joined the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and others in denouncing the judge?s ruling.
?The use of anonymous and confidential sources is a crucial and necessary tool for journalists to do their job as watchdogs. The practice helps reporters shed light on everything from the inner workings of government and other institutions to potential corruption and abuse — information they otherwise would not be able to obtain because the sources who are in the know fear retribution if they are named,? the association said in a statement.
?Judge Jackson’s ruling sends the wrong message — that journalists can be compelled to break promises with sources and thereby have their credibility damaged, otherwise be held in contempt of court. That type of a demand only serves to hamper reporters’ ability to gather the news and the public’s right to know.?
FAIR, ASNE Differ Sharply on Confidential Sourcing (Editor & Publisher)
Setbacks on Press Protections Are Seen (New York Times)
Resources available for reporters covering stories about subpoenaed reporters (Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press)
AAJA Prez: Unity Fuss Casts “Pall” Over Strengths
The debate over the audience reaction to the presidential candidates at the Unity convention ?has cast a pall over the convention and its accomplishments,? writes Esther Wu of the Dallas Morning News, the new president of the Asian American Journalists Association.
?The week was filled with lively discussions designed to help journalists not only be better at their jobs, but understand the communities they cover. Students received hands-on training by producing daily newspapers, radio shows, online content and television broadcasts,? wrote Wu, a regular News columnist.
?And as nice as it was to meet Mr. Bush, I must admit I met someone who meant more to me. A young student who had read my columns about the efforts to remove Jap Road in Fannett, Texas, came up and thanked me after one of my presentations. As a reporter, she said, she had always known that minority journalists can offer voices that are not often heard. But after reading about Fannett, she said, she realized that more important, we can make a difference.
?And that is why there will be a UNITY 2008.?
More about Unity:
- Fred H. Gregory, letter writer, Greensboro (N.C.) News and Record: There’s no objectivity in journalism
- Norman W. Montiegel, letter writer, Columbus Dispatch: Dispatch thorough on convention, Bush
- Allan Provost, letter writer, South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Unity journalists’ response unbiased
- Marissa Silvera, Knight Ridder: Message from international athletes sometimes lost
- Rich Tucker, Heritage Foundation: Three cheers for Kerry
Story Links Prison Rates, Spread of AIDS to Women
While many of us were preoccupied with the Unity convention, a story by Lynette Clemetson in the New York Times tied two trends: high rates of imprisonment among African Americans and high rates of H.I.V. and AIDS.
“While many studies have documented the prevalence of the disease in prisons, researchers are now examining how patterns of incarceration affect its transmission beyond prison walls,? read her Aug. 6 story.
?The health consequences cut across lines of class, said Dr. Peter Leone, medical director of the H.I.V. and sexually transmitted disease division of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. ‘You’re not even looking at six degrees of separation in most black social networks between a disenfranchised former inmate and someone who is in college or highly respected in the community,’ he said.?
BET News Series Looks at Successful Parolees
On Monday at 11 p.m. ET/PT, ?BET Nightly News? begins a five-part series, ?Locked Up, Locked Out,? looking into the lives of five successful African Americans who have struggled as parolees to regain a place among the voting population, a news release announces.
CBS News journalist Randall Pinkston narrates. ?Among those subjects who can?t escape the shackles of past transgressions is renowned actor, producer and director Charles ?Roc? Dutton, who some 30 years following his parole for a manslaughter conviction still is not allowed to vote in his home state of Maryland,? the release says.
Estes-Sumpter Tells Weight Story in Essence
?After a lifetime of battling her weight, Sidmel Estes-Sumpter underwent gastric-bypass surgery five years ago out of concern for her health.
“It was an eye-opening experience. While her newfound physique may have made her more acceptable to society, she says, for her, the ability to move from the shame of being fat to the liberation of healthy self-acceptance reflects the kind of beauty that really matters.? So reads the blurb for an article by Estes-Sumpter, executive producer of ?Good Day Atlanta? at WAGA-TV in Atlanta and a former president of the National Association of Black Journalists, in the September issue of Essence magazine.
?Now that I’ve lost weight, I am better accepted professionally and personally, and that really makes me angry. I want to scream, ?If you didn’t like me then, you shouldn’t like me now, because I am the same Sidmel I always was.? I really have no patience for these fair-weather friends and admirers,? she writes.
The piece adds that Estes-Sumpter is working on a book, ?Being Me: From Fat to Free.?
Black, White Lewis Diuguids Meet Each Other
“We have the same first and last names. We’re both palindromes. Our dads are both from Virginia, and our grandfathers both worked for Norfolk & Western Railway. That’s where the similarities end,” writes Lewis Diuguid in the Kansas City Star.
“Lew is 69; I’m 49. Lew is white; I’m black. Lew’s middle initial is ‘H’; mine is ‘W.’ Lew retired in 1997 after 35 years as a writer and editor with The Post; I’m still trying to keep up in the fast-paced news industry.”
The two Lews met nine years ago, writes the Star?s columnist and vice president for community resources, and 1984 graduate of the Maynard Institute’s Editing Program for Minority Journalists.
Since the Kansas City Diugiud was on the East Coast for the Unity convention, the two met again this month at L.P. Steamers, ?an inconspicuous though well-regarded ‘eat-in or carry-out’ restaurant near the waterfront in Lew’s beloved Baltimore.? Race was among the topics on the table.
Weatherman Mark McEwen Hired in Orlando
?In a bold move to pump up its lagging morning news, WKMG-Channel 6 has hired former CBS morning mainstay Mark McEwen as an anchor, the station announced Wednesday,” Hal Boedeker, Orlando Sentinel television critic, reports.
?McEwen, 49, will start in mid-September and also anchor the noon news. He will have a co-anchor on the early morning news, but WKMG will redesign the telecast and announce his on-air colleagues later.?
Another Head Rolls in Hoy Circulation Scandal
?The Spanish-language newspaper Hoy removed its top circulation executive yesterday as part of an ongoing effort to recover from a circulation scandal involving inflated numbers going back to 2001,? James T. Madore reports in Newsday.
?Richard Czark, senior vice president for circulation, ‘left the company effective immediately,’ according to a spokeswoman for parent Tribune Co., which also owns Newsday.
?Louis Sito, his former boss, announced his early retirement last month as Hoy’s publisher.?
