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It Was 40 Years Ago Today

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Watts Showed Media the Need for Black Journalists

“It was the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” began the “eyewitness account” in the Los Angeles Times 40 years ago this week.

“I went along with the mobs, just watching, listening.

“It’s a wonder anyone with white skin got out of there alive.

“. . . Light-skinned Negroes such as myself were targets of rocks and bottles until someone standing nearby would shout, ‘He’s blood,’ or ‘He’s a brother — lay off!'”

The words were from Robert Richardson, a classified advertising messenger at the L.A. Times deputized to cover the Watts riots of 1965, the first widespread urban conflagration of the 1960s, a series that would culminate with the burning of cities that took place after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968.

In Dean Baquet, the Los Angeles Times has just named its first African American editor. But as the 40-years-later retrospectives unfurl, it is worth remembering the point that Earl Caldwell made in his “Caldwell Diaries” on the Maynard Institute Web site:

“Those two words — eyewitness account — signaled that with Richardson, the Times had a person on the inside to see firsthand and to report in detail exactly what was going on in the Negro district.

“Just below Richardson’s byline, in much smaller type, was an editor’s note: ‘Robert Richardson, 24, a Negro, is an advertising salesman for the Times. . . .’ That was the newspaper’s way of admitting that it did not have a single reporter who was black. And that to effectively cover what was happening just a few miles from its newsroom, it had to grab a guy who wasn’t a reporter and had no training but who was black and could get on the inside in Watts when it mattered.”

And that is why African American reporters began to be hired on “mainstream” newspapers in the 1960s. As the presidentially appointed Kerner Commission put it three years later, in 1968:

“If the media are to comprehend and then to project the Negro community, they must have the help of Negroes. If the media are to report with understanding, wisdom and sympathy on the problems of the cities and the problems of the black man — for the two are increasingly intertwined — they must employ, promote and listen to Negro journalists.”

Much has changed in race relations in the last 40 years, not least the consensus on why people of color are in the media.

Just last year, the E.W. Scripps Co. and the Denver Rocky Mountain News changed the purpose of a program designed “to help early-career Hispanic journalists develop the skills they need to succeed in daily newspaper careers.” They had received a call from the general counsel of Linda Chavez‘s anti-affirmative action organization.

The Denver program, which had been called the “Scripps Academy for Hispanic Journalists” was changed to the “Scripps Academy for Hispanic Journalism.” Roger Clegg, a deputy assistant attorney general in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, complained that such a program was “racially exclusive” and possibly illegal. There is “no reason why only a journalist with a Hispanic surname or whatever should be able to cover those issues,” Clegg said.

Such a rationale would have seemed incomprehensible to news executives trying to cover a racial uprising. Richardson’s coverage helped win the L.A. Times a Pulitzer Prize.

But his story took an unfortunate turn. “The very month it was awarded, Richardson was fired as a reporter trainee because of a misdemeanor charge that was later dropped,” as Mark Fitzgerald explained in Editor & Publisher after Richardson’s December 2000 death. “He was eagerly snapped up by L.A. radio and TV stations, which, like big-city broadcasters across the nation, realized that the long hot summers of the 1960s dramatized the need to get black and brown voices on the air. But success eluded this accidental pioneer: Richardson’s career foundered on a drinking problem he would not lick until he had lived 52 of his 59 years.”

Concluded Caldwell: “Maybe Richardson’s legacy was this: early in 1966, within a year of the riots, Ray Rodgers became the first black reporter on the staff of the Los Angeles Times.”

Richardson’s story was dramatized in the 1990 Turner Network Television two-hour drama “Heat Wave,” starring Blair Underwood, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Sally Kirkland and Margaret Avery. Under the headline “‘Burn, Baby, Burn!'” his L.A. Times account of the riots is excerpted in part two of the Library of America’s “Reporting Civil Rights” series.

“Burn, baby, burn,” is the same phrase the Huey P. Newton Foundation now wants to trademark to brand a hot sauce. It originated during the Watts riots, as Richardson explained in his stories. A Los Angeles disc jockey, the Magnificent Montague, used the catch phrase “Let’s all get together and burn!” When youths picked him up on KGFJ on their stolen transistor radios, “burn, baby, burn” became a battle cry. Much has changed in 40 years.

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Clinton, Daley, Obama to Speak at Johnson Funeral

Former president Bill Clinton, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., will be among the speakers at the funeral Monday for John H. Johnson, the pioneering publisher who died Aug. 1 at age 87, his company announced Friday night.

Others will include Black Enterprise publisher Earl Graves, Sr., Howard University President H. Patrick Swyert, commentator Tavis Smiley, Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner and syndicated radio host Tom Joyner. The Rev. Dr. William H. Gray III, the former congressman who afterward headed the United Negro College Fund, is the official eulogist and the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr. is to deliver the benediction. Vickie Winans is to be among the performers.

Among the written and visual tributes to Johnson, whose company published Ebony and Jet magazines, were an editorial and cartoon that appeared Thursday in the three editions of Hoy, the Spanish-language newspaper produced by the Tribune Co.

“Our philosophy shares the clear vision of Johnson about the challenges that confront the communities of African-Americans — in his case — and Hispanics — in our case,” the editorial read. An accompanying cartoon by Jose Angonoa showed Johnson with the Ebony logo behind him and the words, “Una Pasion Que Compartimos,” or “A Passion We Share.” Javier J. Aldape, editor and vice president of product and audience development, told Journal-isms the editorial package ran in all three editions — in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Johnson’s body is to lie in state Sunday from 2 p.m. until 7 p.m. at Johnson Publishing Co. headquarters, 820 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago. The funeral service is scheduled for Monday at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, 5850 S. Woodlawn Ave., on the campus of the University of Chicago.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to the John H. Johnson School of Communications, Howard University, 525 Bryant Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20059, (202) 806-7690, or the United Negro College Fund, 8260 Willow Corp. Dr., Fairfax, Va., 22031-4511, (703) 205-3400, according to Karen E. Pride, writing Friday in the Chicago Defender.

Black Entertainment Television announced that “Citizen Johnson: A Man and His Empire,” a half-hour special on Johnson airing Monday at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific time, would feature Clinton, former secretary of state Colin L. Powell, the Rev. Al Sharpton, rapper Common and others.

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Harvey’s Daughter 7th Professor to Leave J-School

A seventh professor — Kelly Harvey, daughter of the university president — is leaving Hampton University’s Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communication, while the school has hired three other instructors.

Harvey’s timing — with just weeks to go before school opens — has left the university scrambling to find someone quickly to cover her classes in the fall.

Harvey is going to law school, Judy Clabes, president and CEO of the Scripps Howard Foundation, which has put $10 million into journalism programs at Hampton, told Journal-isms Saturday. While Clabes called Harvey “a very fine teacher” who “did help those young people,” some former members of the faculty have said they viewed her as a spy for her father, and that that made for an uncomfortable atmosphere.

When Christopher Campbell resigned as director of the school in July 2004, he told Journal-isms: “It was not that she wasn’t qualified to be there, but she’d never been in academia, and I think that he relied very much on her for his perceptions of things,” speaking of Hampton President William R. Harvey.

“You typically don’t have a junior faculty member with a line to the president. He was not getting the best sort of take on events in the school, and was making decisions based on that,” he said, mentioning personnel decisions concerning his school with which Campbell disagreed.

Kelly Harvey had been a reporter and weekend anchor at WTKR-TV in the Norfolk, Va., area, and joined the faculty at the same time as Jeffrey Prier, who was a meteorologist for WTKR. Prier, the last white faculty member at the school, apparently has also resigned. His name has disappeared from the faculty list on the school’s Web site. Dean Tony Brown said, “I don’t want to respond to that” when asked two weeks ago to confirm that Prier had resigned.

The university announced last week that it had hired as full-time faculty Kissette L. Bundy, “an Emmy and Creative Excellence in Business Advertising (CEBA) award-winning television producer” who “carries an extensive career in print and broadcast media”; Wayne J. Dawkins, a journalist with 27 years’ experience “who served as former managing editor for BlackAmericaWeb.com from September 2003 to January 2005 and continues to contribute to Black Issues Book Review”; and W. Chris Leonard, “an accomplished film and television producer.”

The five members of the journalism faculty who were already leaving were Jennifer Wood, Kim LeDuff, Curtis Holsopple, Ralph Nickerson and Clarence Cotton. The departures represent an unusually high number for any academic department, especially since the school’s director, Campbell, and another faculty member, Sean Lyons, left last year. The school had nine permanent faculty members, according to its Web site.

Clabes told Journal-isms that the turnover did not trouble her. “The people who left left for good reasons. That’s a challenge that a small institution will always have,” she said. “It will always be a cultivating ground for up-and-coming young professors.” She sent out an e-mail Monday titled “Hampton Help!” in which she said, “The person who was to teach the broadcast courses at Hampton is leaving to go to law school, without much notice. . . . Do you know of someone who would like to get into college teaching?” it asked. She said Saturday that the e-mail had netted “five or six good candidates,” but that it would not hurt to have more. Those with “Inquiries, suggestions — any advice at all” were advised in the e-mail to contact Rosalynne.Whitaker-Heck@hamptonu.edu

The university last month announced that Will Sutton, who recently resigned as deputy managing editor at the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., would be the Scripps Howard Visiting Professor in the 2005-06 academic school year, and that Jack E. White, former Time magazine columnist who had been a visiting professor, would assume the Scripps Howard Endowed Chair held by Earl Caldwell, who took another university position.

[Added Aug. 18: Kelly Harvey is going to the University of Pittsburgh law school, the Daily Press of Newport News, Va., reported Aug. 16.]

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NAJA Asks Media to Stop Using Mascots

“In light of the NCAA’s decision to bar ‘hostile’ or ‘abusive’ mascots and nicknames from NCAA tournaments and events, the Native American Journalists Association (NAJA) asks media outlets to immediately stop using offensive Indian mascots and nicknames in their sports coverage,” NAJA said on July 28.

“‘It’s no coincidence that all 18 colleges and universities identified Friday by the NCAA have Indian nicknames,’ said NAJA president Dan Lewerenz (Iowa Tribe of Kansas & Nebraska). ‘One cannot call a team the “Savages,” deck them out in Indian imagery, and say with a straight face that it’s an honor. One should not continue to “honor” a tribe by using the tribe’s name against the tribe’s wishes. The NCAA has recognized that — now it’s time for the industry to do so,'” the NAJA news release read.

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Book Review Lists Works by Black Journalists

In conjunction with the 30th anniversary of the National Association of Black Journalists, Black Issues Book Review has included a list of works by black journalists in its July-August issue.

It also discusses efforts by the Maynard Institute and by veteran Earl Caldwell to collect and preserve oral histories by black journalists.

“In 1996, Caldwell began producing The Caldwell Journals (www.maynardije.org), an online serial that captured the stories of black journalists, which led to the History Project,” reads the story by Angela Dodson and Daphne Muse.

“‘We intend to make DVDs and create an anthology from the collection as well,’ notes Caldwell, with the kind of pride and passion that comes with shepherding projects like this into reality. ‘We?re also in the process of designing a site that will include clips from the oral histories and many of the documents and photographs and other interesting things we?ve gotten from the journalists in the project.’

“Although the African American Museum in Oakland, California, houses 10 of the oral histories from California journalists, 20 of them are housed at Columbia University in New York City. Caldwell?s goal is to document a minimum of 60 stories. ‘Columbia has a whole highly regarded oral history department and our collection is there,’ Caldwell says. ‘It is also housed at the Oakland Museum and Library and at Hampton University. The plan is to put it in many other places around the country in the black community.'” [Added Aug. 16: All of the tapes are at the African American Museum in Oakland, not just the 10 that were recorded in the Bay Area.] ‘

The book compilation is the work of Wayne Dawkins, NABJ’s unofficial historian. It is “a selective list of some of the best books by and about the lives of African American journalists, past and present.”

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Short Takes

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