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Rising to Rosa Parks’ Challenge

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Covering Detroit Funeral Tested Emotions, Logistics

“There’s the journalist side of you that’s so happy that you were a part” of the reporting team, Oralandar Brand-Williams of the Detroit News said tonight, speaking of the seven-hour funeral service in Detroit for “the mother of the modern-day civil rights movement,” Rosa Parks.

“There is the side of the journalist who is African American. It just hit home,” she said. When Santita Jackson, daughter of Jesse Jackson, sang “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” “I really had to steady myself. Rosa Parks was a friend of the family. I couldn’t help but be touched.”

The service, which was held in a megachurch that seated 4,000 people, and drew hundreds more on the streets outside, posed emotional and some logistical challenges for the journalists covering one of the city’s biggest news events in years. The service drew 80 to 100 print journalists, including one from Zimbabwe, at least 50 still photographers, and 10 production trucks transmitting live broadcasts, according to Ceeon Quiett, communications director for Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who donated staff members to help pull off the event.

Greater Grace Temple, with its full sound studio, supplied its own feed for television and other broadcast media that wanted to carry the event live. C-SPAN aired it on C-SPAN3 and planned to repeat it on C-SPAN2 later tonight [Added Nov. 3: and again on Friday at 9 p.m. Eastern time]; MSNBC, CNN and Fox News Channel carried portions. In Detroit, the ABC, NBC and Fox affiliates — the three that carry news — broadcast the service live, as did the Univision affiliate and several Michigan stations outside Detroit, Quiett said. The church provided a makeshift press room that enabled print journalists to file online, Quiett added.

The local Fox affiliate, WJBK, started its live coverage at 5 a.m. and continued for four hours, then resumed at 11 a.m. for the entire funeral, Debra Dubicki, senior executive vice president, told Journal-isms. Montgomery, Ala., station WSFA-TV, in the city where Parks made history by refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man, also broadcast the entire service.

The Detroit Free Press carried a Weblog and streamed video coverage on its Web site. “When we saw the final list of speakers, we knew it would go beyond three hours,” James G. Hill, Free Press assistant metro editor, told Journal-isms. “The big challenge was just the length of the service. The service didn’t wrap up until 6:30 and that’s usually our deadline time for the first edition.”

To compensate, the Free Press, which deployed 20 photographers and reporters to the story, required reporters to take laptops with them and “write reports and take notes as things went along, so that when things wrapped up, we’d have something to work with,” Hill said.

By the time the service ended, it was dark outside, posing special problems for photographers, one of whom was in a helicopter. “It was dark but it was quite amazing to watch,” Hill continued. “People were literally stopping in the middle of Seven Mile Road to watch the processional” to the cemetery, “waving and singing ‘We Shall Overcome’ and ‘Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.'”

The Free Press was planning an eight-page special section for Thursday, Editor Caesar Andrews told Journal-isms.

Unlike the shorter service Monday in Washington, where media mogul Oprah Winfrey and Gwen Ifill of the Public Broadcasting Service were part of the program, media personalities were absent from the Detroit stage. But there was a constant stream of public officials, African American leaders, Big Three automobile executives, church figures, singers and young people associated with Parks’ favorite causes, a collection not often seen together.

They urged audience members to perform deeds inspired by Parks in their own lives — “our own Rosa Parks moments,” as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said.

Several urged Congress to renew the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which they said would be in jeopardy when it comes up for review in 2007. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the first Latino mayor of that city, declared himself a product of affirmative action, a concept others said was endangered. The Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said having 50 million people without health insurance was a “weapon of mass destruction,” along with drug addiction and failure to raise the minimum wage.

The Rev. Al Sharpton urged Detroiters to head to the polls next week in tribute, and said he wanted everyone to know that “black women are not ho’s,” denouncing music companies for “selling misogyny to a child. Rosa Parks wasn’t break dancing, she wasn’t talking about ‘pimp me out,’ she made the world respect her people,” Sharpton said. Adding that rappers had told them they were only holding up a mirror to “reflect what we see,” Sharpton said he uses a mirror “to correct what you see.”

Jackson called for a life-size statue of Parks in the Capitol, and called the matriarch the true parent of American democracy, the version that the United States says it is trying to export to Afghanistan and Iraq. “Who wants a Thomas Jefferson democracy — where only white men can vote?” Jackson asked.

Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam said “we need to fight religious hypocrisy in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. . . . When slaughter is going on in the name of holy men, we need to become defiant against it.”

Former president Bill Clinton, who grew up in Arkansas, recalled the Nina Simone song “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” and noted that the end of segregation freed whites as well. He said that when blacks no longer had to sit in the back of the bus, he and two of his white teenage friends “decided we didn’t have to sit in the front anymore.”

There were the songs, sung by Aretha Franklin, gospel singer Brenda Jackson, and the church choir, among others. “There were seven very soul-stirring spirituals at the beginning,” Brand-Williams remembered. “You could feel the emotion in that church, both journalists who were African American and not African American. They were moved. Stomping their feet, bobbing their heads. I’m so happy that the Detroit News was mindful of her place as an African American” hero, Brand-Williams said, and recognized “that reporters who were African American should be part of that coverage.”

What impressed Andrews, who arrived in Detroit from the Gannett News Service in Washington only in September, were the “regular people. It’s just been an amazing outpouring of care and respect and admiration,” Andrews said. “What has been impressive up close is the outpouring from regular people. From the time the body arrived in Detroit, the streets were lined with people. It was impressive, but also fitting and in tune with her persona.”

In Montgomery, Front-Page News for 9th Straight Day

“The Parks story has been our page 1A centerpiece story every day since Tuesday, Oct. 25,” Executive Editor Wanda Lloyd told Journal-isms tonight. “We did live video streaming of the entire service today.

“We sent three people to Detroit to cover the funeral, a reporter, photographer and our online director, who went as a videographer.

“In Thursday’s paper we will have a main overview story, a few vignettes and an interview with Claudette Colvin. A busload of Montgomery folks went to Detroit for the funeral.

“Colvin was one of the two women who was arrested on a Montgomery bus for refusing to move before Rosa Parks did the same thing on Dec. 1, 1955. Colvin was 15 years old at the time and it is believed she wasn’t chosen as the one around which to rally a boycott, probably because of her age. She has held some bitterness in recent years and hasn’t been very open with the media. She lives in New York. We finally got a phone interview with her for our upcoming bus boycott section so this was an opportunity to reinterview her so we can get her on video, as we have dozens of others for our new site, montgomeryboycott.com.

“I expect Thursday’s paper will be our last Parks centerpiece story before we begin coverage of the boycott anniversary in a month.”

Acel Moore Retiring, but Continuing His Column

Acel Moore, 43-year veteran of the Philadelphia Inquirer, is retiring from the paper, Editor Amanda Bennett announced to the staff today, but will continue to write his opinion-page column.

“Most recently, Acel was associate editor and director of recruiting, columnist and member of the Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“As a member of our community, he has been both a voice for the powerless, and a sounding board for the powerful. As a journalist, he has been a role model. An icon in our industry, he has won just about every journalistic honor; a trusted colleague, he has been a valued adviser to every editor for four decades. This paper was a richer place for his presence,” Bennett said in her note.

“The good news is that while Acel is retiring, he isn’t leaving us altogether. He has agreed to continue writing his column from time to time, and also to continue to act as adviser . . . for at least the next two years. In addition, during that time, he will remain on our masthead, with the title ‘Associate Editor, Emeritus.’ I am grateful that Acel has chosen to continue his association with us.”

Moore told Journal-isms Monday night that he would keep his office at the Inquirer.

Moore, who turned 65 on Oct. 5, underwent surgery a year ago after being diagnosed with a compressed, herniated disc that was pressing against his spinal cord.

“It was about ready to make me paralyzed,” he said then. Today, he said, his strength is returning, but he has lost some of his stamina.

In September, the Inquirer announced plans to cut its editorial staff by 15 percent from 500 to 425, while the Philadelphia Daily News will cut its editorial staff 19 percent, from 130 to 105.

“In his retirement,” Moore “plans to continue to be active in the community, but also to indulge in a secret passion — oil painting,” Bennett said.

Lena Williams Retires from New York Times

Lena Williams, a reporter for the last 30 years at the New York Times and a Newspaper Guild representative at the paper for nearly a decade, retired from the paper on Friday.

[Added Nov. 3: “I’m heading back to Washington, D.C. I bought a house there,” she told Journal-isms. “I’m going to chill out for at least a year and hope to teach journalism at my alma mater, Howard University.”]

“I have spent the past eight years doing two jobs: sports reporting and representing the union as unit chairwoman,” she wrote in an in-house newsletter, Ahead of the Times. “I was too busy — meeting deadlines, finding another story fit to print, interpreting another wordy provision in the Guild contract — to take time and smell the Starbucks, let alone reflect on a life well spent at The Times.”

In that piece, Williams recalled how she started at the paper.

“I began here on March 19, 1974, as a news clerk in Sports. In addition to stripping the wires — cast-iron teletype machines that spewed sports news in reams of carbon copies — I wrote a weekly column called Women in Sports.

“I wasn’t sure back then whether The Times was the place for me, a 24-year-old black power militant who didn’t trust ‘The Man’ or ‘The System.’ I was a nonconformist and wanted to use my journalism degree to give a voice to the voiceless, to offer a perspective on black life to those who had none, and to write my mind without fear, favor or heavy editing. The Times was an American institution populated by middle-aged white men who used coffee cups as ashtrays, swore like sailors, kept brandy in their lower desk drawers, shared war stories over Scotch at the bar across the street, seldom buried their ledes and thought it sacrilegious to let prose get in the way of facts.

“Into this motley crew came a new breed of female reporters, opinionated 60’s radicals like me, who wanted to blaze new trails and refused to allow stereotypes, presumptions and assumptions to stand in their way. Timeswomen like my mentor Charlayne Hunter, and others like Nan Robertson, Joan Cook, Barbara Campbell, Nancy Hicks, Marcia Chambers, Edith Evans Asbury and Mary Breasted — the notorious “Girls in the Balcony” — showed me that The Times was a place where a woman could speak her mind, stand on principle and effect change. I quickly learned that The Times was a place that valued independent thinking, gumption and go-getters. I also learned that I needed a rabbi, godfather or fairy godmother — someone who had the ears of those in power and could help aspirants like me get noticed.

“Opportunity knocked in August 1976 when Jim Tuite, the sports editor, told me I was one of four newsroom clerks promoted to reporter trainee,” she continued, and her Times career was on its way.

Short Takes

Talia Buford, editor of Hampton University’s Hampton Script when it was seized in 2003 by the university administration, started at the Providence Journal Monday as a two-year intern. She won the National Association of Black Journalists’ inaugural Student Journalist of the Year award.

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