Maynard Institute archives

Apology for a Lynching

by richard01033

Originally published in May 2006

 

Paper Regrets Role of Predecessor in 1916 Atrocity

Today at 11 a.m. Texas time, a small interracial organization met on the steps of the Waco, Texas, courthouse to read a resolution condemning and apologizing for the lynching of a 17-year-old African American, Jesse Washington — a lynching “so astonishingly brutal that the incident became known nationally as the ‘Waco Horror,'” in the words of Wade Goodwyn in a National Public Radio story on Saturday.

“His fingers were amputated for souvenirs and his fingernails taken for keepsakes. Finally all that was left was a charred torso, but Washingtonâ??s body parts were put in a bag so they could be dragged through downtown,” the story recalled.

On Sunday [May 14, 2006], the Waco Tribune-Herald apologized for the role that journalists played in the tragedy. The reading of the resolution was timed to take place 90 years from the exact moment Washington was seized in the courtroom.

“The editorial board of the Tribune-Herald wants to denounce what happened,” the newspaper wrote Sunday.

“We recognize that such violence is part of this city’s legacy. We are sorry any time the rule of passion rises above the rule of law. We regret the role that journalists of that era may have played in either inciting passions or failing to deplore the mob violence.

“We are descendants of a journalism community that failed to urge calm or call on citizens to respect the legitimate justice system.”

The white journalism community was distinct from the black one.

“The Waco Horror broke new ground in lynch journalism,” David Levering Lewis wrote in his 1993 biography “W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race,” about the legendary scholar and activist who edited the NAACP’s magazine the Crisis. The publication reported on the Washington lynching in its June and July 1916 issues. NAACP board members “were shocked by the choice of cover for the June issue — the ghastly, burnt-cork husk of Jesse Washington suspended by chain from a tree. Du Bois poured into the special July supplement the bloodstained detail of an undercover investigation,” Lewis wrote.

“The Crisis carried lengthy, verbatim statements by lynching-party participants, and Du Bois editorialized with his usual withering irony.” In a previous issue, Du Bois had listed the 2,732 lynchings of African Americans between 1885 and 1914 and said, “all this goes to show how peculiarly fitted the United States is for moral leadership of the world.”

Lewis explained that Washington “was a mentally impaired field hand who, after raping and killing his white employer’s wife in the kitchen, returned to hoe cotton placidly beside the husband, son, and daughter. Jailed for safekeeping in Dallas and then tried in Waco, he was set upon and dragged from the courthouse by most of the white men, women, and children of the town. Hitched to a car and dragged till the chain broke, Jesse Washington’s ears were severed, his body doused with kerosene, pieces carved from it, and in final Gothic glee, the shouting, cavorting townspeople hoisted him to a tree on the courthouse lawn and finished incinerating him. Woodrow Wilson was still to redeem his promise to denounce lynching.”

“While some newspapers urged residents to let the law take its course, the Waco Morning News described the mob in heroic terms,” J.B. Smith wrote last year in the Waco Tribune-Herald.

“‘Resembling the forefathers who dared anything for their country’s sake, the determined band of farmers and neighbors last night declared to the sheriff that they didn’t want trouble, but that their blood would not stand for a fiendish brute to trample the chastity and sacredness of life and their women folk,’ the newspaper stated,” Smith reported.

“‘Yesterday’s exciting occurrence is a closed incident,’ stated the Waco Times-Herald (a predecessor of this newspaper) on the day after the lynching.”

The incident is the subject of two recent books: “The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP,” by Patricia Bernstein (Texas A&M Press) and “The Making of a Lynching Culture: Violence and Vigilantism in Central Texas 1836-1916,” by William Carrigan (University of Illinois Press).

Editor Carlos Sanchez said the editorial evolved over two to three weeks after many community leaders said privately they favored an apology by government officials but were unwilling to say so publicly. An informal poll on the paper’s Web site found 80 percent opposed, and “if there’s any sense that racism doesn’t exist, you need to go to our Web site” and read the message boards, Sanchez told Journal-isms today.

Three versions of the editorial were written, with the one that took the middle ground published. “We thought as a newspaper, we’re always telling people what to do — we needed to do it ourselves,” he said.

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Tony Brown, Jack White Exchange Charges

Dean Tony Brown of the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communications at Hampton University considers the departure from the school of former Time magazine journalist Jack E. White “puzzling,” according to an unpublished letter to the editor quoted by the Associated Press in a story Friday.

“Why, a reasonable person would ask, did it take White, a self-described seasoned journalist, two-and-a-half years at Hampton University to suddenly become outraged at what he now describes as a conspicuous and blatant suppression of free speech?” Brown wrote in the letter to the Daily Press of Newport News, Va.

White today called Brown’s words those of a “paranoid conspiracy monger.”

As reported last Monday, White told Journal-isms he was leaving the Scripps Howard Endowed Chair at Hampton after events that followed a February visit by a site team from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.

While other schools openly discussed their accreditation site visits, Hampton tried to keep its results secret. White said he thought the secrecy a mistake, and Brown implied that faculty members who were present the previous year had shared confidential information with Journal-isms, White said. Since White was one of the few holdover faculty members, he said he asked for a retraction of the statement and an apology, but Brown did not reply. An accreditation team member told university President William R. Harvey he had discussed the visit with a reporter. The team faulted the school on two of nine accreditation standards, recommending provisional accreditation.

Brown would not comment to Journal-isms last Monday or later to a Daily Press reporter, whose story appeared Friday morning.

But Brown said Friday evening, according to the AP, which received a copy of the letter to the editor, “I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I thought a program, especially a journalism program, was guilty of routinely violating the First Amendment, I would not be a part of it. Neither would I work at a university that routinely suppressed freedom of speech.”

White told Journal-isms today, “This is exactly what I would have expected from a paranoid conspiracy monger like Brown. Just read his books. In one, he argues that AIDS is not a real disease. In another he claims that the world is run by a cabal of Satanic Freemasons known as the Illuminati. He’s so far out on the lunatic fringe that not even Lyndon LaRouche could take him seriously.”

Ernie Gates, editor of the Daily Press, said Brown’s letter was “a good deal longer” than the paragraphs AP quoted. “My sense is he ought to have spoken to our reporter. We want to get his point of view to the public, and the letter is in the process of being edited. Our reporter tried to get him to talk about Jack White, which he didn’t do” for the news story, Gates told Journal-isms today.

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Knight Ridder Execs to Receive $57 Million

“When Knight Ridder is sold to McClatchy this summer, its top corporate executives will leave the San Jose newspaper company with nearly $57 million in incentive payments, according to a government filing made Wednesday,” Pete Carey reported Thursday in the San Jose (Calif.) Mercury News.

“About $27 million will be paid to the top five Knight Ridder executives with the balance going to ‘other executive officers.’ “

“The payments were disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing by McClatchy, which is buying Knight Ridder for $4.5 billion and assuming $2 billion in Knight Ridder debt.

“A Knight Ridder shareholders’ meeting is scheduled for June 26 to vote on the acquisition by McClatchy. Assuming the sale is approved, Knight Ridder Chairman and Chief Executive Tony Ridder will receive $9.4 million in incentive pay, about $2 million higher than previously disclosed.

“Senior vice presidents Steven Rossi, Hilary Schneider, Art Brisbane and Mary Jean Connors will each get between $4.3 million and $4.5 million.

“The other officers receiving incentive pay were not named. There are 14 other executive officers at the vice president level.”

Those vice presidents include Larry Olmstead, vice president/staff development and diversity. Olmstead told Journal-isms, “My policy is to refrain from commenting on the salary and compensation of individual Knight Ridder employees, including my own.”

Bryan Monroe, president of the National Association of Black Journalists, is assistant vice president/news. Returning from a trip to Tanzania today, he told Journal-isms, “I, too, think it is a good idea not to be discussing folks’ pay and compensation. It’s their business.”

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Immigration Called More Complex Than Believed

As President Bush prepares to address the nation on immigration tonight, reportedly calling for thousands of National Guard troops to be deployed along the Mexico border, at least one Mexican-American academic says curbing immigration into the country will require reexamining a variety of factors, including Bush’s guest-worker proposals and NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“A guest-worker program that is anything like the bracero program â?? even with better protections â?? is not a solution to the structural problem,” he says. “It will actually create even greater immigration,” David Montejano, chairman of the University of California-Berkeley’s Center for Latino Policy Research, said last week in a column by Carlos Guerra of the San Antonio Express-News.

The first bracero program began in 1917 with an agreement between the U.S. Department of Labor and the Mexican government that relaxed border entry standards. It was discontinued when the Dust Bowl created desperate homegrown workers looking for work in the 1930s, then brought back in 1942 during World War II and continued into 1964.

“At some point, the protests ought to focus on Mexico, too, because two governments are involved in this situation, not just one,” Montejano said in the column. “Nobody wants to talk about how NAFTA has contributed to this national dislocation of mexicanos, but that is what it is: A dislocation by a policy that was signed by the elites of both countries to benefit the elites of both countries.”

“Mexico’s mass out-migration, and soon, Central America’s, is from their collapsed agricultural sectors, and it will continue because those countries cannot compete with the United States’ agricultural sector, price-wise,” Guerra’s column continued.

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Cops Credit Hoy Series For Cracking 2004 Murder

Chicago police credited a bi-weekly feature in the Spanish-language daily Hoy for the arrest of two men last week in a murder that had gone unsolved for nearly two years,” Mark Fitzgerald reported today in Editor & Publisher.

“Jorge Gómez and Misael Juárez, both age 19, were arrested for the September 2004 murder of Iván Sánchez as he sat in his parked car with his girlfriend. Police allege the two mistook Sánchez for a member of a rival gang.

“Hoy featured the murder in March as part of the ‘Crímenes sin resolver’ (‘Unsolved crimes’) biweekly joint project between the Chicago edition of the Tribune Co. newspaper and Telemundo Chicago, a local Spanish-language television channel. The Chicago Police Department suggests a cold case for the series each month.”

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Media Perception of Latinos: “We’re All the Same”

Veronica Villafane, president of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, was asked, “What do you think is the most inaccurate perception of Latinos in the media?”

“That we’re all the same,” she told Georgia Pabst of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week. “Overall, the perception of Latinos is that they’re all undocumented immigrants from Mexico, and that’s not the case. There are hard-working professionals, company owners, politicians and many who have been here for generations. We have diversity within our diversity. We come from different countries, different social and economic levels. We don’t all think the same way or share the same culture. What unites most of us is the Spanish language, although a lot don’t speak Spanish. We share a cultural identity, but don’t share everything. That’s a wrong assumption.”

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Racial Overtones in Barry Bonds Quest Debated

Does Barry Bonds’ quest to surpass Babe Ruth’s home-run tally have racial overtones? Of course, but the devil is in the details. Amid the commentary, the Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon examines speculation that Ruth might himself have been black. In the home-run quest, meanwhile, Bonds didn’t do much in the Giants’ 6-3 loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers on Sunday, even when the ball flew in his direction on the game’s decisive play, Dylan Hernandez of the San Jose Mercury News reported.

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White Writer Differs With Fulwood on “Spearchucker”

Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Sam Fulwood, referring to former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote Thursday that “Powell flamed out after his ego no longer allowed him to be an unquestioning spearchucker in Mr. Bush’s war.”

“Whew. That word sure stopped my spoonful of oatmeal in midair while I was reading the column Thursday morning, and I know I had a lot of company,” reader representative Ted Diadiun wrote on Sunday.

Fulwood, a black journalist, “doesn’t hear the word as harshly as I do, and as some of you do, but he says he did use it to get our attention.

“Many people do view that word as hurtful, and I would contend that the line gets drawn long before you start calling somebody a spearchucker in the newspaper. In the time and place where I grew up, the word was just below the ‘N’ word in offensiveness, synonymous with several other terms that racists used for black people. That kind of language in the wrong crowd could leave you with a bad pain where your front teeth used to be.

“Fulwood didn’t see it that way, and in his defense, I wonder if generational and regional issues aren’t at play in how the word hits one’s ears. He and several others around the newsroom who are younger and from a different part of the country than I, say that they first heard the term in the original ‘M”A”S”H’ movie, which had a black character named Spearchucker Jones, and were not offended by it.”

However, today Diadiun, 59, who grew up in Hackettstown, N.J., said he is no longer sure the difference is generational. He said he received about 80 calls and e-mails today and there was no generational split.

Fulwood, 49, whose hometown is Charlotte, N.C., began his column by saying that columnist George Will’s statement that Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell “appeals to blacks by being black” was wishful thinking and ignorant. Blackwell is a Republican candidate for governor. “It’s the wishful thinking that accompanied previous Republican darlings in dark skins,” Fulwood said.

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Globally, Women Less Than 1% of Media Execs

“A detailed survey presented to the International Federation of Journalists 24th World Congress in Seoul, South Korea recently reveals that despite the fact women comprise at least 38 per cent of the workforce in journalism, less than one per cent of media executive posts are held by women. The IFJ survey is the most comprehensive of its kind, with answers received from unions in 40 countries,” according to Kamala Sarup, a Nepali writer and an editor of peacejournalism.com.

“The list of obstacles is long and it is the same, whether drawn up by women journalists in Asia, the Pacific, Latin America, Africa or Europe,” Sarup wrote in a piece published Wednesday in the Los Angeles Chronicle.

“Stereotypes, cultural attitudes where women are expected to be subordinate and subservient, negative attitudes towards women journalists, employment conditions, lack of equal pay, lack of access to further training, lack of fair promotion procedures, lack of access to decision-making positions.”

MESSAGE BOARDS: Feel free to post a comment on this subject and view those from others.

Short Takes

  • One corner of the profession is still enjoying a boom: journalism schools, Katharine Q. Seelye reported today in the New York Times. “Demand for seats in the nation’s journalism schools and programs remains robust, and those schools and programs are expanding. This month, they will churn out more graduates than ever into a job market that is perhaps more welcoming to entry-level multimedia-taskers than it is to veterans who began their careers hunting and pecking on Olivetti typewriters.”
  • The office of Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, has filed a complaint with the Senate Radio/TV Gallery over what it says was an “ambush” interview by CNN’s Joe Johns for a story on “Anderson Cooper 360″ about “Alaskan Pork” and taxpayers’ money going to a “not-so-needy” Alaska, John Eggerton reported Thursday in Broadcasting & Cable. Stevens’ press secretary said she believed the interview was taped with a small camera that they were not even aware of until they saw the interview, but CNN spokeswoman Edie Emery said Stevens “clearly knew he was being interviewed for TV.”
  • “Hard work is the key to a successful life and better world,” was the message NBC’s Al Roker gave Shaw University graduates Saturday in Raleigh, N.C., Janell Ross reported in the Raleigh News & Observer Sunday. “Roker, who supports traditional affirmative action programs, encouraged students to reclaim the term ‘affirmative action.’ Roker said it should refer not just to diversity programs and recruiting efforts, but also to the life-affirming, community-enriching choices that graduates make in their lives every day,” Ross wrote.
  • Several hundred journalists, politicians, government officials and friends attended a funeral service Sunday for A.M. Rosenthal, its former top editor who died Wednesday at age 84, the New York Times reported.
  • “The Courier-Post will recognize the diversity advancement work of one person or group from Burlington, Camden and Gloucester counties each month starting in May in a program called Champions of Diversity. The newspaper also will select one of those honorees for its annual Champion of Diversity award,” the Courier Post of Camden/Cherry Hill, N.J., told readers on Thursday.
  • Students of a Native American studies course at the University of New Mexico have produced the first issue of a 12-page newspaper geared toward the American Indian community at the university, Christopher Sanchez reported in the Daily Lobo, the student newspaper.
  • “In 1980, a Chicago television newcomer named Linda Yu charmed and captivated viewers with a WMAQ-Channel 5 documentary on returning to her birthplace in China,” Robert Feder wrote Friday in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Now, a quarter-century later, Yu is taking viewers back there again,” with reports airing all week, culminating in a half-hour special, “Chicago’s Road to China,” at 6:30 p.m. May 20 on Channel 7, Feder wrote.
  • “It has been four weeks since WCBS/Ch.2 shook up its anchor teams and some of those displaced by the changes are still unsettled,” Richard Huff reported Friday in the New York Daily News. “Lynda Lopez, who had been weekend morning anchor with Reid Lamberty, hasn’t been behind the desk since. Last weekend, Kirstin Cole was there. Mario Bosquez and Jim Ryan have also been off since being deposed as weekday morning anchors.”
  • “When Rowan University alumnus Trymaine Lee joined the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune newspaper a year ago, he never imagined that he would report on a natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina’s magnitude,” Anna Nguyen wrote Wednesday in Lee’s hometown Courier-Post of Camden/Cherry Hill, N.J. “Lee, 27, who grew up in Chesilhurst, is part of the Times-Picayune reporting team that has won two Pulitzer prizes — one for breaking news and the other for public service — for its coverage during the hurricane. He has also been named Emerging Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists.”
  • Columnist Dwight Lewis approves of the addition of early black country music artist DeFord Bailey to the Country Music Hall of Fame, Lewis wrote Thursday. “Now, the only thing left is for the city of Nashville to rename 12th Avenue South” in his honor, he said.
  • Baltimore Sun columnist Gregory Kane, a consistent critic of the NAACP, wrote Wednesday, “Baltimore leaders, civic and political, are tripping over one another in the rush to pucker up and kiss the feet of NAACP board chairman Julian Bond in an attempt to keep the civil rights organization’s national headquarters in Baltimore. A tip of the hat and my hearty gratitude to the politician or civic leader who will tell Bond, ‘Well, get to steppin’, partner.'” Bond is looking to move the organization to Washington, Hamil R. Harris and Darryl Fears wrote in the Washington Post on May 6.
  • The Mexican media company Grupo Televisa said on Friday that it planned to bid for the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision along with five private investment firms, including one owned by the chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates,” Elisabeth Malkin reported Saturday in the New York Times.
  • Oprah Winfrey went on New York’s WWPR-FM, known as Power 105, to deny charges that she doesn’t like hip-hop. “I listen to some Hip-Hop. I’ve been accused of not liking Hip-Hop and that’s just not true,” she said,” according to allhiphop.com. “I got a little 50 [Cent] in my iPod. I really do. I like ‘In Da Club.’ Have you heard the beat to ‘In Da Club’? Love that, love Jay-Z, love Kanye, love Mary J. Mary J. is one of my friends.” Meanwhile, Ann Oldenburg reported Thursday in USA Today that Winfrey “has risen to a new level of guru.. . . a spiritual leader for the new millennium, a moral voice of authority for the nation.”
  • The New York Times announced in Sunday’s Book Review that Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” has been named the best work of fiction in the last 25 years. The Book Review asked 100 prominent writers to nominate one book published since 1980.

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