Diverse Group Lauds Strength of NABJ’s Morgan
Remembrances of Tom Morgan at the memorial service
An extraordinary assemblage— black journalists and white New York Times colleagues, gay friends and straight family members, supporters of a relationship that was also interracial — came together to honor Thomas Morgan III in New York on Saturday. Morgan had been the first gay president of the National Association of Black Journalists, and now he was the first to have lived with AIDS and died from its ravages.
Morgan, 56, died on Christmas Eve during a trip with his partner of 23 years, Thomas Ciano, to the Southhampton, Mass., home of Ciano’s sister, Claudia Ciano-Boyce. As she and others pointed out during a sunlit memorial service in the brand new New York Times building in midtown Manhattan, Morgan’s existence had come to be defined by living with HIV and AIDS, as he had since 1987.
How Morgan met that challenge inspired those who knew him, speakers said as they honored him as an example of strength and leadership who preached the virtues of maximizing every moment.
Marcus Mabry, a co-founder of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force of NABJ, recalled seeing Morgan in the early 1990s.
“Tom had grown perilously close to death. When I saw him at an NABJ convention this time, he was skin and bones.
“But it was in those hours, his body frail and his eyes glassy, that I was most proud of him. It was in those heart-shattering days that Tom’s courage and determination really came out. Not in the majesty of the office he had held, or the marquee of the paper he wrote for. It was in the resolute dignity, even in the midst of his own mortality, that I saw what a truly beautiful man looks like.”
Ron Martin, who served with Morgan on the board of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, said, “Tom’s great impact at GMHC was of course the example he set as a man living openly with HIV/AIDS — and living productively and with dignity. This was important because in the beginning, many people with HIV had simply stopped living once they were diagnosed. There are countless stories of people disappearing from their communities and going elsewhere simply to die. Stories of people in isolation who feared to appear in public because of the visibility of their illness.
“With steadfast love and support from Tom Ciano, Tom Morgan was a remarkable example of courage, facing his fate fearlessly, living in the moment, and making certain each day counted. Inspirational is not a word I use lightly, but I don’t hesitate to use it in describing Tom.”
Those who gave tribute spoke from a red lectern in a ground-level auditorium in the 52-story steel-and-glass skyscraper, where a courtyard appointed with silver birch trees provided a scenic backdrop, complemented in the distance by Eighth Avenue traffic, visible through rows of glass walls.
The audience of about 200 included a number of black journalists, but not an overwhelming one. Some, such as Sidmel Estes-Sumpter and Jackie Jones, sent loving but humorous remembrances that were flashed on a screen. Only one past NABJ president — Merv Aubespin, who spoke, was present. The current president, Barbara Ciara, was conducting an NABJ board meeting in Texas and said she asked Aubespin to represent the organization.
Those who did come to the 75-minute service were provided a window into the personal lives of gay men such as Morgan, an experience that no doubt would have made many who stayed away a little uncomfortable. Morgan and Ciano had been included in “A Summer in the Pines,” a documentary about Fire Island, where they maintained a summer home, for example. In a clip from the film, which was shown at a French film festival and on French television, the two embrace and declare their love for each other.
The absentees might also have been surprised to learn that Morgan, who was subject to a whispering campaign among some NABJ activists when he sought the group’s presidency in 1989, was not only gay at that time, but HIV-positive.
“When Tom was diagnosed with AIDS in 1987,” Ciano told the group, “he decided he still had unrealized goals, so he ran for NABJ president and applied for the Nieman Fellowship . . . And he ended up being selected for them both and pursued them — concurrently. He had a new urgency to live.”
Morgan made neither his sexual orientation nor his HIV status an issue while doing his NABJ work, but once he left NABJ office, and retired from the Times in 1995, staying alive became a full-time endeavor. Most recently, he had been to the emergency room 25 times in three years, Ciano-Boyce said, and was taking 50 pills a day. Some were prescribed to counteract the negative effects of others. In an interview for a CBS News story in 2001, he said, “I’m at a point now where I am recycling drugs that I’ve already taken. . . . And I have days where I want to take my arms and sweep all the bottles off of my bureau.”
But Morgan made time to serve as a role model for others coping with the disease, to give advice on everything from which wardrobe items to keep and which to throw away, as neighbor David Nimmons said, to how to cope with a divorce and remarriage, as Aubespin recalled. Morgan helped counsel Aubespin’s niece when she found out she was HIV-positive, “and was there when we buried her a few years later.”
Journalists Robin Stone and Gerald M. Boyd, the late Times managing editor, a couple he knew from the newspaper, had included “Thomas” in the name of their son, Zachary, partly after Morgan. Sheila Stainback, who served with Morgan on the NABJ board, told how she sought him out after deciding to adopt a son, and how “Tom, who was not really known for his child-friendly nurturing attitude, took to his role as a positive male role model for Charles —attending his baptism, buying him his first scooter, and indulging him at his and Tom’s Fire Island home.”
Katti Gray, a Newsday features columnist and full-time freelancer who had written Morgan’s biography on the NABJ Web site, contributed two songs at the service. One was titled, “This Too Shall Pass.”
At the reception afterward, a gay colleague wondered in conversation about creating a leadership institute for gay men in Morgan’s name.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the New York Times Co. chairman who had become friends with Morgan, attempted humor as a foil for the emotions that had been unleashed.
“It was touching. It brought tears to my eyes,” Sulzberger told Journal-isms. “And you know what? He almost deserved it— he said with a smile.“
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Candidates Get Questions from Black Perspective
The Democratic candidates debate on CNN in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Monday night, co-sponsored on the Martin Luther King holiday by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, was notable for the fireworks between Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. But the presence of two journalists of color on the panel also produced different kinds of questions than were asked at previous debates.
For example, Suzanne Malveaux said, “I’ve spoken with a lot of African American voters in South Carolina this week, and a lot of them say that electing a black president, that this would change the way whites see African Americans and the way African Americans see themselves.
“Do you think that this is a valid consideration for voters in determining who’s president?”
Former senator John Edwards, the third candidate on stage, said he would not presume to tell black voters what criteria to use.
Malveaux also raised the issue of HIV/AIDS in the black community. “It was last June, Senator Clinton. It was the PBS forum at Howard University where you said if HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death among white women ages 25 to 34, there would be a national outcry,” she said. “Obviously, you’re calling attention to the . . . specific need for African American women and their health concerns.
“Why is it that African American women would be better off in your health care program?”
In a section on the economy, Joe Johns noted, “In 2006, a study from the Center for Responsible Lending found that African Americans are something like 30 percent more likely to be sold a subprime loan than white borrowers with similar credit histories and income.
“The South Carolina NAACP said last month that the American dream for too many Americans, too many African Americans,is a national nightmare. The national NAACP has even filed a class-action lawsuit against 12 nationwide lenders.
“So the bottom-line question really is: Do you believe that lenders have specifically targeted African Americans? Is this subprime mess really also an issue of race?”
One of the biggest laughs— and lengthiest responses from the candidates— came after Johns said to Obama:
“The Nobel Prize-winning African American author, Toni Morrison, famously observed about Bill Clinton, ‘This is our first black president, blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.’
“Do you think Bill Clinton was our first black president?”
Obama replied: “Well, I think Bill Clinton did have an enormous affinity with the African American community, and still does. And I think that’s well earned.
“Like John, one of the things that I’m always inspired by —no, I’m — this I’m serious about. I’m always inspired by young men and women who grew up in the South when segregation was still taking place, when, you know, the transformations that are still incomplete but at least had begun had not yet begun. And to see that transformation in their own lives, I think that is powerful, and it is hopeful, because what it indicates is that people can change.
“And each successive generation can, you know, create a different vision of how . . . we have to treat each other. And I think Bill Clinton embodies that. I think he deserves credit for that.
“Now, I haven’t . . .”
(APPLAUSE)
OBAMA: “I have to say that, you know, I would have to, you know, investigate more of Bill’s dancing abilities.”
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: “You know, and some of this other stuff before I accurately judge whether he was in fact a brother. But . . .”
(APPLAUSE)
Moderator Wolf Blitzer said, “Let’s let Senator Clinton weigh in on that.”
CLINTON: “Well, I’m sure that can be arranged.”
Meanwhile, many columnists of color tied in their commentary on the King holiday with recent political events:
David Aldridge, Philadelphia Inquirer: On the NBA: Campaign ’08, NBA style
Tony Allen-Mills, the Times of London: Women turn on ‘traitor’ Oprah Winfrey for backing Barack Obama
Sylvester Brown Jr., St. Louis Post-Dispatch: King’s ‘dream’ is stuff of politics, still call to arms
Cary Clack, San Antonio Express-News: Now, when folks need a boost, it’s good to be King
Stanley Crouch, New York Daily News: It will take a lot more than Farrakhan to smear Obama
Eric Deggans blog, St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times: Media Question of the Day: What Would Martin Luther King Jr. Think?
George Diaz, Orlando Sentinel: Why fear powerful woman, hold to higher standard?
Sam Fulwood III, Cleveland Plain Dealer: Race defines how many view politics, experts say
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: Hillary and the race card
Derrick Z. Jackson, Boston Globe: Edwards’s populist roll of the dice
Eugene Kane, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Politicians march with King’s legacy
Dwight Lewis, Nashville Tennessean: Belafonte tells of King family snub, Obama’s appeal
Rhonda Chriss Lokeman, Kansas City Star: ‘Southern-Fried Huck-bee’
Errol Louis, New York Daily News: Democrats go on offensive in ugly clash
Mary Mitchell, Chicago Sun-Times: Obama’s message of unity
Ruben Navarrette, San Diego Union-Tribune: Being defined by food
Les Payne, Newsday: Rev. King’s legacy demands better
David Person, Huntsville (Ala.) Times: Obama already has made a difference
James Ragland, Dallas Morning News: Modern racism has changed, but it’s still there
Rose Russell, Toledo Blade: Democratic choices not hard, but voters must choose carefully
Gregory Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times: King would be proud
Bob Ray Sanders, Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Black like thee?
Otis L. Sanford, Memphis Commercial Appeal: Unlikely, and fortunate, alliance
Elmer Smith, Philadelphia Daily News: We’re too careful with King’s legacy
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Media Gaffes, Protests Along Racial Fault Line
“Within minutes of posting a story on CNN’s homepage called ‘Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in South Carolina,’ readers reacted quickly and angrily,” CNN reported on its Web site.
“Readers want media to focus more on the candidates and how they feel about the issues not their gender or race.
“Many took umbrage at the story’s suggestion that black women voters face ‘a unique, and most unexpected dilemma’ about voting their race or their gender.”
“An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically: ‘Duh, I’m a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I’m illiterate I’ll pull down the lever for someone. Hm . . . Well, he black so I may vote for him . . . oh wait she a woman I may vote for her . . . What Ise gon’ do? Oh lordy!'”
CNN’s wasn’t the only story that called into question media coverage of the racial and gender dynamics of the campaign.
PBS ombudsman Michael Getler criticized “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” for a Jan. 14 program on racial tensions among the campaigns for Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Each of that show’s guests, Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and the Rev. Joseph Lowery, co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, “is an identified supporter of the opposing candidates — Lewis backs Clinton, Lowery has endorsed Obama — and that led to a lengthy argument, rather than an examination of what, if anything, is really going on. Two more independent observers probably would have been more illuminating,” Getler wrote on Friday.
Meanwhile, Obama “said Monday one of the biggest frustrations of his presidential bid is dealing with national media that he says doesn’t correct inaccuracies about his candidacy and his record,” Leroy Chapman Jr. reported Monday in the State in Columbia, S.C.
“Some of those, he said, are pushed by the campaign of Democratic rival U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is locked in a tight race with Obama for the party’s nomination.
“Obama, speaking Monday morning to State newspaper editors, cited as an example the reporting of his remarks about President Ronald Reagan as an inaccuracy that hasn’t been corrected.
“Obama, speaking of remarks he made to a Nevada newspaper last week, told The State he wasn’t praising Reagan’s policies. Obama said was making a point that Reagan reached across party lines in order to snare a large majority of American voters that made it easier for him to push his agenda.” Obama made the same point in a sharp exchange with Clinton in Monday night’s debate.
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Bernie Boston, Prize-Winning D.C. Photog, Dies at 74
Bernie Boston, a nationally acclaimed photojournalist who worked for the Dayton Daily News, Washington Star and Los Angeles Times, died Tuesday, Jan. 22, at his home in Basye, Va., in the Shenandoah Valley, after battling amyloidoisis, a disease that destroys internal organs. He was 74, Joan Anderson, a contributing writer to Boston’s monthly newspaper, the Bryce Mountain Courier, told Journal-isms.
Boston had been a newspaper photojournalist since 1963, when he joined the staff of the Dayton Daily News. When he moved to Basye in 1994 with his wife, Peggy, he became publisher of the Courier, president of the Shenandoah Valley Music Festival and participated in other community activities.
Boston covered every president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, though just a teenager when Truman was in the White House. In 1963, he left Washington to take a job at the Dayton Daily News, only to return three years later to work at the Washington Star. After two years with the Star, he became director of photography, a position he held until the paper folded in 1981. He was then hired by the Washington bureau of the L.A. Times to establish a photo operation there.
A major portion of his work chronicles the turbulent 1960s. His trademark photograph, “Flower Power,” a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize, shows a young man placing flowers in the gun barrels of soldiers at an anti-war demonstration at the Pentagon on Oct. 22, 1967. Among other honors, “Flower Power” was named No. 30 on a list of the 100 greatest war photos of all time.
“I saw the troops march down into the sea of people,” Boston told interviewer Alice Ashe in 2005, “and I was ready for it.” “One soldier lost his rifle. Another lost his helmet. The rest had their guns pointed out into the crowd, when all of a sudden a young hippie stepped out in front of the action with a bunch of flowers in his left hand. With his right hand he began placing the flowers into the barrels of the soldiers’ guns. ‘He came out of nowhere,’ says Boston, ‘and it took me years to find out who he was . . . his name was Harris,” Ashe wrote.
Boston’s 1987 picture of the unveiling of the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Capitol Rotunda also won him second place for the Pulitzer Prize.
Boston served four terms as the White House News Photographers Association president.
He received the National Press Photographers Association Joseph A. Sprague Memorial Award in 1993, the group’s highest honor in photojournalism. In 1996, Boston was inducted into the Hall of Fame of Sigma Delta Chi, the Society of Professional Journalists.
“Bernie was an ardent craftsman and a guy who loved life and loved to tell jokes. He was the life of any room he entered,” Washington photographer Jason Miccolo Johnson told Journal-isms.
The book “Bernie Boston, American Photojournalist,” was published by his alma mater, the Rochester Institute of Technology, in the fall of 2006. Services are pending.
Bernard “Bernie” Boston, 74, Retired Los Angeles Times Photojournalist, Was An Icon (National Press Photographers Association)
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Short Takes
Mike Kellogg, treasurer and past president of the Native American Journalists Association, started work Monday as publisher of New York’s Greater Niagara Newspapers, publisher of four newspapers in Western New York, including the Niagara Gazette, the paper reported on Tuesday. He had been publisher of the Stillwater (Okla.) NewsPress for the past 10 years.
Washington Post photographer Jahi Chikwendiu has been named “Photographer of the Year,” the White House News Photographers Association announced on Sunday. His first place in the picture story-feature category was titled “Continuous War: Cluster Bombs in South Lebanon.” He also won first place in the portfolio category and second place in the picture story-news category. His award of excellence in the picture story-feature category “gives an intimate and chilling look at lives of students and teachers in a high school in the District of Columbia,” the association said.
Latina Media Ventures Monday announced the appointments of magazine veterans Florian Bachleda, George Pitts and Letisha Marrero at Latina magazine. Additional hires include Denise See, Jennifer Sargent and Jazmin Perez. Bachleda, who joins Latina as creative director, was previously design director for Vibe magazine. Pitts, named photography director, is an associate chair of photography at the Parsons School of Design. Executive Editor Marrero was most recently senior editor for the pregnancy Web site WhatToExpect.com. See, the new design director, was art director for Radar. Sargent, the new photo editor, has held positions at More magazine, Redbook and Alloy Inc. Perez, named special projects editor, was managing editor of Vibe, the company said.
Editors overruled Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Phillip Morris, who wanted to spell out the “N-word” in a column about a bar experience. “The bartender, a man Morris likes, had joined some banter about favorite quotes from the movie ‘Pulp Fiction’ and delivered a quote that contained the N-word. The bartender is white. Morris and most of the other patrons are black, and he wrote of the visceral negative reaction he experienced upon hearing the word in that setting, from that person, even though it was clear to all that no offense had been intended,” Reader Representative Ted Diadiun wrote on Sunday. In the end, hyphens were used “as a gesture of respect, an acknowledgment that we know many of our readers, black and white, just don’t want to see that word in their newspaper,” Diadiun wrote.
Readers who did a double take at the Jan. 21 Jet magazine cover, “Obama’s Historic Win,” coming after Sen. Barack Obama’s losses in the Jan. 8 New Hampshire primary and then Saturday’s Nevada caucuses, need to factor in the weekly’s unfortunate lead time. The issue was closed in two parts, on Friday, Jan. 4, the day after Obama’s historic victory in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, and on Monday, Jan. 7, editorial director Bryan Monroe explained. The issue dated Jan. 21 went on sale on Jan. 14, remaining there until the cover date. Meanwhile, New Hampshire and Nevada voters had spoken.
Marquita Smith, Virginia Beach city editor at the Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., has accepted a Knight International Journalism Fellowship focusing on post-conflict development in Liberia, staffers have been told. As a teacher in the year-long program, Smith is to help local news reporters and editors adjust to practicing journalism in an emerging democracy, a note said.
CNN Worldwide has appointed Reza Sayah as an international correspondent based in Pakistan, the network announced on Tuesday. Sayah, an investigative reporter and anchor for WXYZ-TV in Detroit for the past six years, was born in Iran and speaks English, Farsi and French. “Sayah’s hire stands as one part of the biggest expansion of international newsgathering resources in CNN’s 27-year history,” the network said.
“Paula Fray, an award-winning journalist and the first Black editor of the Saturday Star newspaper in South Africa, has been named Regional Director for Africa by the global news wire Inter Press Service,” IPS announced on Tuesday. “A Poynter Institute-trained coach and Nieman fellow, Fray brings more than 20 years experience in print media as a reporter and news editor, and as an independent media trainer, facilitating reporting workshops at the Institute for the Advancement of Journalism and various other media institutions in South Africa.”
ESPN.com columnist Jemele Hill guest-hosted ESPN’s “Jim Rome Is Burning” show on Monday.
Funeral services for Charles Grant Lewis, husband of Dori J. Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, are scheduled for 2 p.m. Saturday at Chapel of the Chimes, 4499 Piedmont Ave., Oakland/Piedmont, Calif. 510-654-0123. Lewis, 59, died on Sunday in Oakland. An architect, he had been diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2006.
“Is there a separate elegy to be written for that generation of newspapermen and women who came of age after Vietnam, after the Pentagon Papers and Watergate? For us starry-eyed acolytes of a glorious new church, all of us secular and cynical and dedicated to the notion that though we would still be stained with ink, we were no longer quite wretches? Where is our special requiem?” David Simon, creator of HBO’s “The Wire,” wrote Sunday in the Washington Post. Simon was hired out of college by the Sun in 1983 and worked there until the third round of newsroom buyouts 12 years later. “Isn’t the news itself still valuable to anyone? In any format, through any medium — isn’t an understanding of the events of the day still a salable commodity? Or were we kidding ourselves? Was a newspaper a viable entity only so long as it had classifieds, comics and the latest sports scores?”
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Feedback: Malveaux Asked the Wrong Question
Suzanne Malveaux’s question whether Obama’s candidacy might change the way whites view blacks and the way blacks view themselves is one she has asked before. Unfortunately, she has been allowed to get away with it.
The proper response is, “What do you mean?”
I say this because the meaning and implication are that whites and blacks are monolithic groups, each capable of only one point of view. Inherent in the question is that, somehow, Obama’s candidacy makes all blacks feel “better” about themselves and all whites feel “better” about blacks.
Not only is this simplistic, it’s racist. It suggests that blacks as a body presently don’t feel very good about themselves and whites don’t feel very good about them either.
That may be true for SOME blacks and SOME whites, but it’s far from universal. I wonder what kind of response she would get if she asked an individual black man or woman if Obama’s candidacy “makes you feel better about yourself and the way whites feel about you?”
I would posit that, for the vast majority of intelligent, politically astute black folk, Obama’s candidacy makes them feel better about racial progress but not necessarily about how they feel about themselves.
It’s reassuring to this old news dog to see black journalists at the table and asking questions before a national audience during this political campaign — but they’d better bring their A game.
Joe Boyce Indianapolis?Jan. 23, 2008?Boyce is a former Time magazine bureau chief and Wall Street Journal senior editor who retired in 1998 after 32 years in the business.
Caption: Ken Ward
Ken Ward, 44, Dies Before Starting New Job in Tampa
Ken Ward, a reporter who left WSOC-TV in Charlotte, N.C., and was due to start at WFTS in Tampa on Monday, died Wednesday, the Charlotte station announced. He was 44.
According to Bill Fish, an investigator with the Mecklenburg County Medical Examiner’s Office, the cause of death was not immediately known, Michaela L. Duckett reported for qcitymetro.com.
“ ‘This should have been a great day for him, and it’s sad that this has happened,’ said Ken Lemon, president of the Charlotte Area Association of Black Journalists.
“ ‘. . . When I found out this morning, it was a low blow,’ said Dedrick Russell, an education reporter for WBTV. ‘I was in disbelief.’
“. . . According to CAABJ member Davida Jackson, the couple, who have one son together, had just celebrated their one-year wedding anniversary on New Year’s Eve.
“Ward was a graduate of Hampton University and The College of New Rochelle with degrees in journalism and communications.”
He previously worked for WTVD in Raleigh, N.C. “According to a short bio Ken wrote for us during his tenure here, he actually began his career in journalism as a teacher. For several years, he taught television and radio at Ossining High School in New York. From there, he branched out into the world of radio news working as an on-air reporter and then moved on to television,” WTVD said.
