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(Journalisms Training Column) “Punch” “Saved the Summer Program”

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Publisher Enabled Evolution Into Maynard Institute

. . . Black Times Alumni Remember Sulzberger

A 2nd Try After Forum for Black Voters Fails

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Publisher Enabled Evolution Into Maynard Institute

Without Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Sr., the retired chairman of the New York Times Co., who died Saturday at age 86, what would become the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education might have gone out of business in 1974.

Back then, recalled Earl Caldwell, one of the Institute’s founders, the reporter training program for people of color was housed at Columbia University. Fred Friendly, the former CBS News president who was once Edward R. Murrow’s closest colleague, created the program in 1968, days after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, to hasten racial integration of the news media, as Alice Bonner explains elsewhere on this site.

A Columbia faculty member since 1966, Friendly integrated the program’s top faculty in 1972 by recruiting veteran journalists Bob Maynard of the Washington Post and Caldwell of the Times as co-directors.

But Friendly told the program directors in 1974 that the program had run out of money, Caldwell recalled by telephone on Monday. But Friendly promised to keep the program going if the program leaders could raise the money. “I had high visibility,” Caldwell recalled. “I decided to go to Punch Sulzberger at the New York Times. I laid it out to him. We had only a month at the most. Sulzberger said, ‘I’d like to help you, but the New York Times couldn’t underwrite this.

So he took out a piece of paper and said, “What you need is something to take to foundations. He said, ‘I’ll give you this amount, and you can say the New York Times supports you.” Then he said he would contact executives at Time, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal and tell them that Caldwell was coming to see them. There were six people, “all big names,” Caldwell recalled, and “it worked just as he said. They greeted me with open arms and couldn’t wait to tell me they were going to give us something.” The needed money was raised. Friendly was astonished.

Sulzberger “actually saved the summer program. He never got any credit for it. No one ever knew about it,” Caldwell said.

“We raised that money so fast that we shocked Columbia University.”

Columbia wasn’t prepared.

The university officials said they had moved on, assuming the money wouldn’t be raised. Caldwell says he suspects that the students at Columbia Journalism School resented a summer program that found jobs for its graduates while the regular students spent a longer time in the school and received only a degree.

The program set up shop at the University of California at Berkeley as the Summer Program for Minority Journalists, and eventually became the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. The contacts that Sulzberger introduced to Caldwell continued to send money.

True, Sulzberger “guided The New York Times and its parent company through a long, sometimes turbulent period of expansion and change on a scale not seen since the newspaper’s founding in 1851,” as Clyde Haberman wrote in the Times’ 7,741-word obituary.

But journalists of color who interacted with “Punch,” as he was known, “had a sensitivity to the racial issues that I feel that a log of others didn’t have,” Caldwell said, echoing others.

In his posthumously published 2010 memoir, “My Times in Black and White: Race and Power at the New York Times,” Gerald R. Boyd, the Times’ first African American managing editor, called Sulzberger “a genuinely decent man who had several African Americans on his senior management team and one among the company’s board of directors.”

In a visit to the San Francisco bureau, where Caldwell was later assigned, Sulzberger found Caldwell working in a smaller office than the other correspondents in the bureau and ordered that he be given comparable space — even though Caldwell usually worked in the larger offices anyway.

When Caldwell became the subject of a celebrated court case over whether he would be required to reveal his sources to government investigators, Sulzberger “backed caldwell all the way to the supreme court,” James C. Goodale, the Times’ lawyer at the time, told Journal-isms by email on Monday. “He put all the resources of the paper behind him.” Caldwell agreed.

Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor, wrote in his 2003 memoir “City Room”:

“Punch Sulzberger . . . never stopped putting pressure on every department of The Times to employ ‘more nonwhites.’ On April 8, 1968, he called a meeting of all company department heads. ‘The plain fact of the matter,’ he told us, ‘is that we have [been neither] as successful nor as active as we should have been in meeting even our minimum requirements . . . we have made too many excuses to ourselves for not doing enough. We now have to put excuses aside, even where there is a touch of validity to them, and work out a meaningful, effective plan of action. Each department head will be held responsible for the future record of his department and will be asked to come up with a practical timetable for his department’s program.’

“And a year later, Punch offered specific guides to meet the goal of enabling ‘people who have been held back by prejudice and poverty to earn and enjoy a decent life’: develop our internal training programs and initiate new ones to assure equal opportunity and advancement; make sure when employees are hired they receive whatever help is needed to make the grade and that help be continued so that advancement to the top managerial and executive levels is open to all on an absolutely equal basis. ‘I want to ask all of you to accept a share of the responsibility,’ Punch said, ‘for making The Times the leader in providing equal opportunity for all.”

Still, the paper was the subject of a lawsuit by its black and brown employees, and later by women. They all reached settlements.

Boyd wrote in his memoir, “. . . The message from the top was to diversify, but without a plan, diversity remained a concept rather than an executable strategy. And editors had their pet justifications for blocking hiring and promotions; when challenged they often responded with the paper’s typical arrogance: ‘We need to do what’s best for the paper,’ they would argue, as if hiring or promoting a person of color could not possibly be what was best for the paper.”

 

. . . Black Times Alumni Remember Sulzberger

Paul Delaney, former senior editor at the Times:

“He was not a good journalist at the beginning, but he grew into a great publisher. He headed the paper at the start of its most turbulent period. For blacks, that included the efforts to integrate the operation, the newsroom, in particular, the company’s heart and soul. Punch was known to allow editors and managers to run their departments. That meant the all-whites in charge could continue in their old ways, hiring and promoting those who mirrored themselves. I always thought he let Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal bully him, especially regarding minority hiring and promotion. Abe moved with deliberately slow speed.

A minority lawsuit filed in 1971 was settled nine years later. Punch allowed his lawyers to fight the suit to eventual agreement. I always thought he was embarrassed by it, that it sullied the Times’ reputation, and he was right. Afterwards, I was on a committee he appointed with the purpose of implementing the agreement. (The agreement called for hiring, promotions, training, and assigning blacks to all major beats.) I was pleased that Punch told us to continue enforcing the agreement after the expiration date. But, again, he didn’t put muscle behind it and let his managers remain in charge & change was as slow as ever. Well, not really, things began to move faster than they had, and I credit him and his son, Arthur, Jr.

Regarding another matter, I was in the Washington bureau when Punch announced to us at a party that he’d hired William Safire as columnist. Along with most others in the office (I was the sole black reporter for years), I was furious and we all let him know. My fury extended beyond the fact that Safire was conservative, but that there were no black editors on the paper and that Safire represented the real truth that it would be a long time before the paper really changed. At that time, Safire was an example that paper would open up even for conservatives, but not nonwhites.

C. Gerald Fraser, former New York Times reporter and cultural columnist:
I have always had conflicts with uniformed authorities and this includes New York Times’s security guards who, among other things, especially in the late 1960s, always demanded to see my Times ID. Of course, I resisted. I had worked at The Times for quite some time when, one morning the publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, and I had entered the building, more or less together. He approached the security guards first, took out his Times ID, and held it in his open palm for the guards to see. I imagined then that he was trying to tell me, coming in behind him, “It’s no big deal, Gerald, even I, the publisher . . .” I laughed to myself.

Sulzberger was everything they say about his being low-keyed and a gentleman. He greeted all level of employees by name. He had so much power in New York and I never saw or heard of him using it inappropriately.

Charles Brown, the longtime newsroom receptionist, told me today that soon after Punch took over the publisher’s job, he made life better for the Times’s black porters. Previously, they ate their lunch in the men’s room and they also changed clothes there after finishing their shifts. Punch had a recreation room and showers installed.

Two anti-discrimination class action suits occurred during Sulzberger’s reign. His obituary, which I have read only online, referred in passing to the women’s class action anti-discrimination suit, but never mentioned the minorities’s suit. . . . During “our” suit, I never heard Sulzberger’s name mentioned in connection with any of the negotiations.

Roger Wilkins, former editorial writer at the Times and Washington Post:
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger was a real gentleman with a powerful determination to preserve and improve the enormous gem that he inherited. You could call him “Punch” — a childhood family nickname, I believe, but when you brought him a tough issue, he could become a very steely gentleman who was determined to preserve and enhance that gem.

I recall that when he first hired a black member for the Editorial Board, (me), he invited me to his office and spend almost an hour with me alone and then brought in some of his favorite Times journalists to let them know that he intended for this move to be successful. It was gentlemanly and it was clear…..he expected this to work and the people he had brought in to meet me were to make sure that this would work out.

As time wore on, I realized I had a very smart boss who was clear in his mind about what good journalism was and the quality expected in his paper every morning. He understood life in America. And as I worked, I realized that he had made sure that everybody needed to know that this step in integrating this part of his family inheritance was going to work. He was a good man — fair and determined that the great institution that had been handed would grow and maintain the high values of that institution.

Punch was a very good man devoted to his work and to the people who he had brought in to help him achieve that goal.

In all, he was one SWELL boss and a very good guy.

A 2nd Try After Forum for Black Voters Fails

A proposal for a televised, black-oriented presidential candidates forum next week that would be co-sponsored by MSNBC, American Urban Radio Networks, the NAACP, the National Newspaper Publishers Association, Lincoln University and the Grio has been scuttled after the Obama campaign said President Obama would not be available.

However, Jerry Lopes, president of program operations & affiliations for American Urban Radio Networks, told Journal-isms by telephone on Monday that he has another proposal. Lopes said he has offered the Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns 15 minutes each to say whatever they wanted to the black community. The 15-minute presentations would be included in an hourlong special that would be offered to black radio stations around the country. A panel of journalists would analyze the remarks as part of the hour panel.

 

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