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‘We Wanted to Do What We Could to Insure That the Voices of Black Columnists Would Speak the Loudest . . . ’

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Haitian refugees on the way to Guantanamo (Credit: Guantanamo Public Memory Project)

Haitian refugees on the way to Guantanamo (Credit: Guantanamo Public Memory Project)

‘Nothing  . . . Prepared Us for What We Found’

By DeWayne Wickham

The idea that a group of us black columnists would come together to share our common experiences and probe the soft underbelly of our craft is something Les Payne and I have kicked around for several years. Whenever an event in the news struck our interest, or pricked our consciences, we’d talk about the need to “bring a group of us together.”

But given the many daily pressures that come with our jobs, it was painfully easy to let such a grand plan fall by the wayside. That’s because it always seemed to lack the immediacy that compels most journalists to action.

Two things happened to change that. In January of 1992, Derrick Jackson and I went to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to see how the thousands of Haitian refugees being held there against their will were being treated. Nothing we had read in the many news dispatches from the base prepared us for what we found.

The so-called refugee camp was in fact a prison camp; encircled by barbed wire and guard towers and full of people who were hostage to a foreign power. Outraged by what we found, Derrick and I wrote several columns exposing this charade.

Later that year during his presidential campaign, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton promised to end this mistreatment of those fleeing Haiti’s despotic government and to give them “refuge and consideration for political asylum until democracy is restored” to that impoverished island nation.

Clinton’s promise raised the hope that this and other issues of importance to African Americans might be lifted out of the political bog if he made his way into the White House.

It was these two things — that which Derrick and I saw in Cuba and the real possibility that a change in administrations might focus some badly needed attention on the plight of black America — that caused the two of us to join with Les in putting out the call for the first meeting of “The Trotter Group.” We wanted to do what we could to insure that the voices of black columnists would speak the loudest in the debates that would surely follow such a turn of events.

In my letter, my invitation to more than 40 black columnists, I invoked these words of H.L. Mencken:

“The Negro leader of today is not free. He must look to white men for his very existence, and in consequence he has to waste a lot of his energy trying to think white. What the Negroes need is leaders who can and will think black.”

Those who accepted the call to meet at Harvard understand that the craft of journalism is in dire need of black columnists who can and will think black.

The Trotter Group’s first meeting at Harvard University, Dec. 8, 1992.
First row: Peggy Peterman, Betty Baye, Donna Britt
Second: DeWayne Wickham, Kevin Blackistone, Richard Prince
Third: Norman Lockman, Lorraine Key Montre
Fourth: Wiley Hall III, Dorothy Gilliam
Fifth: Mark August, Gregory Freeman, Derrick Z. Jackson, Sherman Miller
Sixth: Courtland Milloy Jr., Les Payne, Wayne Dawkins

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