Nancy Maynard

Maynard was the only black woman covering news in NYC in '68

• Leandra Abbott
• Lenore Allen
• Ed Bradley
• Audreen Buffalo
• Earl Caldwell
• Marquita Pool-Eckert
• Joy Elliott
• Gerald Fraser
• Charlayne Hunter-Gault
• George Goodman
• Charles Hobson
• Jane Irving
• Claude Lewis
• Nancy Maynard
• Gil Scott
• Wallace Terry
• Melba Tolliver
• Mel Watkins
• Hollie West

Nancy Maynard got her first sense of the power of the press when she was a teen. Her former grammar school, PS 46, had burned down. She read about it in the local paper and became so outraged at the negative and inaccurate description of her neighborhood that she decided right there she needed to fix it. Over the course of her career as a journalist, which spans nearly four decades, Maynard influenced the make-up of newsrooms across the country as both a reporter and mentor to younger reporters trying her best to improve the institution for people of color.

Maynard credits her mother, who had a journalism bug, with encouraging her young interest in journalism and keeping her steered in that direction. Her father was a jazz musician and also tried to direct her professional attention toward music, but journalism won out. She worked on the student newspaper of her junior high school and continued to participate in newsroom activities whenever she could.

She got her start in a major mainstream daily as a copy boy at the New York Post while studying journalism at Long Island University. Several New York Times editors taught at the university, and she garnered immediate attention from the Times. She could have gotten a job at the paper right out of college but she decided her career would be better served working at the Post first. In 1966 after graduating, she joined the New York Post reporting staff at the age of 20. Legend has it that she was the youngest reporter on a New York daily staff, but Maynard isn't so sure that's true. Two years later, however, she would become the youngest staff reporter on the New York Times staff.

While at the Post, Maynard won the attention of the legendary Ted Posten who broke the color barrier in the Post's newsroom. He took her under his wing steering her career and developing her talent.

There had been a few African Americans working for mainstream news outlets in New York, but none were women. Maynard was a novelty. At the time she was the only black woman covering news in the City. Sometimes that made relationships to sources difficult, particularly during the civil rights movement, which was controlled by men.

Maynard said she didn't have too much trouble at the paper as a black reporter. "The Post had such an inferiority complex that I didn't have a problem of being seen as not good enough, smart enough or trained enough to do the job," she said.

It wasn't until 1968 that she ran into her first problem at the paper where she felt editors were trying to hold her back. In the spring of that year, she had the opportunity to cover the garbage strike in Memphis where New York unions were sending a delegation. Martin Luther King was to be there and Maynard requested to go. But the editor denied her request saying it would have been a conflict of interest for her to travel with the delegation free of charge. The editor said the Post didn't have the money to cover her travel expenses.

That week, King was assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. With her editor's decision, Maynard knew it was time for her to move on to another paper.