When Violence Was the Ticket

Very soon the newly renamed American Society of New Editors will release it's annual newsroom census. Started in 1978, the census is meant to track the newspaper industry's progress in desegregating the nation's newsrooms. Lately, with an industry in turmoil and diversity efforts stalled, there has been little progress to track, and the report has mostly been met with weary disappointment. It's doubtful that this year will be markedly different. This at a time when events cry out for journalists and media managers culturally competent to help the American public understand the shifting dynamics taking place in our country.

Reading Alice Bonner's description of my father's earlier work brought back a lot of memories. I could almost hear those long ago conversations when he would talk to me about covering one of the most important moment's in our country's history. I felt like I was back listening in on the strategy meetings he would hold at the house as he and his colleagues attempted to rally an industry to understand that it needed a diversity of voices inside the newsroom in order to accurately and fairly cover the diversity interwoven throughout the fabric of our society. But sadly, it also reminded me of that old saw that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

ASNE's conference rooms are no longer packed, as the organization created to support print journalists is seeing its influences being whittled away by the growing power of new forms of media. But just as the leaders of the legacy media failed to fully comprehend the necessity of having a staff that reflects the country, so too do  the architects of this new media seemingly ignore the need for diversity. Yet the need just grows.
In many ways, this is not as dramatic a period as the 1960s and 1970s.  Our cities are not burning, our leaders are not being assassinated, but as Joan Didion once wrote in her famous essay, our center is not holding and as my father wrote in1978. 'As much as I might be concerned about the effects of segregation and bigotry in the news on blacks, I am even more concerned about its effects on the whole of our society,' he wrote so long ago. 'I contend, and will contend for as long as I live, that it is impossible for all Americans to understand what they should about each other if only some kinds of Americans get to control the telling of that story.'

It is my hope that Bonner's piece will serve to remind a transforming industry of this constant truth.

Dori J. Maynard

When Violence Was the Ticket: 

A Press Desegregation Drive Born in the Fires of April 1968

By Alice Bonner

In the gentle warmth of an April evening 42 years ago, a young reporter crouched in his radio car on a Washington, D.C. street watching the violent uprising after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis. Bob Maynard, calm and professional under fire, dictated details of the chaos back to his colleagues in the Washington Post newsroom. Amid that dangerous duty, he resolved to work toward a day when an aspiring black journalist 'could get a chance without having to put quite so much of his life on the line.' His work over the next quarter century demonstrates that he kept that pledge.

April 1968 was a time of bottomless grief across the land, and one of the capital's darkest hours. Black Americans felt the anguish most acutely, and some found release in burning and smashing-mostly in their own communities. The fires of 1968 gave Maynard and other black journalists, who were fewer than 100 in white daily newsrooms, almost exclusive access to the risky work of reporting on violence that swept through hundreds of U.S. cities.

Four decades of newsroom changes have grown out of the April 1968 uprisings and persistent activism by countless individuals and organizations. Although Maynard's work was invariably collaborative, he was the most visible and vigorous proponent of press integration in his time. In the riots, he knew that his race was his most valuable asset, even with his exceptional preparation, which included six years of daily newspaper experience and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard. Still, black reporters often were treated as mere messengers, dictating stories to 'white colleagues barricaded inside' newsrooms where the 'writers, the editors, the people with ultimate responsibility for portraying the event to the world, were all white.'

Maynard was hired at the Washington Post in 1967, at a time when mainstream news outlets were scrambling to recruit 'riot reporters,' to cover the urban outbursts. Rising black anger made riot duty too dangerous for white reporters, including many whose careers had thrived on covering the earlier non-violent phase of the Civil Rights Movement. He carried the banner for press desegregation as he climbed in the newspaper business.

At the Post, he became the first black White House correspondent for a mainstream newspaper, was named Ombudsman, and later became an editorial board member. He left to become Gannett's affirmative action chief in 1977, and then was promoted to top editor of the Oakland Tribune in 1979. In 1983, when he bought the Tribune from Gannett with his wife, Nancy Hicks, a prolific, high-achieving New York Times correspondent, they became the first (and only) black Americans to own and publish a major metropolitan daily. Throughout, he often made headlines for determinedly pushing for press diversity. Many programs and projects sprang up to tackle 'lily-white newsrooms.' Most notably, Maynard and a multi-ethnic group of accomplished journalists created what became the country's top institution dedicated to press diversity, the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.

Maynard said he knew that the riot-era demand for black reporters sprang from a single moment in 1965 when the Los Angeles uprising in Watts sent a few white journalists back to newsrooms and emergency rooms maimed and bloodied. It was a time, 'when violence was the black journalist's ticket to a place in the newsroom,' he later wrote. 'There is no doubt in my mind that practically all the black reporters who worked at that time for daily newspapers were hired to cover this violence.'  While their white colleagues took cover in the newsrooms, black reporters and photographers faced the wrath of both police and protestors. 'They were all out on the street eating tear gas and ducking bricks and nightsticks almost simultaneously.' Yet, newsroom change came slowly.

On an April day ten years after the D.C. riot, almost to the day, Maynard stood before a packed conference room at the Capital Hilton Hotel and bemoaned the fact that 'ten years after the death of Dr. King, at the end of this long, sorrowful decade, the American press still has a long way to go.' Maynard's 1978 speech was aimed largely at the powerful members of the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) who were assembling in Washington for their annual meeting that week, he declared, 'We will not let you off the hook. You must desegregate this business.'

Maynard's message was a main event in an omnibus set of gatherings held that week, including the dual tenth anniversary commemorations of Dr. King's death and of the Kerner Commission Report. That enduring document, released by Lyndon Johnson's riot panel shortly before King was killed, warned that America was becoming two societies 'black, white and unequal.' It also excoriated news media for contributing to persistent racial inequality in the U.S. by their biased and exclusive reporting and hiring. One slender chapter on the media made the report an evergreen of press diversity issues. 

Maynard's immediate audience was the National Conference on Minorities and the News, a gathering organized by the newly organized Institute for Journalism Education. IJE timed its conference to get the attention of top U.S. newspaper editors and attract national media coverage. It featured a keynote address by the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, and was documented for a PBS television program. Nearly one-quarter of the 350 participants were graduates of Columbia University's Summer Program for Minority Journalists. That program was a forerunner to IJE and another byproduct of the fires of 1968, created by CBS News executive Fred Friendly to train 'people who ought to be journalists.'

Many other media organizations were among the participants. Vernon Jarrett, a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune and local broadcaster, represented the National Association of Black Journalists, then in its third year. Jarrett. NABJ's second president was an active member of ASNE. In 1977, he led one of NABJ's earliest attempts to work with white media organizations on diversity efforts, according to Lynn Norment's profile of him on the NABJ website.

The overlapping events of 1978 gave birth to two vaunted ASNE innovations on diversity, an annual census of newsroom integration and a commitment to fully integrate newspapers by century's end. The first tradition continues; this year's statistics will be reported April 13, during the [renamed] American Society of News Editors meeting at the J.W. Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington. The other, known as the Year 2000 Plan, was revised in the late 1990s as progress toward its goal fell far short. The struggle for press diversity struggles haltingly forward into the 21st century.

Some of the changes began immediately. Black reporters at the Washington Post were furious to see only white bylines on front-page stories they had gathered at great risk. Their protest forced the newspaper to change its byline policy in 1968. Jules Witcover noted in the Columbia Journalism Review that the Post sent out every available black staff member when Washington's streets erupted, leaving only whites in the newsroom. They were the rewrite men who got the first bylines on the big riot story. Thereafter, the paper began the practice of printing a box at the end of a story listing all the contributing reporters' names on any group-reporting effort.

Ellsworth Davis, who was hired as the first black photographer at the Post, often rode with Maynard as the newspaper fielded all-black teams in riot zones. Davis later recounted how Maynard reached back to his Brooklyn upbringing in a large West Indian immigrant family, to negotiate their safe passage out of dangerous predicaments.

Jack White, a former Time magazine correspondent and columnist, recalled Maynard's 1967 arrival and his performance in the Washington streets that April as a prophecy of his journalism career that followed. White, a copy aide soon to be promoted to reporter at the Post, said Maynard immediately impressed his new colleagues.

'I think everybody was a little bit in awe of him because he was clearly something different from anything anybody had ever seen in that newsroom before.' White said Maynard  brought a distinctive style, as a Porsche-driving New Yorker who 'called people 'Baby' and  smoked these Galois French funky cigarettes.' But it was his substance that set Maynard apart and made him admired by many at the Post, White recalled. 'He was just the greatest . . .  force of human nature I ever saw in journalism. . . . I think Bob was just one of the smartest human beings I ever met. But I don't think people really understood what Bob was about until the riots came after was King was killed in 1968.'

Maynard's keen analysis of events and people distinguished him among journalists and propelled him on to higher roles in journalism after the riots subsided. Race often has been cited as a reason for his accomplishments, but some of Maynard's confidantes believe his outsized talent merely helped to minimize race as an impediment in a white-dominated profession. 'He was awesome,' recalled Earl Caldwell, an early Maynard colleague and confidante  from the early 1960s when both worked on small-town papers in rural Pennsylvania. 'My strength was I could go out and report something. I could see something and describe it. Maynard had that other dimension. He could analyze, he could put it in a perspective.'

Bob Maynard soon turned his analytical talent on the status of black journalists in the early 1970s, as the riot era receded and some of the breakthrough black journalists were viewed as superfluous in newsrooms that failed to promote them to more competitive assignments or increase their numbers.

'There are mornings in the lives of America's black journalists when the world seems not only to be colored white. It also appears to be colored contradictory-if not downright hypocritical,' Maynard said in a speech to ASNE members in 1972. That year, only 300 or so nonwhite writers, editors and photographers worked on mainstream newspapers, about three-fourths of one percent of the total professional workforce. And four out of five of those few had been hired to cover riots, Maynard said. With such dismal statistics, he said, 'There is no place to go with figures such as these, except up.' Over the next 20 years, he worked to make those words a prophecy, for himself and hundreds of other journalists, becoming the nation's most prominent black journalist and the foremost spokesman for press diversity.

Maynard joined the crusade for press desegregation loudly in 1972, when Fred Friendly recruited him and Caldwell to lead Columbia University's summer program. Thereafter, he was immersed in the mission as its leading voice and visionary. Two decades later, that effort had made substantial change in the complexion of American newsrooms and formed the foundation of Maynard's most lasting legacy. By the time he died of cancer in 1993, nonwhite journalists in mainstream newspapers had multiplied ten-fold from the fraction of one-percent the Kerner Report decried in 1968. A substantial portion of that progress was owed to Maynard's leadership. 

Bob Maynard rests under a simple headstone on a gentle slope of Rock Creek Cemetery in Northeast Washington, not far from the blocks left burnt and tattered by the raging grief for King in that long ago April. Nancy, who died in 2008, shares his gravesite. Around them, the city continues efforts to recover from the violence that helped pry open newsroom doors.

Maynard's legacy lives in the persistent effort to make the news represent all segments of society.  It survives wherever journalists remember his admonition that a representative press is essential to democracy--not only for aspiring minority journalists and communities of color, but also for majority white audiences. All Americans deserve the full, accurate story of their society in the news, instead of the 'badly distorted picture that is presented when white voices dominate and white hands control the final outcome of the product.' His guiding philosophy echoes across the capital city and the nation every April when ASNE releases its yearly census of nonwhite journalists employed on major daily newspapers. Progress creeps along, even as the nation's nonwhite population soars, rapidly advancing toward a majority of the nation.

Yet, as Maynard often reminded anyone who would hear, the headcount was never the ultimate aim. Increasing the presence and voices of minority-group Americans in newsrooms was merely the means to a goal--that of telling America the story of all its diverse components.

'As much as I might be concerned about the effects of segregation and bigotry in the news on blacks, I am even more concerned about its effects on the whole of our society,' he wrote in 1978. 'I contend, and will contend for as long as I live, that it is impossible for all Americans to understand what they should about each other if only some kinds of Americans get to control the telling of that story.'

REFERENCES

Robert C. Maynard, 'Crossfire: Heat in the Lines of Duty,' Washington Journalism Review, April/May 1978, 38.

Robert C. Maynard, 'A Black Journalist Looks at White Newsrooms,' Washington Post, 26 April 1972, Sec. A, p. 16.

Newspapers Urged to Hire More Minority Journalists,' Washington Post, 8 April 1978, Sec. A, p.5.

Jules Witcover, 'Washington's White Press Corps,' Columbia Journalism Review, Winter 1969-70, 46.

Alice Carol Bonner, 'Changing the Color of the News: Robert Maynard and the Desegregation of  Daily Newspapers,' Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1999. (UMI Dissertation Services #9938118)


Jack White, Interview by Alice Bonner, Washington, D.C., June 17, 2002. Tape recording.


Earl Caldwell, Interview by Alice Bonner, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, August 1, 2002. Tape recording.

Lynn Norment, 'Vernon Jarrett, 1977-1979,' www.nabj.org 

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