In Black America

Speaker: From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is in Black America.

Robert C. Maynard: My family had the most effect on my becoming a journalist. I came from a family of. Serious minded scholars. I have five brothers and sisters, all of whom are holders of advanced degrees in one field or another. One of my brothers is a holder of two earned PhD degrees.

So as you can see, ours is a family heavily oriented toward education and service. I grew. Wanting most of all to write and spent most of my childhood experimenting with writing and concluded that it was the world for me. I saw so much that I thought needed to be described, communicated, explored, explained, and so forth.

So that just became my outlet,

John L. Hanson Jr.: the late Robert C. Maynard. Journalist, newspaper, publisher, editor, and former owner of the Oakland Tribune newspaper. Manan was a charismatic leader who changed the face of American journalism and built a four decade career on the cornerstone of editorial integrity, community involvement, improved education, and the importance of the family.

He was also co-founder of the Institute for Journalism Education, a nonprofit corporation dedicated to expanding opportunities for minority journalists at the nation’s newspapers in the 1980s mainly began a twice weekly syndicated newspaper column in which he transformed National, international. To dinner table discussions of right and wrong.

When he bought the Oakland Tribune in 1983, he became the first African American in this country to own a major daily newspaper. But Maynard had a career full of firsts from being the first African American national newspaper correspondent to being the first African American newspaper editor in chief.

I am Johnny Johansson Jr. And welcome to another edition of In Black America on this week’s program, the Life and Legacy of Robert C. Maynard in Black America.

Robert C. Maynard: Before I go on to say how that particular movement affected me personally. I wanna say something about our profession that I think is an indictment of sorts.

You know, we still have a ways to go toward full equality for blacks in America, but I think it’s unfortunate that our media has not made it clear to the American people that what happened between 1950 and 1980, let’s say in America, 30 years is probably one of the most phenomenal revolutions. That’s occurred in human history to take the condition that blacks were in in those days, and to see the number of barriers that fell and the number of conditions that changed, and the number of opportunities that present themselves today versus in that day.

And it’s a remarkable march. And black Americans should take greater pride in what we have already accomplished. That does not mean we should. Slacking in what we feel we need to continue to accomplish, but we should not allow ourselves or deny ourselves, I should say, we shouldn’t deny ourselves a justly deserved compliment.

John L. Hanson Jr.: The late Robert C. Maynard was a dynamic leader in American journalism throughout the 1970s and 1980s. He was the first African American to own a major metropolitan daily newspaper. Manning was the publisher of a struggling Oakland Tribune from 1983 until 1992. Through that newspaper and the Institute for Journalism Education, which he co-founded in 1976, he became instrumental in training and placing minority journalists in important positions nationwide.

Born on June 17th, 1937 in Brooklyn, New York. Mannar was the son of immigrants from Barbados, interested in writing At an early days. He frequently cut class at Boys High School. To hang out at the editorial office of a black weekly newspaper, the New York Age. In 1967, Manny was hired by the Washington Post as national correspondent, the first African American to hold that position on any major newspaper.

In 19 70 70, left the Washington Post and moved to the University of California Berkeley to found the Institute for Journalism Education in 1979. He was hired by GT as editor in the newly acquired Oakland Tribune newspaper. When he purchased the Oakland Tribune in 1983, he became the first African American in this country to own a major daily newspaper.

In 1985, Manny was the recipient of the WIC Carter Redick Award from the College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin,

Robert C. Maynard: Langston had just put on a plague called Simple Sings the Blues, and um. Jimmy Baldwin was just about the published notes of a native son. This was a period in Afro-American history that I was privileged to be the witness to, which was the moral preparation for the civil rights movement.

That’s what was going on in the middle to late fifties when I was traveling Among. This group of writers, they were raising the moral questions that would set the stage for Martin Luther King, for Malcolm X, and for the whole struggle that then ensued the history of the movement up to that time is important to keep in context.

Let me just go back a hundred years to the, at the end of the Civil War. There was an attempt to bring blacks into some sort of, um, economic participation and political participation in the South through reconstruction, as it was called. Reconstruction collapsed in about the 1880s, and little by little black people slipped into a status of semi servitude, yes, no longer slaves, but no, not quite free.

And in that context, came along. A Supreme Court ruling called Plessy versus Ferguson, which decreed that as long as the state provided equal facilities for blacks, they could be separate. And that doctrine, separate but equal is what prevailed from 1896 to 1954. Separate, but equal was just a code word for segregation of the rankest sort.

There was nothing the least but equal about the treatment of blacks and whites in the south. At that time, during World War ii, black Americans went off, as you know, and distinguished themselves in war. And died fighting for the freedom of this country. It was the people who came home in 1945 having fought and bled and seen their buddies die for democracy and freedom elsewhere.

Who began to. Plot the course for the overthrow of Plessy. They were lawyers primarily, you know, people who went to law school and set up shop at Howard University and used that as the launching pad for this assault on the second class status of blacks in America. And as that battle began to heat up in the middle fifties, young writers and established writers began to try to define the black experience.

For public understanding so that white people could understand better. This was the period when Jimmy Baldwin wrote so eloquently about the status of blacks and in the minds of whites. He said, you know, a nigga is not a person. A nigga is an idea. Why do you need a nigga? You know, what is it in your life that makes you need to see somebody else’s being inferior?

And they kept probing that question. And of course. You know, Langston was, was going at it from another side with the stiletto of satire. And other writers would, were grappling with it in different ways. And of course, the writers and the, the clergy and the activists of various kinds all finally began to sing off of one song sheet, as it were into the middle of the 1950s.

And so the Supreme Court. Clearly hearing that the moral outcry had reached a level where this could no longer be tolerated, finally declared segregation legally void, and replaced the evil doctrine of Plessy against Ferguson with the new doctrine of Brown against Board of Education. And from that moment there grew the movement that eventually led to Dr.

King. And others marching on Selma and from Selma to Montgomery, and that ended finally the period of legalized separation of the races in this country. What it did not do is liberate our minds. It liberated our bodies. We became, at least physically. Able to move about freely in American society, but the presupposition remained that we were intellectually still suffering from the legacy of slavery.

We were still, our minds were still enslaved, and so the struggles since the sixties has been more of an intellectual struggle. It has been a struggle to establish. Our right to be viewed as equal in jobs that had previously been been regarded as strictly white jobs, newspaper editors, judges, physicians, you know, the whole range of places that we had been denied access in large numbers.

Well, as we begin to fan out as it were, from that clo, from the enclosure of segregation. Into the broad society. We discover that we’re not all exactly the same in the way we view the world. That, um, to be successful in the world where you have to learn a variety of skills because there are all sorts of new challenges now that we should be working toward.

And so I see my becoming an editor and owner of a major daily newspaper. As being on the cutting edge of the opening up of this new arena of possibilities for the mind, which I think is every bit as important as what the previous era did to free our bodies.

John L. Hanson Jr.: You went to work for the Afro-American in Baltimore.

And I assume that established you at a major American newspaper. Were you comfortable in coming to the Post after working at the Afro-American in Baltimore?

Robert C. Maynard: Well, I didn’t go straight from the post. Okay. I went first to a newspaper in Pennsylvania. Okay. A daily newspaper, the York Gazette.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Okay.

Robert C. Maynard: And I worked there for six years.

Then I was a Neiman Fellow at Harvard. Then, um, as you say, I met Ben Bradley while I was at Harvard as a Neiman fellow. And he invited me to come and see him at the Post, and I did. And I had no discomfort, no about coming there. I felt very good about it. It was a fabulous experience for me.

John L. Hanson Jr.: You said you learned a particular lesson and I guess the illustration that they used in one of the particular article, I think it was in Players magazine, that you had ridden a person that had red paint thrown on this automobile.

Mm-hmm. And you somewhat was gonna make a satire out, that experience. Mm-hmm. And the editor came to you. Well didn’t come to you. He had whacked your particular story. Mm-hmm. You came to him and asked him why did he

Robert C. Maynard: Yeah.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Do this particular,

Robert C. Maynard: yeah.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Could you expound on that more as far as making an impression on you as a journalist?

And well start,

Robert C. Maynard: lemme start. Sure. Lemme tell the whole story so that everybody will know what we’re talking about. In my first day as a police reporter on the York Gazette, I went out to cover. To do what they call collecting the police blott. You go down to the police headquarters and you take down all these various complaints and so forth, and you write one paragraph stories about fender benders and so on.

It’s part of your early training, and I saw one complaint that said that John Smith had, uh, complained to the police that he brought, that he had just that Saturday afternoon. Bought a brand new Blue Pontiac convertible and he parked it outside of his house overnight, and when he came out in the morning, somebody had smeared red paint all over this brand new car.

So he complained to the police. I wrote down the complaint and I came back to the office and I decided to write a funny story. And as I recall it, my story began. If John Smith had wanted a red convertible, he would have bought a red convertible. Instead, he bought a blue convertible, but last night somebody tried to paint it red da da da, and went on to tell his story.

Well, after I turned my story in. I went back over to the city editor’s desk and I looked over his shoulder and he was crossing out all that stuff about if John Smith had wanted a red convertible. And so I said, why did you take all that out? He said, well, let me ask you a question. Why did you put it in?

I said, well, I thought it was funny. He said, well, if you’re, if you had been John Smith, would you still think it was funny? And I stopped and I thought about it and I said, well, no. And he said, well, that’s my point. He said, when we sit down here to write stories, we must never allow ourselves to indulge in our exercise of humor at the expense of some ordinary citizen.

And to me, it was the most profound single lesson. About the impact of what we do. It was, it was a lesson that, as you can tell, has remained with me for over 25 years. And whenever I think about what we do as journalists, I always want to ask the question, what’s the impact on the other fellow or the other woman, as the case may be, what are we doing to people and shouldn’t we be sensitive about that?

Rather than just say, well, I think it’s funny to ridicule this person. Let’s have some fun. Well, maybe that’s not always appropriate.

John L. Hanson Jr.: You’re listening to In Black America with John L. Hanson Jr. We’ll be back with more of our conversation in just a moment. Now on with our conversation,

was it easy for you or difficult for you to be objective when you covered the Civil Rights Movement and Dr.

Martin Luther King?

Robert C. Maynard: Oh, sure. It was, it was. And um, I tried very hard to avoid becoming a press agent for the movement.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Okay.

Robert C. Maynard: I had to cover the news. I had to write. Balance stories that took into account that not everybody in the movement was perfect, and that not everything, even everything that Martin Luther King did was perfect, that nobody’s perfect.

And even though I had enormous sympathy for what the movement was trying to accomplish, I tried to distinguish the goals of the movement from the everyday behavior of individuals and see that. For whatever it was. I never allowed in my mind any source, including Martin Luther King to be larger than life.

John L. Hanson Jr.: What effect covering that movement have on your life personally today?

Robert C. Maynard: Enormous in the sense that if you could have seen the condition of the political, economic, and social status. Of black Americans in the South, particularly in 1950, which is around the time I began to be aware of things outside myself.

You wouldn’t recognize that condition versus the condition of blacks today. And before I go on to say how that particular movement affected me personally. I wanna say something about our profession that I think is an indictment of sorts. You know, we still have a ways to go toward full equality for blacks in America, but I think it’s unfortunate that are, media has not made it clear to the American people that what happened between.

1950 and 1980, let’s say in America, 30 years is probably one of the most phenomenal revolutions that’s occurred in human history. To take the condition that blacks were in in those days, and to see the number of barriers that fell and the number of conditions that changed. And the number of opportunities that present themselves today versus in that day, and it’s a remarkable march, and black Americans should take greater pride in what we have already accomplished.

That does not mean we should slacking in what we feel we need to continue to accomplish, but we should not allow ourselves or deny ourselves, I should say. We shouldn’t deny ourselves. A justly deserved compliment for what we as a people have done to change our own status in a relatively short period of time, even though we know we have a long way to go.

Part of the way you get there is through recognizing what you’ve already accomplished, because hope is key. To all accomplishments and we have accomplished more than we generally recognize, more than the news media. Stop and acknowledge from time to time as I feel we in the news media should. What I saw as a journalist is this, I saw a people in a condition of almost total social and political paralysis, and I saw.

Black people galvanize their energies and their forces and focus on specific targets and obliterate those targets and change a condition. In 1961, when the sit-ins began at Greensboro and at um, in Nashville, there were probably. A dozen black elected officials in there will be 11 states of the old Confederacy, and today there are over 4,000 black elected officials that’s revolutionary.

All of a sudden, all of these popularly elected officials are seeing their names in print associated with all sorts of misdeeds. Some of them fanciful, some of them for real. And lo and behold, their accusers were all anonymous and it left a very bad taste in the public’s mouth. The latest surveys show that more than half the public, 54% will discount a story that contains anonymous sources as unreliable.

They just won’t touch it.

John L. Hanson Jr.: Will you as an editor accept a piece with unnamed sources in it?

Robert C. Maynard: None unless it meets a set of fairly clear standards. First of all, there must be an allegation of a violation of public trust. In other words, it’s gotta be serious. Number two, it must be information that could not be obtained on the record with people’s names attached.

Number three. Some senior editor of the newspaper must know the name of the alleged source. And four, there can’t be just one source. There have to be two independent corroborative sources and those four standards. Yes.

John L. Hanson Jr.: You spoke earlier today about credibility within the journalism profession. Two particular incidents have particularly affected the credibility of black journalists, the Janet Cook incident, and recently the Jaime incident with Milton Coleman of the Washington Post and the Presidential County, Jesse Jackson.

In your opinion, has that drastically hurt black journalists overall, those two incidents?

Robert C. Maynard: No, not drastically. The Janet Cook case looked as if people could say, well, gee, there’s something unique about it, but there wasn’t anything unique about it. Um, in very short order, we had the case of Michael Dailey, of the New York Daily News going off to Belfast, inviting a story that he saw a group of British troops do something that didn’t happen.

And then we had, uh, Christopher Jones write an article for the New York Times magazine about Camp Chi, and it turned out that he was in Madrid all the time that he said he was in Cambodia. Then you had, uh, the case of the AP reporter writing a strange freeway phantom story. So there have been a number of other fabrications.

So, no, I wouldn’t say that there’s anything about that that speaks specifically to black journalists. In the case of the so-called Jaime Town incident, I think there’s something to be said about that, that I have not seen or heard a great deal. And so let me tell you what I think, and I haven’t said this

John L. Hanson Jr.: because I wanna say is, is this a unique incident where you’re.

Privy to information off the record.

Robert C. Maynard: Well, that’s what I wanna talk

John L. Hanson Jr.: about. Okay.

Robert C. Maynard: What I wanna say about that incident is this, what it reflected was the inexperience of both men at what they were doing. Okay. Jesse Jackson is inexperienced in elective politics. He has been accustomed to being in an arena.

In which he could function without the usual checks and balances that go into political reporting. It’s just a different world. And he didn’t know that. And so he thought he could do some things that he did in another arena, in another setting and get away with it in this much different setting. So it was a case of a learning experience for him about how you open your mouth around journalists when you’re a candidate.

Now, having said that, I have to say on the other side that Milton was equally inexperienced in such matters, and what Milton didn’t understand is that in every political campaign, there are always certain areas of understanding between reporters and candidates about the sorts of things that will be allowed to be off the record.

Now in the case of such obnoxious language as Jaime Town, I don’t think there ought ever to be a rule for that sort of thing to be permissible for candidates to use that kind of language. Because if it’s okay for Jesse to say, Jaime Town, uh, what do you do if you’re equally. Beholden to a white candidate and they say, uh, a racist or a sexist remark.

Should a white journalist not report that he’s a putty? Now he feels as if he’s got a certain camaraderie with the candidate and vice versa. Justice Jesse felt he had with the black reporters. Suppose such a white candidate starts using racial epithets in those private circumstances or antisemitic epithets.

Should that be okay? Should the press, should the reporters close to him say, oh, well it’s off. All of his racial epithets are off the record. That doesn’t work either, does it?

John L. Hanson Jr.: No.

Robert C. Maynard: Okay. So what Milton needed to know is, well, how do you handle that? And the way I think he should have handled it is when he heard Jackson use that sort of language the first time in the so-called off the record setting, whatever that might have been.

He should have said to him, Hey, look, I find that offensive. I think that that even speaks to the character of this campaign, and I don’t think, since this is off the record, I don’t think I will report it the very first time, but I want you to know that if I determine that that’s a pattern with you, that you do use that sort of language all the time, it may become part of your profile as I have to report it.

And I think that would’ve cleaned it up, but he didn’t have the experience to know that that’s what you do. We call it in political reporting, one bite of the apple. Every guy, every candidate, every person, man or woman, should have one chance in the early stages of a campaign to make a mistake. ’cause we all do without us blowing it up.

But if we find that that mistake. So called at first, begins to reveal itself as a pattern that tells us something about the character of the person. Then. We should put ’em on notice that we intend to use that material in a story.

John L. Hanson Jr.: The late Robert C. Maynard, former editor and publisher of the Oakland Tribune newspaper, Maynard died on August 17th, 1993.

He was 56. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions as to future in Black America programs, email us at In Black america@kut.org. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. Don’t forget to subscribe to our podcast and follow us on Facebook. You’re gonna previous programs online@t.org.

Also, you can listen to a special collection of In Black America programs at American Archive of Public Broadcasting. That’s American archives.org. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessary though of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin in Black America is a listener supported production of KUT and KUTX in Austin, Texas.

You can support our work by donating@supportthispodcast.org. Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez. I’m Johnny Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week.

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