From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is in Black America.
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,
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.
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.
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,
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.
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?
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.
Okay.
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.
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
Yeah.
Do this particular,
yeah.
Could you expound on that more as far as making an impression
on you as a journalist?
And well start,
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.
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?
Oh, sure.
It was, it was.
And um, I tried very hard to avoid becoming a press agent for the movement.
Okay.
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.
What effect covering that movement have on your life personally today?
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.
Will you as an editor accept a piece with unnamed sources in it?
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.
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?
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
because I wanna say is, is this a unique incident where you're.
Privy to information off the record.
Well, that's what I wanna talk
about.
Okay.
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?
No.
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.
The late Robert C. Maynard, former editor and publisher of
the Oakland Tribune newspaper, Maynard died on August 17th, 1993.
He was 56.
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Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer David Alvarez.
I'm Johnny Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us today.
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