African American Journalism and Journalists: Bob Herbert
Commentary by Chitown Kev
One day shortly after the 2008 election, I was at work pounding numbers into a spreadsheet and “ear hustling” a bit on a phone conversation that my boss, an educator, was having. I knew that my boss “knew people” including the (at that time) newly-minted 44th President of the United States, with whom he had worked with in the 1990’s on education issues. J. (apparently) had maintained his relationship with now-President Obama through the years.
Anyways, I overheard my boss trying to call Bob Herbert, the op-ed writer of The New York Times to talk with him about education issues that he wanted to see addressed, perhaps in one of Mr. Herbert’s columns. I didn’t expect that the operator/call screener would actually put my boss through; I mean, this was Bob effing Herbert, someone whom I sort of idolized as a long-standing New York Times columnist that wrote often and cogently on issues of race and poverty.
Sure enough, within about a minute, the tone of J.’s voice changed and it hit me that my boss was on the phone with Bob Herbert, himself.
Bob effing Herbert!
Encyclopedia.com:
Bob Herbert was born on March 7, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in the New York suburb of Montclair, New Jersey. His parents owned a couple of upholstery shops, and during his youth, Herbert felt destined to go into the family business. At the same time, the Herbert household was politically engaged, and the hot issues of the day were a regular topic of conversation around the family dinner table. A voracious reader from an early age, Herbert was reading newspapers by the time he was five years old. He also liked the classics. He was smitten by Dickens at an age when most kids are just dipping their toes into comic books. He read Oliver Twist when he was nine.
(I suspect that Mr. Herbert’s engagement with issues relating to poverty probably began with his childhood readings of Charles Dickens.)
In 1963, Mr. Herbert was drafted into the Army and was sent to Korea instead of Vietnam, something that he discussed a bit in a 2005 interview on C-SPAN.
HERBERT: It was 1963 in Montclair, New Jersey. It was all about cars and rock 'n' roll and I had discovered girls and that sort of thing. And lo and behold, not surprisingly, I got drafted. I didn't have a college deferment.
It turned out that that was very good for me. I mean, the Army experience, while it was tough and for a lot of my friends, tragic, it was a way to sort of jumpstart my growing up process. And I got drafted in the initial buildup for Vietnam. But through the luck of the draw, just got sent to Korea, I didn't go to Vietnam. A lot of my buddies did go there, Vietnam. A lot of them did not come back from Vietnam.
After two years of service, Mr. Herbert attended Montclair State University for two years and decided that he wanted to be a writer.
And so after two years in the Army I came out, did a brief stint at Montclair State. Decided, what am I going to do for a living? Wanted to write, called up The Star-Ledger in New Jersey with the idea of not looking for a job. I get these jobs when I'm not looking for a job.
I called up with - not with the idea of looking for a job, but trying to get some advice on what I ought to major in because I was going to go back to school. And the advice that I got was, come on down here, we'll talk to you. And I said, fine. And when I got down there they gave me a job as a reporter.
After working as a reporter and night city editor at the Newark Star-Ledger, Mr. Herbert moved on to work for the New York Daily News in 1976. It was at the Daily News that Herbert began to attain prominence for his reporting as city hall bureau chief, his columns, and his television appearances on New York public televison as well as national shows like The Today Show.
In 1993, Herbert was hired by The New York Times and became the first Black American op-ed columinist in that paper’s history. By the time of his retirement from the Times in 2011, Mr. Herbert was called by some “the conscience of The New York Times” for his twice-a-week columns on national affairs, generally, and specifically for his coverage of issues of race, poverty, war, and his scathing critiques of the presidential administration of George W. Bush.
Mind you, Mr. Herbert’s critique of presidents did not stop when George W. Bush’s administration ended and Barack Obama took office.
Mr. Obama has seldom addressed black concerns directly, although many of his initiatives have benefited blacks. What has taken a toll is the perception that the president has consistently seemed more concerned about the needs and interests of those who are already well off, who are hostile to policies that would help working people and ethnic minorities, and who in many cases would like nothing better than to see Mr. Obama fail.
Most blacks are reluctant to publicly express their concerns about the president because they are so outraged by the blatantly unfair and often racist attacks against him from the political right. But many blacks are unhappy that Mr. Obama hasn’t been more forceful in the fight to create jobs. And there is disappointment over the dearth of black faces in high-profile posts in the administration.
In 2011, Mr. Herbert retired from his position as an op-ed columnist at The New York Times after 18 years at The Times but I was pleased to find that retired doesn’t necessarily mean...well, retired.
Bob Herbert is currently the host of Op-Ed TV, a half-hour public affairs program televised on CUNY TV; episodes of Op-Ed TV are available on YouTube. His most recent program, posted on YouTube four days ago, was about the humanitarian crisis in Haiti.
My own favorite Op-Ed TV show is his 2015 interview with the Pulitzer Prize-winning former editor and columnist of Newsday, Les Payne.
There’s no reason to wait, as the saying goes, to “wait to give Bob Herbert his flowers.”
Bob Herbert has certainly earned and continues to earn “his flowers” and there’s no time better than the present to give those “flowers” to him.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Three police officers were crowded into the assistant principal’s office at Hobgood Elementary School, and Tammy Garrett, the school’s principal, had no idea what to do. One officer, wearing a tactical vest, was telling her: Go get the kids. A second officer was telling her: Don’t go get the kids. The third officer wasn’t saying anything.
Garrett knew the police had been sent to arrest some children, although exactly which children, it would turn out, was unclear to everyone, even to these officers. The names police had given the principal included four girls, now sitting in classrooms throughout the school. All four girls were Black. There was a sixth grader, two fourth graders and a third grader. The youngest was 8. On this sunny Friday afternoon in spring, she wore her hair in pigtails.
A few weeks before, a video had appeared on YouTube. It showed two small boys, 5 and 6 years old, throwing feeble punches at a larger boy as he walked away, while other kids tagged along, some yelling. The scuffle took place off school grounds, after a game of pickup basketball. One kid insulted another kid’s mother, is what started it all.
The police were at Hobgood because of that video. But they hadn’t come for the boys who threw punches. They were here for the children who looked on. The police in Murfreesboro, a fast-growing city about 30 miles southeast of Nashville, had secured juvenile petitions for 10 children in all who were accused of failing to stop the fight. Officers were now rounding up kids, even though the department couldn’t identify a single one in the video, which was posted with a filter that made faces fuzzy. What was clear were the voices, including that of one girl trying to break up the fight, saying: “Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay. Stop, Tay-Tay.” She was a fourth grader at Hobgood. Her initials were E.J.
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Police in Ohio pulled a paraplegic Black man from his vehicle and threw him to the ground during a traffic stop in Dayton, according to bodycam footage. The video shows how Clifford Owensby had his hair pulled as he was forcibly removed from his car during the Sept. 30 arrest.
In the video, Owensby can be heard telling officers he’s paraplegic. “I can’t get out of the vehicle sir,” Owensby said. The officer tells Owensby he needs to get out of the car so a dog could smell for drugs. “I don’t think that’s going to happen, sir,” Owensby replies. After some more back and forth the officer makes clear he isn’t asking Owens but rather telling him what must happen. “You can cooperate and get out of the car, or I can drag you out of the car,” the officer says. “You see your two options here?” The officers then pull Owensby out of his car. “I’m a paraplegic, bro, you can hurt me!” Owensby can be heard screaming before he’s handcuffed.
Owensby has filed a complaint with the Dayton Unit of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which will investigate the incident. “To pull this man out of the car, by his hair— a paraplegic—is totally unacceptable, inhumane and sets a bad light on our great city of Dayton, Ohio,” Derrick L. Forward, the president of the NAACP’s Dayton unit told the Washington Post. He said Owensby continues to feel anguished over what happened. “He felt he was treated inhumanely, like a dog on the street,” Foward said. “He felt officers did not have empathy for him.”
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Black-owned businesses turned to fintech firms at more than twice the rate of those owned by white, Hispanic or Asian people when applying for pandemic aid under the Paycheck Protection Program, according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The research released on Thursday, which showed about 25% of Black-owned firms applied for PPP loans through fintech lenders, confirmed that they were more likely to be forced to seek alternatives to the traditional banking system when applying for the government funding, which offered forgivable loans that could be converted into grants.
"Our results suggest that historical factors that prevent Black owners from receiving bank credit continued to operate with the PPP," the researchers wrote in a series of blog posts here published Thursday.
Businesses that used fintech firms to apply for PPP loans also generally asked for and received smaller loans.
The analysis, based on information from small business data processing firm Womply and a Fed survey of 9,693 small businesses, builds on previous research finding that minority-owned businesses struggled to tap into government aid early in the crisis because they lacked existing banking relationships.
The research released on Thursday also showed that businesses in communities with high concentrations of racial minorities, often based in urban areas, faced steeper drops in revenue - and a slower recovery - during the pandemic than neighborhoods with fewer minorities.
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The landscape of the great outdoors is changing, thanks to a team of nine skilled Black and Brown mountaineers from across the United States.
In the spring of 2022, the group known as the Full Circle Everest Expedition will make history as the first all-Black team of climbers to trek up Mount Everest.
The group is being led by Phil Henderson, a 30-year veteran in the Outdoor Industry. The San Diego Native takes the notion to lift as you climb.
“You know, really what prompted me to plan it was the fact that over almost three decades, I’ve been one of the very few Black people working in the outdoors and climbing mountaineering and whatnot,” Henderson tells TheGrio.
“And as the years have gone by and I’ve been connected with a few other younger Black climbers, it was just an obvious connection. I wanted to be able to take my experience in the outdoor industry and help mentor those folks and provide some opportunities for them that weren’t provided for me at the same time.”
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French president Emmanuel Macron says the 26 pieces of art from the Dahomey Kingdom will be returned to Benin in an effort to make up for previous wrongs. The Grio: France to return African art to Benin
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French President Emmanuel Macron said Friday that his country will return 26 African artworks — royal thrones, ceremonial altars, revered statues — to Benin later this month, part of France’s long-promised plans to give back artwork taken from Africa during the colonial era.
Discussions have been under way for years on returning the artworks from the 19th century Dahomey Kingdom. Called the “Abomey Treasures,” they currently are held in the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. The museum, near the Eiffel Tower, holds thousands of works from former French colonies.
Macron said the 26 pieces will be given back at the end of October, “because to restitute these works to Africa is to give African young people access to their culture.” It remains unclear when exactly they will arrive in Benin.
“We need to be honest with ourselves. There was colonial pillage, it’s absolutely true,” Macron told a group of African cultural figures at an Africa-France gathering in the southern city of Montpellier. He noted other works already were returned to Senegal and Benin, and the restitution of art to Ivory Coast is planned.
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The hostages in Zamfara were freed on Thursday as a result of “extensive search and rescue operations,” and were helped by sweeping security measures. The Grio: Nigerian forces free more than 180 hostages, say police
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In one of the largest liberations of kidnap victims, at least 187 people including babies have been freed in the country’s troubled north, police announced.
Nigerian security forces rescued the hostages from a forest in Zamfara state where they had been held for many weeks, Zamfara police spokesperson Mohammed Shehu said in a statement. He said they were released “unconditionally,” indicating that no ransoms were paid.
The hostages in Zamfara were freed on Thursday as a result of “extensive search and rescue operations,” and were helped by sweeping security measures including a shutdown of mobile phone networks and restrictions on gatherings and movements in Zamfara state, Shehu said.
“The new security measures in the state have been yielding tremendous results, as they have led to the successful rescue of many abducted victims that run into hundreds, and (they) have been reunited with their respective families,” Shehu said. Nigeria’s security agencies will continue working “to ensure the return of lasting peace and security in the state,” he said in the statement.
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