Black Journalism and Black Journalists: Dorothy Butler Gilliam
Commentary by Chitown Kev
Reading the online edition of the Columbia Journalism Review celebrating the 60th anniversary of the magazine, I came across a reprint of a 1972 essay titled “What Do Black Journalists Want?” by Dorothy Gilliam, the first Black woman reporter hired by The Washington Post in 1961.
Probably many of the same things that Black journalists still want, I said cynically to myself: opportunity, understanding, and R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Granted things have become better since the pre-Civil Rights Era as Butler Gilliam documents in both her 1972 article and in her 2019 autobiography, Trailblazer: A Pioneering Journalist’s Fight to Make the Media Look More Like America. From the CJR essay:
Before 1954, there was near-total neglect of the black community—as well as black journalists—unless the story dramatized some sensational aspect, by and large crime. After the 1954 Supreme Court decision, when the struggle for civil rights equality escalated, the white media helped to make known the wrongs, although they often misinterpreted what they heard and misrepresented what they saw. Then came the riots, and rebelling blacks—fired with the pent-up injustices of long years—roamed their neighborhoods, burning largely the white- and black-owned businesses that had bled them economically. Here was a new phenomenon: white reporters were chased away when they showed up. Obviously newspapers had to have some black faces. Black copyboys and messengers, even, became instant reporters during that period. And most metropolitan newspapers, wire services, and TV stations started taking the hiring of black professionals seriously—more or less.
In the wake of those rebellions, in 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) reported that its “major concern with the news media is not in riot reporting as such, but in the failure to report adequately on race relations and ghetto problems and to bring more Negroes into journalism.”...
Trailblazer documents how the daughter of an AME pastor living in a segregated Louisville, Kentucky became a part-time secretary at the Black newspaper The Louisville Defender prior to being asked to fill in for an ill society editor and “write a few stories— to help out” and went on to write for Jet and Ebony magazine, graduated from Columbia Journalism School, was hired (and re-hired) by the Washington Post, covered some of the era’s most prominent stories, wrote her own column for seven years, wrote a biography of Renaissance Man Paul Robeson, and traveled the world with her (then) artist husband while caring for three children.
Ms. Butler Gilliam was interviewed by The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah upon the release of Trailblazer in 2019.
The History Makers.org has a nice summary of the very basic biographical highlights:
Former president of the National Association of Black Journalists Dorothy Gilliam was born November 24, 1936, in Memphis, Tennessee. Her parents, Adee and Jessie Mae Butler had ten children, only five of whom survived. Gilliam began attending Ursuline University in Louisville and transferred to Lincoln University to study journalism.
While attending Urusline University, Gilliam began working as a typist for the Louisville Defender, but at the age of seventeen, she was named the society editor. In 1957, while working for the Tri-State Defender, Gilliam, against the wishes of her boss, covered the integration of Little Rock. While there, she met an editor from Jet magazine and was offered a job as an associate editor. In 1959, after two years with Jet, Gilliam left to continue her education at Tuskegee Institute, and in 1960, she was accepted at Columbia University in the graduate school of journalism. Following graduation, Gilliam decided to travel to Africa with Crossroads, and upon her return in 1961, she was offered a job with The Washington Post. Leaving in the mid-1960s to spend time with her family, she returned to the Post in 1972, where she worked for more than thirty years and her popular Metro section columns often focused on issues of education, politics and race. In 1997 Gilliam became director of the Young Journalists Development Project, which helps local high schools develop journalism programs. Today, she is a fellow at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.
Interestingly, it took two tries for Ms. Butler Gilliam to be accepted to Columbia Journalism School. She was not admitted on the first try and, in Trailblazer, she states that “the school turned down my application on the basis that I didn’t have enough liberal-arts credits on my transcript from Lincoln University to meet Columbia’s criteria” and then, decades later, she discovers...something else.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the interviewer, a Columbia alumnus in Chicago, also had written a note to the school officials that they should be aware that I was “very dark-skinned.” That suggested that I might have gotten in more easily if I had been a light-skinned Negro. Lighter skin was sometimes seen as more acceptable, even among black people. I found out about the interviewer’s remark decades later when the school recognized me as one of the Columbia Alumni of the Year, and a professor, my old Washington Post colleague Luther Jackson, found it in my records.
At Columbia, Ms. Butler Gilliam was one of fifteen female students in her class and the only black woman and while she often felt overwhelmed by her more urbane and cosmopolitan classmates, she did make friends including Nina Auchincloss Steers, a stepsister of First Lady Jackie Kennedy. On Friday, November 22, 1963, the two Columbia J-School graduates were having lunch:
...The waiter had not yet brought our orders when the news began spreading like a fire in a dry sagebrush that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. A few minutes later, we heard he had died, and we leapt from our seats and gathered our belongings to leave. Startled, unbelieving, then shocked, I ran back to The Washington Post to see how I could help cover the story. I lost touch with Nina in the chaotic moments after we left the restaurant.
On nearly every page in Trailblazer, Ms. Butler Gilliam credits the Black journalists and editors of the Black press for being her inspiration and guide, whether it involved braving the dangers of covering the integration of Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962, or providing her with a solid foundation of knowledge and depth in reporting on Black community and culture so that upon her full-time return to The Washington Post in 1972, she worked in the Style section as an assistant editor and began to shape the section as befitted what a major newspaper should be in “Chocolate City”:
My work in Style was a two-way street with ideas coming from reporters to me and from me to my fellow editors and reporters. My insights came from my experience growing up in the segregated South, attending a black college for two years, and working in the black press for several years, experiences the white editors and reporters had not had. Over the years, I was able to suggest good stories because of my reading, interests, and experiences. Stories on important black figures took on an extra dimension because I was familiar with black specialists in politics, music, entertainment, and education to interview and quote in my stories.
At every turn, Dorothy Butler Gilliam has paid homage to the Black press giants that came before her and, through her involvement in multiple professional associations and educational initiatives, continues to “pay it forward” for the new generations of Black journalists to come and that are, in fact, already here.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Gibson told The Associated Press on Friday that he was in uniform when the incident happened. He said he was in a van rented by FedEx but that it did not have a FedEx logo on it. He pulled into a driveway and dropped off a package sometime after 7 p.m. on Jan. 24. Before he turned his van around in the driveway to exit, he said, he noticed a white pickup truck pulling away from another house on the same large lot.
He said the pickup driver tried to cut him off as he exited the driveway. Gibson swerved around him and then encountered a second man.
“I drive down about two or three houses and there’s another guy standing in the middle of the street, with a gun pointed at my vehicle,” said Gibson. The man motioned for him to stop. “I’m looking at him, like shaking my head, because why would I stop for somebody with a gun?”
Gibson said the man fired as he drove away, damaging the van and packages inside. He said the white pickup chased him to the interstate highway near Brookhaven before ending the chase. Later, police told local news outlets that the elder Case was the suspected pickup driver, while Brandon Case was the man in the street. Gregory Case is 58, and his son is 35, according to The Daily Leader of Brookhaven.
Gibson said he called police and was told by one officer that police had received a call about a suspicious person at the same address at the same time. “I said, ‘Sir, I’m not a suspicious person. I’m a FedEx worker. I was just doing my job and they shot at me.’”
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On Monday afternoon, the Supreme Court crushed yet another key component of the Voting Rights Act, halting a lower court order that required Alabama to redraw its egregious racial gerrymander. The court’s intervention in Merrill v. Milligan was so radically unjustified that Chief Justice John Roberts—an architect of the judicial attack on voting rights—dissented, alongside the three liberals. The court’s order indicates that the five ultraconservative justices are preparing to dismantle the VRA’s guarantee against gerrymanders that dilute the voting strength of Black Americans. Indeed, by interceding so aggressively in Merrill, these far-right justices have effectively nullified this guarantee for the current redistricting cycle.
Over the last decade, the Supreme Court has bulldozed several key provisions of the VRA. But until now, it had not yet repealed the law’s protections against the dilution of votes cast by racial minorities. This shield, contained in Section 2 and clarified by 1986’s Thornburg v. Gingles, requires a three-judge district court to determine whether a redistricting plan carves up minority communities to prevent them from electing the candidate of their choice. Although the Gingles test can be difficult to apply, the relevant factors here are straightforward: Due to racially polarized voting in the state, Black Alabamians cannot elect their preferred representatives unless they constitute a majority of their district.
Alabama Republicans understand this fact, and it is why their new congressional map ruthlessly dilutes Black votes. The plan packs a huge number of Black voters into a single, sprawling district that stretches from Birmingham to Montgomery, including as many non-white residents as possible. The few remaining voters of color are distributed through six majority-white districts, where they stand no chance of electing their favored candidate. As a result, while Black Americans make up 27 percent of the state’s population, they control just 14 percent of its congressional delegation.
This map, in other words, is a classic racial gerrymander designed to diminish the political power of racial minorities. Black residents challenged its legality, and after a thorough trial, a three-judge district court agreed that it violates Section 2 of the VRA in a meticulous 225-page opinion. (Two of the three judges were appointed by President Donald Trump, which illustrates just how lawless and brazen the redistricting plan was.) The court found that Alabama had willfully refused to create a second majority-Black district, instead slicing up minority communities to boost the voting power of white residents. And it ordered the state to redraw its map with another majority-Black district in compliance with the VRA. Predictably, Alabama Republicans appealed to the Supreme Court, asking it to eviscerate Section 2’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering.
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A University of Alabama building named for a former governor who led the Ku Klux Klan a century ago will also bear the name of the first Black person to attend the school, trustees decided.
Graves Hall, an academic building named for two-term Gov. Bibb Graves, a progressive who also was Grand Cyclops of the KKK before leaving the group in the late 1920s, will become Lucy-Graves Hall to recognize Autherine Lucy Foster, who in 1956 became the first Black person to enroll at Alabama.
She briefly attended classes in Graves Hall but was expelled three days later after her presence brought protests and threats against her life. In 2019, she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the university, where she had returned and earned a masters degree in education in 1992.
Trustees voted to approve the change during a meeting Thursday, news outlets reported.
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NPR talks with writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor about the racist real estate practices that ensured wealth accumulated along racial lines, even after housing discrimination became illegal. NPR: The Racist Architecture Of Homeownership: How Housing Segregation Has Persisted
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This week, we're celebrating NPR's 50th anniversary, kicking off a series we're calling We Hold These Truths to examine what's working and what's not in American democracy. And one of the underpinnings of democracy, without question, is property ownership. You see; there was a time when owning property was required simply to participate in this democracy. Yet we began as a nation that considered Black people to be property, to be three-fifths of a person.
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
There's also an assumption in this country that owning a home is the best way to build intergenerational wealth. But more than a century and a half after the end of slavery, property ownership eludes Black Americans more than any other racial group. In fact, the gap between white and Black homeownership is bigger today than it was in 1960, when race-based discrimination in the U.S. was still legal.
CHANG: So this week we're going to look at the structural forces both from the government and the real estate industry that have denied Black Americans a fair shot at the American dream of home ownership. One person who has spent many years thinking and writing about this is Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. She wrote the book "Race For Profit," a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in history, and she's going to help us open our series. We began our conversation discussing why homes owned by Black Americans don't accrue value the same way that white-owned homes do.
KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR: The market is a reflection of social attitudes in our society. I think sometimes we are led to believe that the market is this neutral space where supply and demand are the only thing that dictate how it functions.
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A statue of white supremacist former Mississippi Gov. Theodore Bilbo has quietly been moved out of sight in the state Capitol — a move praised by Black lawmakers who say he never deserved a place of prominence.
Bilbo was a Democrat who blasted racist rhetoric. He was governor for the 1916-20 and 1928-32 terms and was in the U.S. Senate from 1935 until his death in 1947.
The bronze statue of Bilbo stood prominently at the center of the state Capitol for decades. After the building underwent extensive renovations in the 1980s, the statue was moved to a first-floor committee room.
Democratic Rep. Kabir Karriem, a member of the Legislative Black Caucus, said its lingering presence was “very offensive” in a state where nearly 40% of residents are Black.
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For many Haitians it felt wearily familiar. On January 24th a large earthquake hit the south-west part of the country, the second in the area in less than six months. The victims would of course need help, and the dysfunctional government of the western hemisphere’s poorest country was unlikely to provide much. But the prospect of yet more foreign aid workers descending on the place once dubbed the “Republic of ngos” did not inspire much enthusiasm either. They are “like vultures”, complains Monique Clesca, a journalist and activist: they live off disasters, but do little to improve things. It is a common view.
Haiti’s situation is dire. Since Jovenel Moïse, the president, was assassinated in July last year gangs have taken over more of the country. Even the well-off are struggling. Rose-May Guignard, a former civil servant who lives in a once-prosperous neighbourhood to the south of Port-au-Prince, the capital, said she only leaves her home for short trips to get food and see her family. Travelling on the highway would put her at risk of kidnapping.
This lawlessness is compounding Haiti’s poverty. Even before the pandemic, three-fifths of its 11m residents lived on less than $2 per day. It is placed 170th out of 189 countries on the most recent Human Development Index, a un ranking of the quality of life derived from data on life expectancy, education, health and the like.
What makes this misery all the more depressing is that Haiti has been receiving vast quantities of foreign aid for decades. Since 2000 rich countries have handed over $17bn: worth almost 8% of gross national income between 2000 and 2019, and roughly equal to government spending over that period. After an earthquake in 2010 which killed perhaps 200,000, aid surged.
This bonanza, however, has done little good. Haiti’s economy has grown more slowly over the past ten years than those of many other poor countries that receive much less aid per person (see chart). Relative to the citizens of countries that benefit from similar largesse, Haitians have lower life expectancy and are less likely to finish primary school. Other places that have suffered catastrophes, such as Rwanda and Cambodia, have grown much more quickly in the aftermath.
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Over the past eighteen months, there have been seven coups and coup attempts in African nations. In Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan, military leaders succeeded in seizing power; in Niger and, most recently, in Guinea-Bissau, they failed.
On Thursday, following the failed coup in Guinea-Bissau earlier this week, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) convened to discuss the unrest, which ECOWAS chair Nana Akufo-Addo described as “contagious” and a threat to the entire region.
That’s not wrong, according to Joseph Siegle, research director at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.
“I think yes, the broader point is there has been a pattern after a period of relatively fewer coups,” Siegle told Vox in a phone call. “It’s reasonable to assume that there’s some copycatting going on, or the norm of militaries not being involved [in government] or seizing power has been broken.”
But while the recent spate of coups have several common characteristics and show what Siegle calls a “dispersion effect,” Joseph Sany, the vice president of the US Institute of Peace’s Africa Center, told Vox in a phone interview that he thinks referring to them as “contagious” is unhelpful.
“I hate the term ‘contagion’ because it’s a blanket term,” Sany said. “You can’t put Guinea in the same group as Mali and Burkina Faso.”
According to Sany, despite some commonalities — governments unable to provide basic services for their people, corruption, and weak state institutions — the circumstances and mechanics of the recent coups and attempts are different.
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Thousands of protesters have hit the streets of some of Brazil’s biggest cities to denounce racist violence after the murder of a young Congolese refugee on one of Rio’s most famous beaches.
On Saturday morning demonstrators flocked to the waterside bar where 24-year-old Moïse Mugenyi Kabagambe was beaten to death late last month with fists, feet and sticks.
The racially-charged murder – captured in chilling security camera footage – was followed days later by another killing in which an unarmed black man was shot by a white neighbour who claimed to have confused him with a thief.
“It’s as if black blood is worth nothing,” said Bruna da Silva, one of several thousand people to join Saturday’s rally on Barra da Tijuca beach in Rio. “We’re here to say it does matter and that we won’t rest until we get justice.”
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