The Black Reporter Who Exposed The Military’s Lies About the Atom Bomb — by dopper0189,Black Kos Managing Editor
Charles Harold Loeb (April 2, 1905 – August 21, 1978) was an American journalist known for exposing the truth about radiation casualties from the Hiroshima bomb. Loeb's articles reporting on World War II were published in multiple newspapers with support of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (known then as the National Negro Publishers Association, or NNPA). Loeb served multiple terms as chairman of the Editorial Society for the NNPA. In the world of Black newspapers, his name alone was enough to attract readers. Charles Loeb defied the American military’s propaganda and denials to report on how deadly radiation from the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima sickened and killed people long after the event.
Mr Loeb is among the greatest investigative reporters of 20th century but has never got the credit he deserves. I first learned about Charles Loeb years ago when I was watching a special on Hiroshima and a family friend mentioned his name. I later did some research on him.
In his groundbreaking reports, Loeb explained how deadly radiation sickened and killed the city of Hiroshima’s residents. His perspective, while at times coldly analytic, cast light on a major wartime cover up. His page one articles published in Black Newspapers directly contradicted the War Department, the Manhattan Project, and The New York Times star reporter, William L. Laurence, on what had become a bitter dispute between the victor and the vanquished. Japan insisted that the bomb’s invisible radiation at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had led to waves of sudden death and lingering illness. The United States, on the other hand emphatically denied the charge.
History and science proved later Loeb right. Loeb’s reporting not only challenged the official US government line but also echoed the skepticism of many Black Americans who worried that race had played a role in the United States’ decision to drop the experimental weapons on Japan but not Germany. Black clergy and activists at times sympathized openly with the bomb’s victims. “They were willing to question the main narrative,” said Alex Wellerstein, a historian who glimpsed this skepticism while researching his recent book, “Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States.”
Loeb’s questioning never got the recognition it deserved. While hailed as a civic leader in Cleveland, his hometown, and more widely as a pioneering Black journalist, he was unappreciated for having exposed the bomb’s stealthy dangers at the dawn of the atomic age. His insights were mostly lost to history.
In one article, Loeb told of a press tour of Hiroshima that had crossed paths with a military investigation of the atomic victims by American scientists and doctors. The study had been ordered by Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the U.S. Army, who directed the making of the bomb, and led by his deputy, Brig. Gen. Thomas F. Farrell. One scientist was surprised to hear General Farrell tell the investigative team in an early briefing that its mission was to “prove there was no radioactivity.”
General Groves reportedly wanted the bomb to be seen as a deadly form of traditional warfare rather than as a new inhumane weapon. Groves was concerned about the a 1925 international treaty that banned the use of germ and chemical weapons. Therefor the head of the Manhattan project wanted no depiction of atom bombs as unique weapons, and banned public discussion of radiological warfare by personnel.
General Groves clearly understood the radiation issue as early as 1943 but kept it from top American officials, including Harry S. Truman. Scholars say that at the time he authorized the bombing of Hiroshima, the now President Truman, knew almost nothing of the bomb’s radiation effects. Something he later spoke of regrets for this.
Shortly after the atomic strike of Aug. 6, 1945, The New York Times began covering the radiation dispute between Japan and the United States. In September, the headline of Mr. Laurence’s Page 1 article said scientific readings at the American test site “Confirm That Blast, and not Radiation, Took Toll,” contradicting “Tokyo Tales” of ray victims. The next day, The Times ran an article with a Tokyo dateline in which General Farrell’s investigative team, as the headline stated, found “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.”
General Groves and his aides, it turns out, were telling only half the story, as Loeb detail in his reporting. Atomic bombs emit two kinds of radiation. In the first seconds, the expanding fireball sends out colossal bursts of neutrons and gamma rays powerful enough to speed through the air for miles and still penetrate steel, concrete and human bodies. They break chromosomes and upend the body’s cellular machinery, causing sickness, cancer and death. These vanish instantly and are hard to measure directly.
An atomic detonations also generate a second, more persistent and detectable radiation. The splitting atoms produce hundreds of different kinds of radioactive fragments, including Strontium-90 and Cesium-137. These isotopes emit their own deadly radiations that last for years. These particles blown out by the mushroom cloud can travel on the wind for hundreds of miles, raining back to earth as radioactive fallout. Detecting them can easily be done with a Geiger counter.
At Hiroshima, the American scientists found detectable fallout — but not at ground zero. Downwind, they found the blast had produced a minor trail of weak radioactivity that led to the city’s edge and a dense bamboo forest. Therefor in official interviews, General Groves and his aides gave press tours both in Los Alamos New Mexico and Hiroshima at atomic detonation sites. He would direct attention to the low readings of Geiger counters as evidence of little or no radiation danger. “You could live there forever,” Mr. Laurence of The New York Times quoted the general as saying of Hiroshima.
In contrast, Mr. Loeb addressed the fireball’s initial burst, not the nonexistent fallout at ground zero. He did so by reporting on the findings of Colonel Stafford L. Warren, who before the war was a professor of radiology at the University of Rochester. Warren was the Manhattan Project’s top physician. His stateside job was to protect bomb makers from radiation hazards. In Japan he lead the medical evaluation of the Japanese victims. As detailed in the 2020 book, “Atomic Doctors,” he threw himself into gleaning what information he could from the hospitals, their patients and surviving Japanese doctors. Repeatedly, he saw the ravages of bomb radiation: fever, diarrhea, lost hair, oozing blood. Patients who seemed to have mild cases would die suddenly. James L. Nolan Jr., author of “Atomic Doctors,” said Colonel Warren was careful in his medical reports to downplay the ills. “Groves was his boss,” Mr. Nolan said in an interview. “He knew his audience.”
Loeb’s education most likely helped him discern the truth. At Howard University, one of the nation’s leading historically Black colleges and universities, he had taken a pre-med curriculum before turning to newspaper work and was familiar with the basics of physics and chemistry, anatomy and pathology, X-rays and lead shielding. What kept him from going to medical school, he recalled late in life, was lack of tuition, not interest. It’s unknown where Loeb first encountered Colonel Warren both men frequented the Dai-ichi Hotel, which was a meeting ground for military officers and civilian correspondents.
That October, Loeb’s article was carried by The Atlanta Daily World as well as other Black-owned newspapers such as The Baltimore Afro-American, The Philadelphia Tribune and The Cleveland Call and Post, where he had worked before the war and later returned. The papers were part of a Black press group that had been founded early in the war by 22 publishers and saw large spikes in circulation as Black readers sought to learn about their soldiers.
Loeb described the correspondents returning from Hiroshima as “completely flabbergasted.” In contrast, his own article was unemotional. He numbered his conclusions, as if writing a scientific paper. Radiation was his third point, after blast and damage.
The former pre-med student ignored the Geiger counters and the official denials that had appeared in The New York Times and other papers. Instead, Loeb noted the military study biased and “designed to lay to rest the wild speculation” about radiation victims in the devastated city. Loeb then proceeded to substantiate the human suffering with hard facts.
Loeb first introduced “Our Colonel Stafford Warren” (using pronoun our to evoke trust) as the bomb project’s “Chief Medical Officer.” Although Loeb wrote nothing of Colonel Warren’s denying the existence of radiation victims, which was the official results of the investigative team. Instead, Loeb quoted the colonel as identifying the proximate cause of the gruesome ills.
Of Colonel Warren the radiologist, Loeb quoted him saying “a single exposure to a dose of gamma radiation (similar in effect to X-rays) at the time of the detonation” gave rise to the “gruesome ills”. His proposed cause was understated and almost clinical in nature but a radical departure from the US military’s blanket denials. But Loeb, in closing the section, did note that Colonel Warren ruled out the possibility of sickness caused by “dangerous amounts of radio activity on the ground.”
Few if any journalists of Loeb’s day approached his level of detail and tight focus on reporting on the radiation poisoning. But a month after Loeb’s article in November of 1945, public awareness of the radioactive fallout had grown, and General Groves could no longer deny the toll of the bomb’s initial bursts. Instead, General Groves grotesquely described their impact on humans as “a very pleasant way to die.” But the Black press kept pounding away at this lie, with Baltimore Afro-American writing of “thousands of radiation victims.”
The military finally owned up to the enormity of the misinformation campaign. In June 1946, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey wrote medical investigators saw the radiation emissions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki as responsible for up to 20 percent of the deaths. The twin bombings killed approximately 100,000 to 200,000 people, so the radioactive fallout killed up to 40,000 people. The radiation also left a lethal legacy, studies of the survivors revealed that they endured high rates of cancer, stroke, cataracts and heart disease. Babies in utero at the time of the bombings suffered poor development, epileptic seizures and reduced head size.
Memories of Japan reportedly haunted Loeb long after the war. Military censorship took out any attempt by reporters to portray the human suffering. The US military allowed depictions of broken buildings, not not broken bodies, because of this Loeb’s articles gave no details of the victims. His daughter Stella Loeb-Munson recalled him talking of melted faces and skin hanging from wasted bodies. During an interview, Mrs. Loeb-Munson pointed to a photograph he took of a crumpled body on a sidewalk. “It totally messed him up for years,” she said. Slowly he turned from sullen to angry. “He had to talk about it — he had to,” Mrs. Loeb-Munson said. “He was really messed up. He never really got over it.”
Loeb died in 1978 at 73. While getting no credit for his atomic scoop, he became known late in life among other journalists as the dean of Black newsmen. In 1971, he spoke of his long career in an oral history interview with Columbia University. Then age 66 and managing editor of The Cleveland Call and Post, Mr. Loeb said that he regretted not going back to medical school but that he felt he probably did more social good as a journalist than he would have as a surgeon. He said it was his great good fortune to marry a woman who put personal goals ahead of money. He recalled his wife, Beulah Loeb, saying “We’ll starve together”.
Loeb in the interview spoke at length about Black publishing and the community it served. “One of our functions is to tell the Black side of any story,” he said, as Black readers were often skeptical of the white news media. Even when Black papers got scooped on big stories, he added, “our readers still buy our newspapers to see what we said about it.” Black newspapers perform “a real service” not only for Black people but also, Mr. Loeb said, the press in general because they reliably present alternative points of view and fresh perspectives.
“You have to tell the truth,” he added. If not, he said, “you’re in trouble.”
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Xavier University of Louisiana and Ochsner Health leaders signed a legal agreement today to create the nation’s fifth HBCU allopathic medical school, a move that physicians assert can mitigate disparities that kill Black people with some diseases two times more often than others.
The students at Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine, the only HBCU medical school on the Gulf Coast, will receive cultural competency training, said Xavier President Reynold Verret. And in addition to a curriculum that examines and promotes health equity, the doctors of color who graduate from the school will be role models in underserved communities, said Leo Seoane, executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer at Ochsner.
Those distinct aspects of the medical school are significant because most doctors in the U.S. might not understand customs, challenges, fears and sources of pride within the Black community. And it’s highly unlikely that they look like the people of color they treat. Less than 6% of doctors in the United States are Black. And the health outcomes for Black patients are deadly and dismal.
The CDC reports that Black people are less likely than white people to be current on screenings for breast, cervical and colon cancer. And while white women are more likely to get breast cancer, Black women are 40% more likely to die from it. Even when adjusted for tumor stage when diagnosed with colon cancer, Black people are 20% more likely to die from colon cancer within five years of diagnosis. And Black men are twice as likely to die from prostate cancer than other men.
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- Negro Foot, VA — The Richmond Times-Dispatch did some digging into the name Negro Foot — and it’s even more racist than you’re imaging. According to their reporting, the name appears to be a reference to a severed foot taken from an enslaved African as form of punishment. The unincorporated town was actually originally called N***erfoot, but in 1981 the name was reportedly “cleaned up” according to the Virginia Mercury.
- Negro Creek in Kansas and Missouri — According to reporting from Capital B, the creek that flows in both Kansas and Missouri was named after a Black man who died in the water while attempting to escape slavery. However, other reporting suggest it was named after the community’s first Black settler. In 2021, the creek was renamed Adams creek after the last name of the Black man it was originally named after.
- Anna, Illinois — If you read Anna, Illinois and thought it was on this list by accident — think again! According to reporting from ProPublica Illinois, the name actually stands for “Ain’t No N***ers Allowed” signifying the rural town as a “sundown town,” i.e. a town that didn’t allow Black people after sundown.
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A panel of federal judges has tossed out Louisiana’s new congressional map, striking the state’s second majority-Black district just months after it was signed into law.
The ruling, if it stands, could be a win for Republicans, since Democrats were almost certain to win the newly drawn district.
Louisiana’s congressional lines have been bogged down in a long-running legal battle. A federal court found in the summer of 2022 that the map Louisiana Republicans drew after the 2020 Census likely violated the Voting Rights Act because it diluted the power of Black Louisianians. The Supreme Court, however, allowed that map to be used for the 2022 midterms, and it saw five white Republicans and one Black Democrat elected in a state where Black residents made up roughly a third of the population.
But ultimately, the Supreme Court restored that lower court’s decision, and the state had to redraw its map to give Black voters more power. The GOP-dominated state legislature compiled, drawing a second majority-Black district in January that snakes from northwest Louisiana all the way down to East Baton Rouge.
The new map carved up GOP Rep. Garrett Graves’ seat to create a district in which 56 percent of residents were Black. It would have also partially offset an efficient Republican partisan gerrymander in North Carolina, where the GOP basically automatically netted three seats for 2024 in mid-decade redistricting.
But a group of self-identified “non-Black voters” quickly filed suit challenging this new map in Louisiana, alleging that the new map was itself an impermissible racial gerrymander.
A divided panel of federal judges agreed on Tuesday. District Judges David C. Joseph and Robert R. Summerhays — both appointees of former President Donald Trump — tossed the new district, saying that race played a “predominate role” when drawing the lines.
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A UN-backed court has issued an arrest warrant for the Central African Republic’s former president François Bozizé over possible crimes against humanity committed by the nation’s military between 2009 and 2013.
The alleged crimes include murder, enforced disappearance, torture, rape and other inhumane acts, according to the special criminal court (CPS), a hybrid jurisdiction located in the capital Bangui with Central African and foreign magistrates.
Bozizé, 77, seized power in Central Africa in 2003 in a coup before being overthrown 10 years later. He now heads the country’s main rebellion and has been in exile in Guinea-Bissau since March 2023.
The international warrant was issued on 27 February but only announced on Tuesday, according to the CPS, which was set up in 2015 with UN sponsorship. The CPS is calling for Guinea-Bissau’s cooperation to “arrest” and “hand over the suspect”.
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Gangs in Haiti laid siege to several neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, burning homes and exchanging gunfire with police for hours as hundreds fled the violence early Thursday in one of the biggest attacks since Haiti’s new prime minister was announced.
The attacks began late Wednesday in neighborhoods including Solino and Delmas 18, 20 and 24 located southwest of the main international airport, which has remained closed for nearly two months amid relentless gang violence.
“The gangs started burning everything in sight,” said a man called Néne, who declined to give his last name out of fear. “I was hiding in a corner all night.”
He walked with a friend as they carried a dusty red suitcase between them that was stuffed with clothes — the only thing they could save. The clothes belonged to Néne’s children, whom he had rushed out of Delmas 18 around dawn during a pause in the fighting.
The neighborhoods that once bustled with traffic and pedestrians were like ghost towns shortly after sunrise, with a heavy silence blanketing the area except for the occasional bleating from a lone goat.
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