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"Committed
to the Cause:
A Salute to NABJ's Presidents"
Chuck Stone
1975-1977
Essay by Paul
Brock
Long before becoming NABJ's first president, Chuck Stone was
a journalistic legend.
 He
had edited three influential black newspapers - the New York Age, the
Washington Afro American and the Chicago Defender. He had written two nonfiction
books, "Tell It Like It Is" and "Back Political Power in America," and
a novel, "King Strut." He had been Harlem congressman Adam Clayton
Powell's chief administrative assistant and speechwriter.
As the now-defunct Washington Star put it in 1969, Stone was
a "tough-minded militant" who "probably poured forth
more angry rhetoric, ruffled more political moderates and simultaneously
pacified and frightened more whites than most of (Washington's) other
black leaders."
He mellowed not one bit after becoming an outspoken columnist
for the Philadelphia Daily News in 1971.
Enough of a firebrand to have worked with Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael
- yet with unassailable journalistic credentials - the sharp-tongued
but affable Stone was superbly suited to be the first leader of an organization
seeking to not only change the way the media would tell Black America's
story, but who was going to tell it.
Moreover, reaching that goal would require organizing the
previously unorganizable - black journalists. They had been trying and failing
for years to pull together a national group representing their interests.
"The challenge we faced was on two levels. Creating NABJ
was black journalists' response to the Kerner Commission's call for
improving the coverage of the black community," Stone recalled. "We
set out to both increase black employment in the mainstream media and,
just as importantly, to examine and analyze the institutionalized racism
that plagued the reporting about black people in the mainstream media."
Stone used an acronym to evaluate stories: FEAT, for fair,
even-handed, accurate and thorough.
"The mainstream papers just weren't living up to that
standard," he said. "Even when they weren't making serious
factual errors, they weren't giving the complete picture of what was happening
to blacks. That's what we had in mind."
As president of the Association of Black Journalists in Philadelphia, Stone
led one of the well-organized local journalists' associations that came together
as NABJ. Others included the Washington Association of Black Journalists,
the Chicago Black Journalists and the Baltimore Black Media Workers.
But before NABJ could get off the ground, it had to define
what it stood for. Stone had definite ideas about that.
"The one thing I insisted on was that we be called journalists,
not media workers or some other euphemism," he recalled. "I
said I wouldn't be part of any organization that called itself anything
else. In a sense, it was a way of adding dignity and authenticity to
our profession. I think choosing to call ourselves journalists helped
to attract people to our ranks."
It is almost impossible to overstate the obstacles facing
the 120 black journalists invited by the NABJ Interim Committee to
meet at Washington Sheraton Park Hotel on Dec. 12, 1975. Only 44 actually
signed the roster and paid dues, and thus became founding members. But they
and many more showed up the next night for a dinner at which James Baldwin,
Nikki Giovanni and Congresswoman Yvonne Burke of California spoke.
At the time, the best guess was that African Americans made
up less than one-tenth of 1 percent of journalists at major newspapers. The percentage
in the broadcast media was higher, about 4 percent, because the Federal Communications
Commission insisted that television stations hire minorities.
Much of the media - typified by Herb Lipson, publisher of
Philadelphia Magazine, who blasted the new organization in an editorial -
bristled with hostility toward the very idea of a black journalists' group.
"Even some white journalists who were normally allies
just did not see the professional imperative for a black journalists'
organization," Stone recalled. "They claimed they saw a conflict
of interest between the standards of the profession and our proclaimed ethnicity
and gently speculated about our ability to be 'objective.'"
For some, the backlash was more than verbal.
One of NABJ's first regional directors, Sandra Gilliam-Beale,
a television anchor in Toledo, Ohio, was frankly given the choice of resigning
from the organization or losing her job. Some black reporters refrained from
joining out of fear they would suffer the same fate. But many more,
of course, defied the threats of their editors and news directors and
joined.
That was largely because during two one-year terms as president,
Stone worked relentlessly to establish NABJ as a national presence. He spoke
out forcefully against the racially exclusionary hiring practices of
the nation's major dailies. Speaking for NABJ, he castigated presidential
candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter for ignoring African American issues
and concerns, and demanded that President Ford's Interior Secretary Earl
Butz be fired for publicly telling a racially demeaning joke.
And he seemed to take particular glee in pointing out instances
of biased reporting, such as the time when The Washington Post put a story about
a black rape suspect on the front page on the same day it buried a piece
about a white rape suspect deep in the metro section.
"We cited any number of specific instances of that kind
of shoddy reporting," Stone said, "that showed how deeply racism
was imbedded in the mainstream media. I used to drive (Post Executive Editor)
Ben Bradlee crazy."
For all of his successes at calling attention to the media's
failings, Stone failed to reach one group: major university journalism
schools. "They have still not done enough in attracting minority
students and teachers to their classrooms," he said, "and the historically
black colleges and universities cannot fill the void by themselves.
Our efforts with the journalism schools while I was president of NABJ were
mostly stonewalled by disinterest and subtle racism."
The continuing dearth of minority journalists coming out of "J" school, he
added, means the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) has a handy
excuse for not hiring more minorities.
"They're once again saying they can't find any, and this
time they're probably telling the truth," he said.
After stepping down from the presidency, Stone continued to
break new journalistic ground.
Because of his reputation for integrity, he became a trusted
middleman between Philadelphia police and murder suspects, more than
75 of whom "surrendered" to Stone rather than to the cops. He also
negotiated the release of hostages five times - in a prison, a bank,
a motel and two private homes. He became a leading critic of the city's first
black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, for the 1985 Operation MOVE bombing that killed
11 people and wiped out an entire neighborhood.
In 1991, to the almost audible relief of Philadelphia politicians,
Stone retired from daily journalism to accept the Walter Spearman professorship
at the University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
He has also held visiting professorships at Syracuse University and Trinity
College in his hometown of Hartford, Conn., and was a John F. Kennedy
Fellow at Harvard University's Institute for Politics. He reportedly
has four books in progress.
"In my wildest dreams, I never thought NABJ would grow
to have 3,500 members," Stone said. "I thought we'd have maybe
two or three hundred. At the start, we were ridiculed, we were pressured,
we were questioned by all sorts of people who never questioned anyone else's
right to come together in their own interests. We survived because we upheld
the highest standards of our profession while maintaining our identity as
black people. We knew we had to be the best. We couldn't even afford
mediocrity because we were under a microscope."
That attitude put NABJ on a solid foundation a quarter century
ago and laid the groundwork for the organizational strength it enjoys
today.
Paul Brock is director of media relations for the Village
Foundation in Virginia. A former journalist, he served as NABJ's first executive
director.
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