“I’m willing to bet you’ve never invited a Negro boy to your home and that there isn’t one Negro kid among all your friends…Wouldn’t it be something to cheer about if the paper hired Negro copyboys and gave them the same sort of chance you and your friends are getting in the city room — even letting them prove their talent as members of your [in-house] Timesweek staff?”
— George Streator, the first Black journalist to work for the New York Times.
The more you study the history of white people in America, the harder it is to explain the privilege, ineptitude and cowardice that permeate Caucasian culture.
For instance, when white journalist Henry Jarvis Raymond and financiers George Jones and Edward Wesley founded the New York Times in 1851, Black journalists didn’t exist. Sure, there were already multiple Black newspapers, including Freedom’s Journal, whose office was literally next door to the Times’ founders, but how were these great white intrepid journalists supposed to know that?
Or maybe Black journalists weren’t very good. Black newspapers like The New York Age regularly outsold the Times, but the inability to find Black reporters was clearly a problem. Or maybe it was too dangerous to hire Black journalists. The Times would publish articles by Black freelancers like George Edmund Haynes. But he graduated from an inferior college no one in New York had ever heard of, called Columbia University. Or maybe white people didn’t see race until Haynes began writing freelance stories about this nationwide terrorist campaign called the Red Summer of 1919; no one had heard about the greatest sociologist in the history of this country (except for the president of the United States, of course).
The New York Times didn’t employ a single Black journalist for its first 95 years of existence. The Washington Post took 75 years to hire its first Black journalist, Simeon Booker and fired him before he uncovered a story down in Mississippi about a boy named Emmett Till. The fact that every single editor, owner, manager, executive and HR person at every major newspaper in America simultaneously overlooked every Black reporter in the entire country while millions of other white people didn’t say anything is probably a coincidence.
There’s only one other logical explanation:
Either the white people who made those decisions—and their readers—are stupid, cowards who are bad at their jobs...
Or they’re racist.
But that’s not the remarkable part.
The most astonishing thing about Black history is how unremarkable our trailblazers are. Frederick Douglass did not graduate from Harvard with a degree in abolition. Harriet Tubman didn’t study maps or spend her childhood hiding geography books under her skirt. And on Dec. 12, 1975, 44 Black reporters, editors and staffers working at major news outlets started the National Association of Black Journalists—the world’s largest and oldest organization for…you know.
Some of the founders include:
Paul Delaney, the Times' first Washington Bureau correspondent
Mal Johnson, a pioneering broadcast journalist at Cox Broadcasting.
Vernon Jarrett, the first Black syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune
Max Robinson, the first Black network news anchor
They weren’t organizers or strategists. They weren’t brave pioneers or courageous rulebreakers. They were just Black people who wanted other Black people to have opportunities.
Can you imagine?
Today’s Reading List:
Can humans spontaneously combust? The baffling cases explained. by Lauren Leffer.
Bonus: Here’s Why You’re Wrong by Michael Harriot, Panama Jackson and Touré
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