By Jayson Blair
The sky is patchy and purplish blue. It is almost 7 a.m. A spotty trail of men carrying bags and backpacks stuffed with their worldly possessions heads north on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE toward Good Hope Road.
Traffic crawls. Exhaust pours from tailpipes, from mouths. Up and down The Avenue, dressed-up women wearing 9-to-5 faces walk in the slumberous rhythm of the morning toward the Anacostia Metro station.
In a little while, the heavy iron security gates will go up on The Avenue's beauty salons and barbershops, its schools and churches, carryouts and storefront businesses. At Clara Muhammad School, the snow-bearded custodian already has raised the security shutters and turned on the lights.
In the east, a pale orange light breaks the horizon. It means that life, even on this forlorn side of Washington, soon will take its daily course.
I have been reading John Fountain since I was knee-high to a grasshopper (that’s how tall I still am) since I was in high school.
Reading those words was in great contrast to what we discussed on the podcast, the fact that so many in the journalism profession believe that Black writers can’t think, can’t write and are lazy.
John recently walked away from the Chicago Sun-Times after an editor rewrote his column – a rarity in the profession of columnists – on Aaron Lee, John’s former student who had recently died and whose documentary, Dream Chaser, about another South Side native and former high school teammate that tells of gangs, violence and hoop dreams.
“Yeah I said I resigned, I'm out – I'm free,” John said in the episode. “You set me free.”
It’s not dissimilar from the way he left The New York Times.
“God will take care of me,” John said he told Gerald Boyd, who was our managing editor.
John also shared about how he and his students at Roosevelt University wrote a story about 51 mostly Black women who were killed in Chicago over several years and whose stories went uncovered.
“Part of the reason isn’t on the front pages continually or isn’t on the nightly newscast that they were black women,” John said. “If that were 51 dogs or cats that would be continuous.”
John also told a story about a young Black boy in St. Louis named Rodney McAllister who had been mauled by dogs and how it galvanized the community. He talked about how he could not get it on the front page of The Times because they had another “dog story” running about an elderly white couple in California who survived a pit bull attack.
“This wasn't a dog story. This was a story about a little black boy and all those things I just mentioned,” he said, referencing how Rpndy fell through the cracks and how his death galvanized his community.
“There are no urban stories, suburban stories, nor rural stories, no Black stories, white stories, there are only human stories,” he added. “They may have different faces, they may have different dynamics, different elements but it is a human story.”
He noted, “It is important we are going to purport that journalism is essential to democracy, that people are rationale human beings and they are capable of discerning truth, then we need to present that truth and if we don’t do that in its totality, then journalism is a lie.”
John believes that to do that, Black Americans need to learn to “tell our own stories.”
I will be the first to tell you that I have come across many great white editors over my time in journalism. Hodding Carter III, who was a reporter at the Delta Times-Democrat pushing for Civil Rights in the 1960s, was my journalism professor. Howell Raines, the editor of the New York Times when I was there, was a Civil Rights pioneer when he was at the Birmingham News. Gene Roberts, another professor at the University of Maryland, was a reporter in Virginia and North Carolina in the 1960s before becoming the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of The Times.
No journalist touched my life more, than Reese Cleghorn, who was the dean at Maryland. He was the editorial page editor at The Charlotte Observer when notoriously racist politicians like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms were fighting Civil Rights and fighting against integration.
He gave me hope of a better tomorrow. He gave me hope that change could happen. He even gave me hope after my own scandal at The Times and was among the few that reached out to embrace me afterwards. Reese knew there were only human stories but that there needed to be more Black Americans telling those stories.
On that, I think, Reese, John and I agree.
As Maya Angelou wrote in her poem, Still I Rise, “I am the dream and the hope of the slave.”
No matter what I do, whether its write or podcast or coach people or consult with others, whether I fall or I rise up, I don’t forget, that I am the dream and the hope of a slave. One committed, like John is, to building a better world.
For more reading:
Aaron T. Lee: A Life and A Dream Fulfilled
Student Journalists Tell Unreported Stories of 51 Women
The Dream Struggle of King Avenue