LETTER THEEDITOR FROM
DeWAYNE WICKHAM
Fifty years ago, I was“ in the room where it happened.”
It was in a meeting space at the Sheraton Park Hotel, in Washington, D. C., on the evening of Saturday, December 12, 1975, that a small group of Black journalists gathered after covering the second day of a three-day meeting of the Third National Institute of Black Elected Public Officials.
The Institute brought together more than 800 of the nation’ s Black leaders. Among the invitees were Dorothy Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women; Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP; Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party; Wallace D. Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam; Carl Stokes, mayor of Cleveland; Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jesse Jackson.
The gathering also attracted more than 50 Black journalists. The focus of the meeting they were sent to cover was politics and Black economic development. But when many of these reporters got together that night, the talk was about surviving in the journalism profession.
In 1968, the Kerner Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson created to study the causes of more than 150 socalled“ race riots,” which sweep the nation in the 1960s, reported that“ Fewer than 5 percent of the people employed by the news business in editorial jobs” were Black.
Despite a wave of hirings of Black journalists following the Kerner Commission’ s findings, by 1975, that percentage had barely moved. FAIR( Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) reported in a June 19, 2020, article titled“ What Journalism Needs Is Not More Diversity, but Less White Supremacy,” that by 1998, Blacks were“ still just 5.4 % of newsroom employees.”
It was against this backdrop that a small group of Black journalists under the leadership of Chuck Stone, a 51-year-old columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, gathered to plot a survival plan. Stone was cut from an old cloth, one that produced Black journalists like Chicago Defender publisher Robert S. Abbott, and Charlotta Bass, the editor of the California Eagle – two Black journalists who rose above others.
Stone, too, stood out. During his 19-year career at the Daily News, at least 75 people pursued by Philadelphia police turned themselves in to him to ensure their safe treatment by city cops. So, not surprisingly, the Black journalists in the hotel meeting room the night of December 12, 1975 – many of them not yet 30 years old – accepted Stone’ s leadership.
When asked about the role Stone played in creating NABJ, Les Payne, a Newsday investigative reporter who attended the group’ s first meeting, gave a tongue-in-cheek nod to Stone’ s leadership. There were a lot of“ leaders” in the room that night, Payne said.“ But Chuck was the one holding the clipboard.”
Ironically, the deliberations of the more than 800 Black leaders, whose meeting the NABJ“ Founders” went to Washington, D. C. to cover 50 years ago, are all but lost to history.
But the transformative decision its“ Founders” made in creating the National Association of Black Journalists continues to resonate as the group’ s membership has grown from 44 in 1975 to more than 4,000 Black journalists in 2025.
And while the percentage of the nation’ s Black journalists has seen little movement since the group’ s founding, the presence of Blacks in media leadership positions holds out the hope that meaningful progress may yet be made.
Hopefully it will not take another 50 years. •
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