JACKIE JONES

I attended my first National Association of Black Journalists Convention in Detroit in 1982. It was a year after losing my job at the Washington Star, which closed and left me jobless just 5 months after I started working there. Within a month, I accepted a job at the Detroit Free Press, joined the local Black journalists chapter and became a member of its convention planning committee.

Conveniently, I lived just 3 miles away from the Book Cadillac Hotel, where the conference was held. The late Gwen Ifill, my friend and a former colleague from the Baltimore Evening Sun, stayed at my apartment and we commuted to the conference each day for meetings, workshops and social events. In the 44 years since, I’ ve missed just two conventions.

This year, NABJ hosts its 50th convention in Atlanta. Founded in December 1975 in Washington, D. C., the NABJ’ s first convention was held in 1976 at Texas Southern University, a historically Black university which had recently established a school of communications.

In this issue of the Morgan Global Journalism Review, NABJ founder Joe Davidson, a longtime journalist who worked at several outlets

including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, provides a history of the organization’ s annual convention and its evolution. Over the years, the NABJ Convention has hosted U. S. presidents and presidential candidates, foreign leaders and newsmakers of every stripe. Its annual gathering is the largest convening of Black journalists every summer, with plenary sessions, workshops for career and professional development, and a jobs fair featuring major news and media outlets, top-tier journalism graduate schools, and other communications outlets.

Speakers have included U. S. presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton, Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and Hillary Clinton.

Back in 1984, the NABJ convention became the lead story of the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, when then-Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young, displeased by Democratic

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