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DeWayne Wickham
This issue of the Morgan Global Journalism Review probes the lives of three men. Two of them I came to know up close during my journalism career; the other is a man whose path I never crossed, but wish I had.
Michel du Cille, was a Jamaican-born photojournalist and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Marion Barry served four terms as mayor of Washington, D.C., the capital city of the United States. In their separate ways, each of these men made a deep impression upon me.
Du Cille was a fellow journalist whom I encountered usually at the annual meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists, an organization to which we both belonged. Barry was a civil rights activist-turned-politician whom I occasionally covered as a journalist, but came to know best through the musings of John C. White, his press secretary and my longtime friend.
In this volume, White takes us inside the bubble that surrounded Barry and his inner circle of aides to describe what it was like to be “in the eye of the storm” that often engulfed Washington’s longest serving mayor. Hamil Harris, a longtime reporter with The Washington Post, writes about his close relationship with Barry, who often gave him news scoops even though he covered religion – not politics. And Adrienne Washington, a former columnist with the Washington Times writes about the politician who, despite his failings, many Washingtonians referred to as “Mayor-for-Life.”
Barry was a complex political personality and social and economic force in a place many people – because of his leadership – affectionately called “Chocolate City.”
Also in this book, E. R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize winner and associate professor in the School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes about Samuel Lowe, a man from China who found his way to Jamaica in the early years of the 20th century. He stayed there long enough to father the mother of Paula Madison, a retired NBCUniversal executive.
When Lowe returned to China, Madison’s mother was just 3 years old. She never saw her father again. Madison and her two brothers never met their grandfather, who lived out his life in China.
But after retiring, Madison set out to discover everything she could about her grandfather and her Chinese roots. Shipp tells readers what Madison found and what she did with that information. It’s a fascinating story of self-discovery – a fitting read for the Morgan Global Journalism Review.
DEAN'S CORNER