FINDING PAMELA NEWKIRK
FINDING PAMELA NEWKIRK
But it was in newsrooms that she got her best education.
Her early days in journalism took her to the New York Amsterdam News and the Knickerbocker News, where she became a state Capitol correspondent and broke stories during the administration of Gov. Mario Cuomo.
Then came a stint in Washington, D. C., as the Capitol Hill correspondent for the Gannett News Service where she reported on the 1988 Democratic National Convention, Rev. Al Sharpton and the case of Tawana Brawley, the Wappinger Falls, N. Y., Black teenager whose accusation of abduction and rape by four white men- including an assistant prosecutor- deepened the nation’ s racial divide and the rift between Black journalists and their White editors. Newkirk’ s reporting put her right at the center of this national story, which a New York State grand jury concluded was fabricated.
In this and other stories, Newkirk was learning how to report on America while also learning how America reported on Black people. Not long afterwards, her journalism career put her on the frontline of a much bigger story that carried her across an ocean.
In the days leading up to Nelson Mandela’ s release from prison in February 1990, Newkirk traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, as part of the entourage of U. S. journalists who accompanied Jesse Jackson to that momentous event.
With journalists in tow, Jackson stopped in London, where he continued his advocacy for sanctions against South Africa. Newkirk reported that then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a message she wanted Jackson to take to Black South African leader:“ Tell Mr. Mandela, how many hopes ride on him for the future of his country,” she told Jackson.
Mandela had been imprisoned for nearly 28 years for resisting the oppression of South Africa’ s Black majority. Apartheid’ s grip on that country was just beginning to slip when Jackson and his traveling press corps arrived there.
sixth woman ever interred into the Panthéon, France’ s mausoleum for some of its most revered historical figures.
There was something almost breathtaking about that. A Black American woman, who was born in poverty in St. Louis during America’ s Jim Crow Era, moved an ocean away and became one of France’ s greatest heroes.
In telling this story, Newkirk is not merely studying Paris, she probes the soft underbelly of the connections of Black Americans to this great city. Its streets. Its train stations. Its bistros and cabarets. Its theaters.
Its memories.
At museums, including the Louvre, Newkirk encountered the works of Barbara Chase-Riboud, the visual artist, novelist and poet whose life and work had also become part of Paris’ Black American story.
Working for the New York Post at the time, Newkirk wrote nine articles documenting the unfolding story of Mandela’ s impending release from prison.
Then came Feb. 11, 1990- the day Mandela walked out of Victor Verster Prison.
Later that day, he appeared on the balcony of Cape Town City Hall before a massive crowd of people who had waited years for this day. Newkirk remembers the crowd as enormous. The anticipation waiting to hear him was palpable. But before Mandela appeared, Newkirk remembers that
BLACK WOMAN IN PARIS
Paris offered Newkirk endless evidence of the impact that Black Americans have made throughout the city. Here was Josephine Baker. There was Ella Fitzgerald. Here was James Baldwin. There was Barbara Chase-Riboud and Richard Wright. Their footsteps and fingerprints were everywhere. And in pursuit of them was Newkirk, wading through it all with the trained eye of a seasoned journalist and the curiosity of an accomplished university scholar. Newkirk summed up her expansive research for me with one short sentence.“ I feel like I belong everywhere.”
Those words stayed with me throughout our conversation. Perhaps because belonging has been one of the great existential questions that generations of Black Americans have struggled with. Where are we allowed to belong? Who gets to claim a place? What does it mean to carry a history of displacement and still insist upon belonging somewhere?
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