Photo from Newkirk’ s archives for the book Letters from Black America Credit: Ian Clarke / Center for New Media
something happened that seems almost impossible to imagine now.
Silence.
“ You could hear a pin drop,” she told me.
Then Mandela stepped into view. The man who had been imprisoned for over 27 years was no longer speaking from behind bars. He stood before his people- a free man.
“ Amandla.”
Power.
The crowd answered:
“ Ngawethu.”
To the people.
The exchange was more than a chant. It was recognition. Power had returned to the people who had been denied it. The crowd had waited. Mandela had endured. And Newkirk was there, notebook in hand, capturing the moment.
She recorded Mandela’ s declaration that he had fought against both white domination and Black domination. Decades later, Newkirk could still remember the moment. It was, she said, the highlight of her daily journalism career.
Then Newkirk told me something else. continued on next page
Newkirk’ s answer seems less like a destination than a declaration:“ everywhere.”
There were moments during our conversation when the magnitude of her career seemed to recede into a quieter place. She spoke about the people who shaped her. Her parents. Her children. The writers she loved. The places to which she has traveled. The students she’ s taught.
In our conversation, Newkirk moved easily between a discussion of journalism, history, culture and memory, as though the borders between them didn’ t exist. At one point, as we walked along a New York City sidewalk, she shifted from English to French with the ease of someone who moves seamlessly from one consciousness to another – from one identity to the other.
Newkirk is the director of undergraduate studies at New York University’ s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. But her research has often taken her across the Atlantic to Paris, where she has pursued the
Antique camera originally owned by Louis Newkirk( Pamela’ s father)
historic infatuation of Black Americans with that European city.
As my lengthy interview with her drew to a close, Newkirk’ s words,“ I feel like I belong everywhere,” no longer sounded abstract. They sounded lived.
In her office I saw more proof of her universality. The books. An antique typewriter. An old camera. The many documents she obtained in her travels that she plans to donate to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a world-renowned repository of Black history, uptown in Harlem.
This all seemed to reflect the instincts of her father, who owned a small antique shop and filled his business and the family’ s home with the fragments of Black history that he gathered. Pamela, the youngest of his two daughters born to him and her mother, became a journalist – a hunter-gatherer of another sort. Then she became a scholar and author, whose storytelling in her previous books preserved some precious Black history.
And now, with her new book on Black Americans in Paris about to be published, Pamela Newkirk shows once again that she is a race woman whose penchant for storytelling about Black life in the African diaspora is irrefutable evidence that Black people“ belong everywhere.” n
Angela Blount is a senior research fellow in the Center for New Media & Strategic Initiatives at Morgan State University. A strategic communications major and president of the MSU student chapter of the American Advertising Federation, she graduates in December 2026.
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