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"And yet I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black and bid him sing."
By Countee Cullen
From "Yet Do I Marvel"
This article originally appeared in the Fall 1993 issue of Outlook, the newsletter of the Institute for Journalism Education.
By Earl Caldwell
For the journalist Robert C. Maynard, the words of the poet Countee Cullen made a perfect fit. More than anything else, Bob Maynard was a newspaperman. He fell in love with the craft as a kid growing up in the tough neighborhoods of the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. And in his life, which spanned 56 years, that never changed: it never did.
In the world that he loved, Maynard did it all. He rose to the top as a writer, reporter and editor. Eventually, he broke through to become the first African American to own and publish a major daily newspaper.
So large were his accomplishments that when he died, his peers looked at the whole of what he had achieved and they gave him the kind of acclaim rarely given in the newspaper industry.
Bob Maynard made himself special. Much of the time, what a newspaperman accomplishes gets measured almost entirely by the words he puts on paper. Maynard passed that test -- but for him that was just a starting place. He also possessed what Countee Cullen called "this curious thing." He had a voice. It was a voice that was deep and rich and full, and he coupled that with the enormous command he had of the language. The combination of the two brought life to Cullen's words: "To make a poet black, and bid him sing."
Maynard came of age in a newspaper industry that virtually held out a sign: "For white males only." That merely piqued his determination. It only made him ready for battle. And he did that. The New York City of his youth was a town filled with newspapers, yet, he couldn't get a start on any of the dailies. No problem. He went out of town. After some breakthrough experiences on some black weeklies, he wound up in southeastern Pennsylvania in the town of York. When he was finished there, he was managing editor and on the recommendation list for a Nieman fellowship at Harvard.
He came away from that experience with so much going for him that the door was opened. Editors at The Washington Post -- a newspaper with credentials that say "top of the line" -- beckoned to him.
At The Post, Maynard did it all. There was nothing he couldn't cover. He started on the streets working riots, and he wound up at the White House covering former President Lyndon Johnson. Maynard wasn't finished. He showed a mind so sharp that he was chosen to speak for the paper. Later, he was the readers' advocate as the newspaper's ombudsman. All those experiences positioned Maynard for the work that was to change the industry. He set out to train young journalists, those who had been locked out because they were not white. He could have made some noise as a rabble-rouser. But that was not his way, not his style.
And Bob Maynard had style. It was in his voice; it was in his body language, and yes, it was in his soul. Together, it amounted to a formidable array of skills.
He stated the goal: We want to remove from the lexicon of American journalism the words, "We can't find any qualified (minorities)."
Just to train young people to get them into newsrooms was a major task. But for Maynard, that was only part of the job. He believed everybody, regardless of race or sex, had to know why it was important. So he brought a whole different language to the mission. These were his words: portrayal, diversity, demystification.
He was brilliant -- spellbinding, too -- in describing the damage that the media were inflicting with their portrayal of those who were not white.
He was eloquent in arguing the case for diversity in the newsroom -- in detailing the ways diversity makes America better and stronger.
He demystified that which had been complicated, and he did it in a way that brought the editors' association to embrace his "Year 2000 Strategy" for a complete desegregation of the news business.
As it happened, Maynard didn't get all the years he should have had. But for him, you say this: "My, how he used the time he had."
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