Chapter Eleven
During the riots nearly every one of us had moments when we had the urge to jump at the cops for some unjust move, just as Ted Jones had confronted them during their vicious attack on the crowd. We admired Ted, but the action he took raised questions among us. Did being black make our roles as journalists different? Editors always tell reporters, "You are the neutral observer. You do not get involved." Was putting our jobs on the line a risk we were supposed to accept? Questions like these would follow us through our careers.
Maybe it was different for Ted because he was a New York City guy, raised in Harlem. He may have been looking at the people being beaten and thinking of his mother or father. He never talked about what compelled him; in fact, he pretended that nothing had happened. But we knew he was putting on the line what he had struggled many years to achieve.
Early on, Ted knew he wanted to become a newspaperman, but not just anywhere. He wanted to be a Timesman. He loved The New York Times so much that to get there, he started at the lowest level – as a messenger. It was 1953. While doing that, he also earned his college degree. That got him to copy boy. In 1958, he earned a master's at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. That got him to editorial assistant.
When you love something the way he did though, you stay with it. He never saw his long, slow rise as a racial issue. "There were a whole lot of us (the others being white) who started out together," he said. "Sydney Schanberg. Bob Lipsyte. Bill Farrell. We were the young turks." Ted finally made staff in 1961.
When the riot broke out, Ted was the first Times reporter on the story. For two days straight, The Times featured his stories on page one. He wrote of the white off-duty cop who shot and killed a 15-year-old black youth who had allegedly threatened him with a knife and of the protests that followed. On a Saturday night, all hell broke loose. "It was just building, building, building," he said.
The decision that Ted Jones made to confront the cops, we kicked around among ourselves for a long time. It raised a lot of issues and soon they would be revisited. But now, in Harlem, we were engrossed in the stories we had to tell each other, our tales of breaking through.
Austin Scott broke the color line as a full-time staffer at the Associated Press. It was 1961. He was just out of Stanford University. "I had been at The Oakland Tribune. They made me start as a copy boy. I had this drunken city editor. He'd be sound asleep with his head on his desk and every time he'd wake up, he'd look around, grab a pencil and start hollering: "Boy! Boy! Boy!" I lasted three days. I had applied for a job with the AP in San Francisco, but I was told there were no openings. On the fourth day I'm at The Trib, the AP calls. They had a job for me in Sacramento. I just left right then." In May 1964, Austin was assigned to the AP's New York office. That's how he wound up in Harlem.
Tom Johnson was the first black at Newsday on Long Island. He'd finished Long Island University in 1954. After he was not able to break through on the major dailies, he started his own little company. He'd cover stories and make a few bucks selling them to black papers. To support his family, he had a job at the welfare department. Then, the writer Louis Lomax, who was a buddy and neighbor, telephoned. "Call Newsday; they're looking for someone." Tom understood. He met with Bill McIlwain, the managing editor. "He says to me, 'All these people around here (Newsday), always talking about integration, integration, integration. Well, I told 'em: You don't have any Negroes working here. Never have.' And with that, he hires me. He was a good ol' boy from North Carolina."
Les Carson had timing. He had just graduated from the University of North Carolina. It was 1963. He tried to get a reporting job there but wasn't successful. "I tried a lot of places up the coast and then a friend told me to come to New York. He said, 'If you can't get a job at a newspaper, you can always go to work in the welfare department.'" Carson had timing; he applied and got hired at the World Telegram and Sun and he was covering the streets of Harlem for them.
Junius Griffin started at The Times in 1964. "I was in the Marines. I wanted to be another Ernie Pyle," he said. He had some experience in public relations. "I struck a bargain: I agreed to reenlist; after a year, I'd get a transfer to Tokyo and be assigned to Stars and Stripes." That got him into journalism. He wrote for the military paper and he also filed to the AP and ABC News. "A lot of people didn't know I was black," he said. In 1962, he got discharged. "I came straight to New York." He hooked on with the AP. Two years later he was at The Times. "Abe Rosenthal called and offered me the job. He wanted me in Harlem; Abe thought I could bring more depth to the (black) coverage."
Wallace Terry came out of Brown University. He was the first black student to become the editor of an Ivy League newspaper. At age 20, he was at The Washington Post. In 1963, he moved to Time magazine, and that's where he was working when the riot broke out in Harlem.
Claude Lewis was with Newsweek. He'd gotten hired in the late 1950s as an editorial assistant. He just went in, applied for the job, and got it. He'd been there about five years when, one day, an editor in sports slipped him a couple of tickets to a championship fight at Madison Square Garden. Claude went. Benny "Kid" Paret got killed in the ring. Claude reported the story; his work got noticed. He made staff at Newsweek magazine.
It was July 1964. Harlem was our coming out.
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