Video: Adopting the Term "Black" - Fraser recalls how the term "black" was adopted by reporters at the New York Times. Running Time 4:04 Using Information Differently - Frazer witnesses police brutality and identifies the police officer by his badge number in a story. Running Time 3:23 Using Information Differently - Frazer witnesses police brutality and identifies the police officer by his badge number in a story. Running Time 3:23 New York Times Security Guards - Frazer's run-ins with the guards at the Times. Running Time 2:54 New York Times Security Guards - Frazer's run-ins with the guards at the Times. Running Time 2:54 Links: QuickTime required to view videos » Click here to download QuickTime

C. Gerald Fraser

Worked for the New York Daily News and the New York Times

When the cries for black power rose in the streets in the mid 1960s, Gerald Fraser felt a heightened sense of new found strength among fellow black reporters at the New York Times.

"It was the summer in which Newark exploded," he says recalling the time. "The black power conference convened that summer, too."

Up to that point African Americans were either colored or Negroes. Using the term black or African to identify people was offensive. But as the black power movement gained momentum, the demand to be called black clashed with the New York Times tradition of using Negro.

"The word Negro was out, even among reporters," says Fraser. "We wanted to identify with a community and people who were calling themselves black."

So every opportunity they got, Fraser and other black reporters challenged their editors, removing Negro from copy and replacing it with black. This was just one of the issues around which black reporters in New York organized.

Fraser says as the consciousness of African Americans grew, black reporters around the country were faced with trying to make sure stories about blacks were told accurately rather than through the often ill-informed perspective of whites as had been the case.

Fraser wasn't one to let anything slide.

"I had trouble with editors because of my personality," he says.

Once after writing a story for the paper, the editor called him over for follow-up questions. Fraser says the questions hadn't bothered him as much as the tenor of the questions.

" I said to him in a loud voice, "I know more about this than anyone here, than anyone in this room. I was there.'" The newsroom got quiet. People looked up, their heads still bent over their typewriters.

Fraser is not sure what led him to journalism. As a child he never saw any black reporters. But the by time he was 12 he knew he wanted to become a newsman. Three papers came to his family's home in Boston: the Boston Globe on Sunday, the Boston Post and the black paper, the Boston Record, which published the numbers. He read each one from cover to back.

Journalism was a bit of strange aspiration at the time for Fraser. Both his parents were immigrants from the Caribbean—his father from Jamaica, his mother from Guyana. They came looking for a better way of life. His father, who loved cars, was accepted into an auto mechanics school in Iowa. But when school officials discovered he was black, they wouldn't let him enroll. Fraser's parents and other adults were more likely to push their children go to college and get a solid civil servants job.

Fraser attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he worked on the school paper and earned a degree in economics.

During his college years and after, he tried to find work in newspapers. Most mainstream papers in the late 1950s refused to hire blacks.

Fraser got his big break with the black press, a New York paper called the Amsterdam News. The editor, G. James Fleming had attended University of Wisconsin, too, and felt kinship with the young man. Fraser started out as a general assignment reporter, even covered an execution at Sing-Sing prison. Toward the end of his tenure at the Amsterdam News he began hanging out at the United Nations with the U.N. correspondent. In 1962 Fraser decided to quit his job at the Amsterdam News and begin covering United Nations news for papers in the West Indies. In the course of his work, Frasier met Pete Wallenberg, the Daily News U.N. Bureau Chief.

He continued to apply for other reporting jobs in New York but couldn't find any. Finally, someone suggested that he try the Daily News. He wrote them a letter and within a few weeks they offered him a job. Fraser said he suspects Wallenberg put in a good word for him.

Fraser was assigned to the Foreign National desk where he worked until 1967. In that time he worked on breaking stories in the 1964 New York Riots and the assassination of Malcolm X. After four years or so at the Daily News, Fraser got a reporting job with the New York Times. He stayed there until 1991.

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