(1975-2005)
Crucial milestones, achievements and events
in which black journalists affected the profession

1. Robert C. Maynard becomes editor of The Oakland Tribune in 1979, and in 1983 becomes editor and president in the newspaper industry’s first management-leveraged buyout. By doing so, he becomes the first African American to own a major metropolitan newspaper. Once “arguably the second worst newspaper in the United States,” it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for its coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. In 1992, the earthquake’s aftermath and Oakland Hills fire combined with a national recession and troubled city economy, force Maynard and wife Nancy to sell The Tribune.

2. Photo courtesy of Sarah Glover Chuck Stone

   Forty-four men and women found the National Association of Black Journalists in Washington on Dec. 12, 1975. More than 100 people gathered for the first meeting at the Sheraton Park Hotel, which was scheduled to coincide with a national conference for black elected officials. Chuck Stone of the Philadelphia Daily News is elected founding president.

3. CNN’s Bernard Shaw moderates presidential debate between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis on Oct. 13, 1988. Shaw’s opening question to Dukakis, whether he would favor the death penalty for someone who raped and murdered his wife, is a crucial campaign moment. It aimed to give Dukakis a chance to show emotion, but the governor answers in a wooden, lawyerly manner and remains the “Ice Man” to many voters.

4. Max Robinson at ABC News in Chicago.

   Max Robinson, on July 10, 1978, becomes one of three co-anchors of ABC’s new “World News Tonight,” and thus first black journalist to serve as a nightly network news anchor. Robinson held the job until 1983, when ABC switched him to weekend anchor. He soon left to work at WMAQ-TV in Chicago.

5. Robert Johnson launches Black Entertainment Television, the first black-owned national cable-TV network, in 1980. BET would come to air “Lead Story,” a weekly news talk show filling void of black-related concerns ignored by major networks on Sundays, and “BET Nightly News,” a newscast dependent on black freelancers. BET later cancels such programs amid complaints it focuses more on entertainment and less on substantive matters.

6. The first Unity: Journalists of Color convention, held in Atlanta in 1994, draws 6,000 members and supporters of black, Asian, Hispanic and Native American journalists. A second Unity convention is held in Seattle in 1999, though many black journalists decry anti-affirmative action measure passed in Washington state that year. Unity 2004, billed as the largest journalism convention in U.S. history, draws 8,100 people to nation’s capital.

7. Ed Bradley joins CBS News’ “60 Minutes” during the 1981-1982 season after serving as a White House correspondent and anchor of “CBS Sunday Night News.” Now finishing his 24th season “60 Minutes,” Bradley, a former radio reporter, is a broadcast journalism icon who has won nearly 20 Emmy awards.

8. Former sportscaster Bryant Gumbel becomes the first black co-anchor of a network morning news show, on NBC-TV’s “Today” show in 1982. Among many achievements during his 15 years as host, Gumbel is credited with orchestrating and anchoring the show’s groundbreaking weeklong coverage from Africa in November 1992. He also anchored the network’s coverage of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain.

9. Jayson Blair commits wide-scale plagiarism and fabrication at The New York Times, which in 2003 leads to the resignation of the paper’s top two editors (including its first black managing editor). The saga spurs a full-scale review of ethics policies at The Times and media nationwide, spawns complaints from affirmative action opponents and causes concern for young black journalists, in particular, that their work and futures would be tarnished.

10. Photo courtesy of The New York Times Isabel Wilkerson

    Isabel Wilkerson in 1994 becomes the first black journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize for individual reporting and first black woman to win a journalism Pulitzer – 25 years after Ebony’s Moneta Sleet Jr. wins for his photograph of Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow and child at King’s funeral. Wilkerson, of The New York Times, wins in the features category for a profile of a Chicago fourth-grader and for two stories about a Midwestern flood.

11. Janet Cooke wins Pulitzer Prize for “Jimmy’s World” at The Washington Post in 1981, but the paper, humiliated, returns it after she admits made up the story. Cooke is disgraced as a journalist and drops out of public view for many years. She briefly re-emerges in 1996 to tell her story to GQ magazine. The movie rights from that interview were sold for $1.6 million.

12. Bill Clinton is first U.S. president to visit a large organization of black journalists, at 1997 NABJ convention in Chicago.

    Photo courtesy of The New York Times Bob Dole addresses the NABJ convention in 1996.

    Beginning with Clinton’s visit to NABJ in Detroit in 1992, presidential tickets find it advantageous to appear before black journalists. In 1996, Al Gore, Bob Dole and Jack Kemp visit NABJ in Nashville. (A photo of Dole sitting beneath NABJ’s logo appears next day on front page of The New York Times.) President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry speak at Unity 2004 convention in Washington.

13. Emerge launches as a monthly national black newsmagazine in 1989. The publication generates hard-hitting news stories and columns about African-American concerns, especially among black journalists eager for outlet to produce stories hardly placed in mainstream media. Emerge makes waves with controversial covers of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas but makes biggest mark with Reginald Stuart’s three articles about federal prison inmate Kemba Smith. The articles helped prompt President Bill Clinton to commute Smith’s sentence to time served in 2000 – same year Emerge shuts down.

14. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign for the White House presents unprecedented opportunities for black journalists to cover a presidential campaign. They include, among others, Gerald Boyd, Jacques Chenet, Milton Coleman, George Curry, Julie Johnson, Sylvester Monroe, Kenneth Walker and Jack White. Some feel betrayed when Jackson announces his candidacy to Mike Wallace on “60 Minutes,” a week after the minister had met with black journalists and signaled that one of them would get the “scoop.”

15. Ten years after the Kerner Commission spotlights the lack of newsroom diversity, in 1978 the American Society of Newspaper Editors pledges to have the newspaper industry reach parity by 2000. Two key impetuses: The recently released – and first – extensive survey of journalists of color by Jay T. Harris, an assistant journalism dean at Northwestern University; and the spurring on by Robert C. Maynard and others at the new Institute for Journalism Education. Harris’ study becomes model for annual ASNE diversity census. In 1998, despite fierce criticism, ASNE extends the parity goal to 2025.

16. The Institute for Journalism Education (IJE) is incorporated in Oakland in 1977. Renamed in 1993 to honor late co-founder Robert C. Maynard, the institute reports that it has trained and placed hundreds of journalists of color in newsrooms and offered training to hundreds of journalists of color seeking advanced editing and high-level management jobs.

17. President Jimmy Carter meets with 29 Black Press representatives at the White House on Feb. 16, 1978. The Washington Post reports Carter in the meeting “warned that the United States would ‘consider it a very serious breach of peace,’ if the Ethiopia-Somalia conflict leads Ethiopian forces to cross Somalia’s borders.” Carter discussed the naming of black and women federal judges during a second meeting with black journalists on Jan. 10, 1979.

18. Mumia Abu-Jamal, a freelance radio reporter and outgoing president of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, is sentenced to death for the 1981 murder of a police officer. PABJ maintains “considered support” for him and his right to a fair trial. After years of appeals, Abu-Jamal’s execution is set to happen during the 1995 NABJ convention in Philadelphia, but a stay is granted just before. Disappointing many who want it join an international chorus to “free him,” NABJ joins other journalist groups in supporting his free-speech rights. Prison officials had banned him from doing media interviews.

19. Newsweek’s Mark Whitaker in late 1998 becomes first black journalist to be named editor of a major weekly newsmagazine. Whitaker joined Newsweek as an intern in 1977 and had been its managing editor since early 1996. He filled in as top editor during his predecessor’s illness, supervising coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, among other major stories.

20. In 1976, St. Louis-area black journalists create the first hands-on, training program where black high school and junior college students gather with professionals on weekends to learn about journalism. The program has benefited hundreds of students with training and scholarships, and spawned many similar high school journalism workshops nationwide.

21. U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia on April 14, 1998, rules that the FCC’s 30-year-old EEOC rules requiring broadcasters to hire minorities are unconstitutional. Some news organizations issue statements that they will continue following the rules voluntarily.

22. BET News Anchor Ed Gordon, on Jan. 24, 1996, sits with O.J. Simpson for an hour before a live, national cable TV audience. It was Simpson’s first live broadcast interview since his Oct. 3, 1995, acquittal after a months-long trial that riveted the nation. While Gordon’s probing of Simpson receives many positive reviews, the football Hall of Famer refuses to discuss specifics while insisting again he did not kill his ex-wife or her friend. BET scores its highest-ever prime time rating to date but is criticized for letting Simpson promote his $30 mail-order video before and after the broadcast.

23. Black journalists at the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere experience deja vu after the April 29, 1992, acquittal of four police officers in the Rodney King case leads to rage and unrest in the city. A generation after the 1965 Watts riots led The Times to hire its first black reporter, black journalists who covered the new unrest believe they were assigned “primarily because they were black,” according to a NABJ report. While many black journalists volunteered to go to Los Angeles, feeling obligated to their race and hoping for a career boost, they felt their papers “undervalued their talent and ideas,” the report found.

24. Many black journalists report on Million Man March in Washington on Oct. 16, 1995. Some wary of editors’ concerns that going to the march may show support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Keith Woods later writes for The Poynter Institute that the media focused more on the minister’s “proclivities for race-, religion- and sexuality-baiting” than on “the story of the racial rejection, estrangement and hunger for acceptance and brotherhood that drove all those folks to the mall.” Farrakhan calls black journalists “slaves” of white media at NABJ’s 1996 convention in Nashville.

25. Fifty-plus black photojournalists help produce “Songs of My People,” a book of images of African Americans. Gordon Parks, the legendary photojournalist, contributes an essay, as do black writers and critics who introduce sections on the black male; black artists, musicians, performers, filmmakers, athletes, and ministers; black women and the black family.

26. Milton Coleman of The Washington Post reports Jesse Jackson’s off-the-record “Hymietown” comments about New York, creating a firestorm that cripples Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. It also causes a divide among black journalists over whether they should cut black officials or sources more slack than white counterparts – and concern that newsroom leaders could stop assigning black reporters to major stories.

27. Black journalists shine in Pulitzer Prize-winning series, “How Race is Lived in America.” Published by The New York Times in 2000, the series explored racial experiences and attitudes across America in the military, law enforcement, public schools, workplace and other settings. Then-Deputy Managing Editor Gerald Boyd serves as a co-senior editor, and black reporters Steven A. Holmes, Ginger Thompson and Dana Canedy wrote stories.

28. On Sept. 11, 2001, reporter Sonya Ross, cameraman George Christian and sound technician Erick Washington – are among only five journalists with President Bush aboard Air Force One the day of the terrorist attacks. Many black journalists nationwide play active roles in the crisis coverage, but many others feel left out of the action. New Managing Editor Gerald Boyd helps The New York Times earn six Pulitzer Prizes for 9/11-related coverage.

29. Gregory Moore, managing editor of The Boston Globe since July 1994, is named editor of The Denver Post in June 2002, making the Colorado paper the country’s largest (circulation-wise) with a journalist of color at the helm.

30. Pam McAllister Johnson in Nov. 1981 becomes first black woman named publisher of a general circulation newspaper, the Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal. Johnson was named assistant to the publisher a month before at the 20,000-circulation paper, which had just been named “The Best of Gannett” for 1981.