By Jayson Blair
In the cold morning
mist, The Avenue slowly awakens.
The sky is patchy and purplish blue. It is
almost 7 a.m. A spotty trail of men carrying bags and backpacks stuffed with
their worldly possessions heads north on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE
toward Good Hope Road.
Traffic crawls. Exhaust pours from tailpipes,
from mouths. Up and down The Avenue, dressed-up women wearing 9-to-5 faces walk
in the slumberous rhythm of the morning toward the Anacostia Metro station.
In a little while, the heavy iron security gates will go up on The Avenue's beauty salons and barbershops, its schools and churches, carryouts and storefront
businesses. At Clara Muhammad School, the snow-bearded custodian already has raised the security shutters and turned on the lights.
In the east, a pale orange light breaks the
horizon. It means that life, even on this forlorn side of Washington, soon will
take its daily course.
Thirty years after the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. was killed, 70 years after his birth, this street – like many named in his
memory – embodies both the dream and the dream deferred. Life and death, faith
and despair, violence and a tenuous brand of peace coexist in a 30-block
corridor east of the Anacostia River that in many ways is a portrait of
inner-city communities across the nation.
Damn.
John is such a good writer, I thought, just like I did in 1999 when I first
read the story. I put him up there with my favorite newspaper writers of my
time in the profession – Peter Canellos, Rick Bragg and John Fountain.
I
have been reading John Fountain since I was knee-high to a grasshopper (that’s
how tall I still am) since I was in high school.
Reading
those words were in great contrast to what we discussed on the podcast, the fact
that so many in the journalism profession believe that Black writers can’t
think, can’t write and are lazy.
John
recently walked away from the Chicago Sun-Times after an editor rewrote
his column – a rarity in the profession of columnists – on Aaron Lee, John’s
former student who had recently died and whose documentary, Dream Chaser,
about another South Side native and former high school teammate that tells of
gangs, violence and hoop dreams.
“Yeah I
said I resigned, I'm out – I'm free,” John said in the episode. “You set me
free.”
It’s
not dissimilar from the way he left The New York Times.
“God
will take care of me,” John said he told
Gerald Boyd, who was our managing editor.
John
also shared about how he and his students at Roosevelt University wrote a story
about 51 mostly Black women who were killed in Chicago over several years and
whose stories went uncovered.
“Part
of the reason isn’t on the front pages continually or isn’t on the nightly newscast
that they were black women,” John said. “If that were 51 dogs or cats that
would be continuous.”
John
also told a story about a young Black boy in Chicago named Randy McAllister who
had been mauled by dogs and how it galvanized the community. He talked about how
he could not get it on the front page of The Times because they had
another “dog story” running about an elderly white couple in California who
survived a pit bull attack.
“This
wasn't a dog story. This was a story about a little black boy and all those
things I just mentioned,” he said, referencing how Randy fell through the
cracks and how his death galvanized his community.
“There
are no urban stories, suburban stories, nor rural stories, no Black stories,
white stories, there are only human stories,” he added. “They may have
different faces, they may have different dynamics, different elements but it is
a human story.”
He noted, “It is important we are going to purport that
journalism is essential to democracy, that people are rationale human beings and
they are capable of discerning truth, then we need to present that truth and if
we don’t do that in its totality, then journalism is a lie.”
John
believes that to do that, Black Americans need to learn to “tell our own
stories.”
I
will be the first to tell you that I have come across many great white
editors over my time in journalism. Hodding Carter III, who was a reporter at
the Delta Times-Democrat pushing for Civil Rights in the 1960s, was my
journalism professor. Howell Raines, the editor of the New York Times
when I was there, was a Civil Rights pioneer when he was at the Birmingham
News. Gene Roberts, another professor at the University of Maryland, was a
reporter in Virginia and North Carolina in the 1960s before becoming the editor
of The Philadelphia Inquirer and managing editor of The Times.
No
journalist touched my life more, than Reese Cleghorn, who was the dean at
Maryland. He was the editorial page editor at The Charlotte Observer
when notoriously racist politicians like South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond
and North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms were fighting Civil Rights and fighting
against integration.
He
gave me hope of a better tomorrow. He
gave me hope that change could happen. He even gave me hope after my own
scandal at The Times and was among the few that reached out to embrace
me afterwards. Reese knew there were only human stories but that there needed
to be more Black Americans telling those stories.
On
that, I think, Reese, John and I agree.
As
Maya Angelou wrote in her poem, Still I Rise, “I am the dream and the
hope of the slave.”
No
matter what I do, whether its write or podcast or coach people or consult with
others, I don’t forget, that I am the dream and the hope of a slave. One
committed, like John is, to building a better world.
For more reading:
Aaron
T. Lee: A Life and A Dream Fulfilled