A Story of Two Black Men
by Harrison Chastang‚
Aug. 09‚ 2007
Barry Bonds finally reached 756 home runs before a full house at AT&T Park that included more than 300 media people. Of those 300 plus journalists, maybe four or five were African American. Relatively few African Americans cover Major League Baseball and many African Americans say Barry’s often bitter relationship with the media stems from the fact that so few reporters questioning Bonds are African Americans. Before Monday’s game the conversation among the national media, including the few Black reporters in the press box, was the shocking mob style murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey.
Bailey, who also had worked at the Detroit News and the Oakland Tribune, was shot dead last Thursday morning on his way to work at the Post, the African American paper he had been named editor just two months ago. The thought of journalists being shot in the United States for the stories they’ve written or broadcast seemed so unlikely that when news broke of Bailey’s death many people speculated that Bailey’s murder had nothing to do with journalism and was linked to a personal aspect of Bailey’s life, or that Bailey was a victim of the random drugs and gang related violence that has taken so many lives in Oakland. When it became clear that Bailey was killed over stories he had written about the operations of Your Black Muslim Bakery, even the sports reporters in the AT&T press box watching Barry were overcome with a sense of shock that even sports journalists could be a victim of violence at the hands of an angry sports fan outraged over a story or column about their favorite team or player.
Bailey was the first American reporter to be killed in the line of duty since 1993 when Dona St. Plite, a Miami Haitian American radio reporter who was killed by opponents of Haitian president Jean Bertrand Aristide. Bailey’s death comes at a time when the number of African American journalists in the United States has dropped significantly. Black reporters were virtually nonexistent at mainstream media outlets before the urban riots of the mid 1960s that forced major newspapers and broadcast outlets to hire Black reporters to cover Black communities hostile to white reporters.
Like baseball, African Americans developed their own network of newspapers to counter the racism that prevented Black journalists from working at the Chronicle, the Washington Post, CBS News or the New York Times. The push to hire Black journalists hit its peak in the early 1990s due to Affirmative Action programs at major universities and a commitment of media companies like CBS, the Washington Post and the Gannett and Knight-Ridder chains to hire and promote Black journalists. Black journalism pioneer Robert Maynard used his purchase of the Oakland Tribune in 1983 as a journalism affirmative action experiment to show that a racially diverse newsroom could result in quality journalism.
Before Maynard took control of the Tribune, it was a second rate paper owned by the right-wing Knowland family that did not have any Blacks in the Tribune newsroom. Maynard increased the number of journalists of color at the Tribune to the point where Blacks, Latins and Asians made up the majority of the newsroom staff. During Maynard’s 13 year tenure as editor and publisher, the Tribune won every major award in Journalism, including the Pulitzer for the paper’s coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake. Although Bailey was hired at the Tribune a year after Maynard sold the paper, Bailey was part of Maynard’s legacy and vision to recruit and train Black journalists. A similar effort by the Knight-Ridder chain to increase the number of non-white journalists at the chain’s flagship Mercury-News transformed the Merc from a sleepy small-town paper to one of the best newspapers in the United States.
Bailey, an Oakland native, was part of a corps of Black journalists hired by mainstream media outlets in the early 1970s from programs to recruit minority journalists at Columbia University and UC Berkeley. Efforts by anti-affirmative critics like Ward Connerly have resulted in the demise of most of the 1970s programs created to recruit Black journalists. Most of the Black journalists hired from these affirmative action programs are nearing retirement age or are being forced out of the newsroom because of media consolidation, while many other African Americans with great writing and broadcasting skills have opted to work in non-journalism related fields.
Latest surveys of the nation’s newspapers and broadcast newsrooms indicate that today fewer than five percent of the nation’s journalists are African American; many newspapers and broadcast outlets have no African Americans in their newsrooms. The Chronicle has gone from having nearly 30 African American reporters, columnists, editors and other editorial staff right after the Examiner-Chronicle staff merger in 1999 to less than five today.
Bailey was committed to working with the Black press and throughout his career he found some way to stay in touch with the Black owned media. During his tenure at the Tribune he managed to find the time to produce and host a newscast on the legendary Oakland cable Soul Beat channel and to write for the Black owned San Francisco Sun Reporter. Bailey was forced out of the Tribune after his Tribune editors would no longer tolerate Bailey’s moonlighting with other media outlets. Unlike other out-of-work Black journalists who sought employment in the academic or corporate world, Bailey went back to his first love, the Black Press. He was killed working for a Black paper, covering the Black community.
The AT&T press box discussion of Bonds and Bailey touched on how both men were similar. Bailey and Bonds would not hesitate to speak their minds. Bailey had a reputation for asking tough and sometimes embarrassing questions that could often anger and intimidate the subjects of his stories. Barry’s often combative attitude toward the media has been cited as a reason why fans express so much animosity toward Bonds regarding allegations of illegal steroid use. Both men were successful African Americans in a mostly white profession.
As Barry rounded the bases, African American journalists commented that Barry’s record breaking home run was history because given the lack of Blacks in baseball; it would be unlikely that the next home run king would be African American. When the discussion returned to Bailey, some of the out of town journalists questioned whether the void left by Bailey’s passing could be filled. While there are plenty of out of work African American reporters and editors with the skills and experience to replace Bailey, it’s going to be very hard, if not impossible to find someone with the drive and determination to fill Chauncey Bailey’s shoes.
EMAIL THIS STORYPRINT FRIENDLY
May 9, 2008
