African American Foreign Correspondents: A History

Epilogue

Epilogue When I began this project, the names of only two black foreign correspondents came to mind—CBS’s Ed Bradley and CNN’s Bernard Shaw. Bradley’s reports from Vietnam during that war and his subsequent reports from abroad, and Shaw’s gripping reporting from under a hotel bed in Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm still conjure up images of daring and dogged pursuit of international news. Both men worked in television; therefore, their stories from abroad came to us in our living rooms. I did not know about the accidental foreign correspondents, Frederick Douglass and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, who left their country in the mid-1800s to escape slavery and intolerable conditions for blacks and started a genre of African American foreign correspondence ; nor did I have much knowledge of Ralph Waldo Tyler’s reports from World War I, or of Joel Augustus Rogers, who as the first correspondent the black press sent abroad, covered the Italian-Ethiopian War to tell that little African nation’s side of the story in the 1930s. I had never heard of Nancy Cunard , the white British socialite who was disinherited because of her support of black causes. Such a lack of knowledge is understandable because although the body of literature on the black press continues to grow, hardly anything has focused on black foreign reporting.1 This book fills that void, focusing primarily on African American foreign correspondence in black publications, for that is where the reporting was most prolific, and then on correspondence in some mainstream publications. Media historians note that early in the genre, the New York Herald and New-York Tribune provided correspondence that was primarily episodic and rooted in accomplishments.2 The foreign correspondence of African Americans was contemporaneous with that of those newspapers, occurring a decade before the Civil War. Foreign correspondence by African Americans and at least one white person was a conversation about race and government and race and media. The writers, most of whom were men, recognized that the epilogue 205 ability to live, work, travel, and even eat and sleep anywhere in the country was not a permitted birthright for African Americans. Consignment to a permanent underclass in the United States and an intolerance of racism, exploitation , and injustice compelled African Americans to go abroad and gather and present information and perspectives that would not only enlighten, but would aid in pleading the cause of blacks in the United States and people of color worldwide. Thousands and thousands of stories constructed an alternative narrative grounded in advocacy and truth telling. That black perspective gave meaning and visibility to people and issues typically either marginalized or misrepresented in media and society. As George Washington Williams wrote in 1890 when he challenged the rule of Congo by Belgium’s King Leopold II and the foreign reporting of famed New York Herald correspondent Henry Morton Stanley, “And while I have an interest in the civilization of Africa equal to any person’s, I cannot be silent, or suffer to pass unchallenged statements calculated to mislead and deceive the friend of humanity and civilization.”3 That desire to tell the truth or “our story” characterized the genre of African American foreign correspondence well into the twentieth century. Providing foreign news took grit and determination. The men and women were unafraid to fight for the opportunity to go overseas. Once there, they objectively reported information that by its very nature challenged injustices. T. Thomas Fortune’s reports in the Voice of the Negro used the words of Filipinos to challenge racism. The Pittsburg Courier’s Frank Whisonant and The AfroAmerican ’s James Hicks exposed racism during the Korean War. Like other African American journalists, the foreign correspondents did the “leg work” for the black newspapers and the world community of color. Enoch Waters, who covered World War II and some of the African liberation movement, noted that black writers “faced racial barriers, ridicule, insults, and even violence in the efforts to carry out assignments,” devising “techniques and stratagems to overcome and circumvent obstacles meant to prevent and discourage them from obtaining information needed to carry out the mission of the black press.”4 No better example of this role exists than William Worthy Jr., who often went abroad at the behest of The Afro-American newspaper chain, or acted alone, with little more than a letter of introduction and copies of stories he had written, to gain entry to and report from foreign countries. Like...