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Messaging the Blackman JOHN WOODFORD H . Rap Brown was in jail in Louisiana on trumped-up charges. The Black Panther Party was striding around northern California declaring it the right and duty of our ethnic group—the African American people—to defend itself with arms against brutal police. And there sat I, in what I thought would be a good position to cover the freedom movement, as an editor/writer for Ebony magazine in Chicago. The problem was, in 1968 both Rap Brown and the Panthers were strictly verboten as sympathetic topics for our country’s biggest magazine aimed at African American readers. Ebony’s publisher, John H. Johnson, not only regarded the Panthers as bad apples, but also considered covering them as not worth the financial risk. The advertising leash constrains most mainstream media in the land of the avowed freedom of the press, and a Black publisher runs on the shortest leash. (Which is not to say that there have not been many dauntless and high-principled Black publishers who have sacrificed riches to carry the real news, from Joseph Russworm’s Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and Frederick Douglass’s North Star in 1857, to Robert S. Abbott’s Chicago Daily Defender in the early decades of this century, to Carlton Goodlett’s Sun Reporter in Oakland, California, and Andrew W. Cooper’s [New York] City Sun today.) Regardless of the rationales behind Ebony’s censorship, all I knew was that it was barring me and other young writers from covering two of the biggest stories for Black Americans in 1968. I was twenty-six years old, the same age as Huey, but there he was showing the guts to defy a bunch of “racist pigs,” and here I was, muzzled while working for a Black publication when I could have worked anywhere else in the country. I’d quit Ivy League grad and law schools to enjoy the satisfaction of being in on “the action” via journalism. I knew something had to give. (The Ebony staff did get some meaty assignments, but none of them was near the battle zones; any story with teeth was usually historical.) I’d already been ticked off by an earlier demonstration of Ebonyesque servility never reported until now. Ebony had surveyed its readers in 1967 on their preferences in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries, promising to report the results. President Lyndon B. Johnson and his aides didn’t like the results of the poll, however, because it indicated that African Americans strongly favored Robert F. Kennedy over LBJ. The story was written, and 2 | John Woodford the ear of the front cover (the ear is a headline summarizing a key non-cover story) announced that the issue contained the results of the poll. Suddenly the presses were stopped. The poll was cut out of the issue, and the cover was reprinted with a new ear. This maneuver had to cost Johnson Publishing Company plenty in production charges. I don’t cite this incident to knock Mr. J. as exceptionally self-interested, however, for he was following the same pocketbook-first principles of U.S. journalism as the heads of publications like the New York Times and Time magazine—both of which received evidence of the killing of the Ebony readers poll, but chose not to follow up with an investigation and news story. In any event, these and similar practices of American mainstream “free” journalism —whether the owners of the presses were Black or not—were goading me to seek an employer with more guts to cover stories that needed to be told. One late spring day I picked up another Chicago-based publication that I’d previously enjoyed reading only for its kookiness—Muhammad Speaks, the weekly tabloid published by the Nation of Islam (a.k.a. the Black Muslims) under the leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, described by himself and his followers as the Last Messenger of Allah. I’d read with a sort of scoffing amazement the newspaper’s religious columns that explained the Messenger’s distinctive mythology—how people who considered themselves to be Whites were somewhat hybrid beings, “Devils” incarnate created by the surgical grafting and bioengineering of the arch-scientist and chief Devil, Yakub. Yakub had accomplished this feat 6,000 years ago by engineering pig genes, or portions of pig anatomy—something like that. All in all, the mythology is no more far-fetched than Mormonism, or Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism...

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