In honor of Black History Month, three not-so-well-known journalists who contributed to the Civil Rights Movement and the advancement of African Americans will be recognized. Their works have paved the way for Black and Brown journalists of today, and their works have shaped and changed America.
Max Robinson
In 1975, Max Robinson founded the National Association of Black Journalists with 44 others.
Then three years later, he became the first African-American to anchor the nightly network news. also
“To live in America as a Black person is a massive risk no matter where or who you are,” Robinson said in a Formal Address. “Black and white Americans rarely speak to each other. And the media reflects the nation. The news you get is not an accurate picture of America.”
After facing racism from previous jobs, he was selected as one of three anchors in the nightly news for ABC news “World News Tonight.”
“As a pioneer — a first Black — I am forced to do some soul searching, to find out who I am,” Robinson said. “And after the Smith incident, the unexpected happened. Cards, letters, telephone calls — mostly Blacks, but many whites wrote, too — probably saved me my job. This was unexpected. It has made a difference in my life.”
Ida B. Wells
From the 17th century, Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist, educator and early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. In 1909, she was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which was an organization to fight racial discrimination and advocate for rights of African Americans.
“When the lives of men, women and children are at stake, when the inhuman butchers of innocents attempt to justify their barbarism by fastening upon a whole race the oblique of the most infamous of crimes, it is little less than criminal to apologize for the butchers today and tomorrow to repudiate the apology by declaring it a figure of speech,” Wells said in her book, The Red Record.
In 2020, Wells was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize for her extraordinary report of horrific violence against African Americans during the era of lynching. Her works included “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases” and “The Red Record,” provided documention of racial violence.
“It is with no pleasure I have dipped my hands in the corruption here exposed,” Wells said. “Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.”
Gordon Parks
Documenting various images of Chicago’s South Side in the early 1900s, and capturing the true mistreatment and poverty of Black americans was photographer and journalist Gordon Parks
“And I think that after nearly 85 years upon this planet that I have a right after working so hard at showing the desolation and the poverty, to show something beautiful for somebody as well,” Parks said.
One of his most famous photographs was the American Gothic, which depicts Ella Watson in front of an American flag, holding a broom and standing stiffly. This captures the complexity of Parks’s style and work including vulnerability, strength and exploitation.
“Pictures I’ve made that have become the most important pictures, were pictures that I wished I never had to take,” Parks said.