Messaging the blackman

Abstract

Woodfont is executive editor of the University of Michigan's News and Information Services, where he produces Michigan Today. He is also a member of the board of the National Alliance of Third World Journalists. 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 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 sacririced 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 Defender in the early decades of this century, to Carlton Goodlett's Sun Reporter in Oakland, California, and Andrew W. Cooper's New York C/ty 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 26-years old, the same age as Huey, and there he was showing the guts to defy a bunch of racist pigs, and here I