The Role of Minority Women in the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication from 1968 to 2001

Abstract

In August, 1968, Lionel C.Barrow, Jr. requested and was granted time by President Harold Nelson (Wisconsin-Madison) on the program of the final business session of the Association for Education in Journalism (AEJ) to read an “Open Letter” he had sent to Nelson and a number of other AEJ members. Barrow, who earned his PhD in 1960 from Nelson’s school, told the membership that the time had come to develop an AEJ plan for the recruitment, training, and placement of an increasing number of minority group members in AEJ itself and in the various fields of mass communications served by AEJ. Nelson, in describing Barrow’s presentation, said Barrow told AEJ “that it was late and weak in looking inward: membership almost lily white, it showed no awareness of that; teachers’ classrooms almost as white, it was equally unaware” (Nelson, 1971).