by Askia Muhammad
More than
28 years ago, when—thanks to Ted Clark—I started doing commentaries for National Public Radio’s “All
Things Considered,” I was in a constant race with the staid old “Gray Lady”—The New York Times,
so named because of its stodgy, hidebound, gray appearance and style—and with The Washington Post to pitch
story ideas to my editors before they appeared in those two important, national “newspapers of record.”
After
a story appears in one of those publications, no reporter can claim it’s still “news.” So for me, as often
as not when editors rejected my story suggestions, if and when the story later appeared in print, I would always call and
remind them that I pitched the story to them, before it was seen in The Times or The Post. I wanted
them to know they could trust my “nose for news.”
But once in a while, there is still some “news” after a story appears in
The Gray Lady. In this instance, it’s an old saga made new, by a report by Times writer Rachel L. Swarns, published
March 27, 2009. “Obama Brings Flush Times for Black News Media,” reads the headline
“For
the nation’s black magazines, newspapers, and television and radio stations, the arrival of the Obama administration
has ushered in an era of unprecedented access to the White House,” she begins. That may well be true, and it’s
about time!
“At
his news conference Tuesday (March 24), he skipped over several prominent newspapers and newsmagazines to call on Kevin Chappell,
a senior editor at Ebony magazine,” she continued. “It was the first time an Ebony reporter had been
invited to question a president at a prime-time news conference.” Stop right there.
What we see today may or may not be “The Greatest” days The Black Press
has ever seen at the White House, but understand: these are just “The Latest.” And, by a long shot, they certainly
are not The First!
The
Times article, well intentioned as it may have been, is a classic example of how short-term memory can revise history.
First, the declaration that this
was the first time an Ebony reporter had been invited to question a president at a prime-time news conference, may
have been technically accurate because back in the day when Black reporters broke the glass ceiling in the White
House Press Corps there were very few prime time news conferences at all.
When I came to Washington
in 1977 for the Chicago Daily Defender during the Carter administration, Johnson Publishing
icon Simeon Booker—a member of the second Nieman Fellowship class of journalists at
Harvard University in 1947, and a winner of the prestigious National Press Club Fourth
Estate Award, among many, many, many notable achievements—was writing his “Ticker Tape USA” column in JET magazine and had long been an accredited White House correspondent.
Mr. Booker told me that when he agreed to work for the immortal John H. Johnson, his first condition
of employment was that his office and everything about the Johnson Publishing Co. news bureau had to be not just “First
Class,” but “Top Shelf First Class,” just like all the other well respected news operations in town. The
office was and is located in the 1700 block of Pennsylvania Ave., just one block from the White House, for example.
But most press conferences by Presidents Carter, Reagan, and even George H.W. Bush,
were not held in “prime time” unless it was a national emergency. Black reporters from the Black-owned press were
rarely called on, ever in those days. In fact, in 1969 Mr. Booker had to press then Nixon administration communications head
Herbert Klein to allow JET to even have a seat in Mr. Nixon’s press conferences.
Mr. Booker’s colleagues Roy Betts and the late E. Fannie Granton, were also White House “hard pass” holders, as was JPC photographer Maurice Sorrell. With my own
White House “hard pass,” Roy Betts and I, along with Don Agurs representing Mutual Black
Network, Tamu White of Howard University Radio, and Glen Ford of Sheridan Radio, often attended, press conferences,
but were never called on, although Mr. Agurs did get an exclusive one-on-one interview with Mr. Carter, and I managed to ask
him a question at two press conferences, and participated once in a high level briefing with just eight other reporters.
Later, after one particularly
hurtful snub by Pres. Carter at a late afternoon press conference just ahead of a meeting he was to have (also in the East
Room) with a group of Black mayors, Tamu White and I literally hid in the bushes along the North Portico, until Mayors Marion Barry and Richard Hatcher approached. We whined and cried, telling them the president just
had a press conference and did not call on any Black reporters, even though he was set to meet with the Black mayors immediately
afterward.
Mayor
Hatcher spoke to the president about our complaint and at the next press conference, this time in prime time, just days after
the Delta Force got bogged down by a sandstorm in the Iranian desert trying to rescue the
American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran,
I was called on again. Instead of asking my "civil rights" question, I asked the
(scowling I'm told, I can't remember because I was too nervous trying to not sound afraid) President why he did not
try to use peaceful means to get the hostages out, instead of launching the disastrous attack? Well, as you might imagine
that was it for me and other Blacks from the Black Press being trusted to ask questions at
press conferences for years to come.
The legendary Ethel L. Payne was a Black Press pioneer at the White House. She was so highly regarded
for her work at The Chicago Defender that when the U.S. Postal Service issued its first stamps honoring women journalists
in 2002, Miss Payne was one of the four journalists pictured. She was also a thorn in the side of presidents, even incurring
the wrath of Pres. Eisenhower when she demanded to know as the U.S. anti-apartheid (Civil Rights) movement was heating up,
why he would not simply issue an executive order banning segregation on interstate bus travel, which was his prerogative,
via the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Before Miss Payne there was Alice Dunnigan, who also represented the Chicago Defender and
the Associated Negro Press (ANP). She fought and secured her credential in 1946.
In the 1980s, along came Bob Ellison representing Sheridan Radio. He was a trusted
member of the White House Press Pool, and was even elected President of the White
House Correspondents Association. Since then of course we have had the twin Divas, Sonya Ross (an honorary member of
The Black Press) working for the Associated Press (AP), and April
Ryan of American Urban Radio Network (AURN). They were (and April is a) fixture(s) of the White House Press Corps and
were frequently called on by Presidents and by Press Secretaries at daily White House Press Briefings.
The Gray Lady also makes a big
deal out of a reception held for members of the National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) with the current White House
incumbent. President Obama, the author reports: “gave Black Enterprise magazine
his first print interview and gave a black talk show host one of his first radio interviews. This month, he invited 50 black
newspaper publishers to meet with him at the White House.”
The fact of the matter is that the then President-elect actually gave an interview
to Ebony magazine before anyone else. It’s about time the Black Press got to the front of the line.
But
receiving Black editors and publishers is nothing new. In 1981 or 1982, L.H. Stanton, publisher of National Scene magazine
(a monthly rotogravure supplement which appeared in NNPA newspapers, which I edited) attended a reception for publishers with
Pres. Reagan. The president signed a comp copy of a picture shaking hands with Mr. Stanton.
In 1978 Black Enterprise publisher Earl Graves took a delegation of the “BE 100”
top businesses to the White House to meet Mr. Carter, and I'm certain he as well as John H. Johnson, who is the namesake
of the Howard University School of Communications, were also among delegations of their peers at White House receptions, probably
on multiple occassions.
In
addition, in 1992 or ‘93, Pres. Clinton hosted a delegation from NNPA. I attended that event, and my friend Sharon Farmer,
Chief White House Photographer (a Black woman!) took my picture when His Nibbs shook my hand. I have an unsigned copy of that
print.
So,
that’s why I maintain the Times’s claim is a bit off the mark. Again: we may or may not be seeing “The
Greatest” days The Black Press has ever seen at the White House, but understand: these are just “The Latest.”
And, by a long shot, they certainly are not The First!
Read! Learn all about yourself. Remember, history is best qualified to reward our
research.
Could President Barack Hussein Obama’s "historical memory"—inherited from his paternal
grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama—of the brutal British suppression of the Kenyan independence movement in the 1950s
affect the "special relationship" between the United States and America’s long time ally, the United Kingdom?
But what if his grandfather had been Palestinian? Would Mr. Obama ever have been able to become President in the first
place? I doubt it very seriously.
After reporting on the barbaric torture inflicted on Hussein Onyango Obama in a Dec.
3, 2008 article published online by The Times of London, writer Ben Macintyre says that the first African American
President’s views towards the United Kingdom just might be different from those of the previous 43 White U.S. presidents.
"Barack
Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence,"
Mr. Macintyre and co-author Paul Orengoh reported. "He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security
prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency,"
they wrote.
"The African warders were instructed by the White soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till
he confessed," said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman the President refers to as "Granny
Sarah," the article states.
Hussein Onyango Obama, a Kenyan Muslim, served with the British Army in Burma during
World War II, yet just four years after the war, his employer, a British Army officer for whom he served as a cook, rewarded
his loyal manservant by firing him, then denouncing him to the authorities on suspicion of "consorting with troublemakers."
The
irony is that Mr. Obama was a member of the Luo people from Western Kenya, not the dominant Kikuyu people. Some Kikuyu persons
took secret oaths and formed the dreaded Mau Mau, which conducted a bloody rebellion against British colonial rule. The country’s
first President Jomo Kenyatta was accused and put on trial for being a Mau Mau. Jamaican attorney Dudley Thompson successfully
represented Mr. Kenyatta at trial.
The British soldiers "would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic
rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing
down," Granny Sarah told The Times of London. "The alleged torture was said to have left Mr. Onyango permanently
scarred, and bitterly anti-British," the authors wrote. "That was the time we realized that the British were actually
not friends but, instead, enemies," Mrs. Onyango said. "My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be
arrested and detained."
The President writes of his Black Muslim grandfather in his best-selling memoir Dreams
From My Father. He says only that his grandfather was "found innocent" and held for "more than six months."
While
a total of only 32 Europeans were killed by the Mau Mau, the British slaughtered as many as 50,000 Africans during the seven
year state of emergency which they imposed, trying to maintain their unjust, racist, colonial rule. But the American body
politic did not hold the President accountable for any potential anti-Anglo-ism.
Now. Just suppose that Barack Hussein
Obama’s grandfather had been a Palestinian Muslim, arrested in Palestine in 1949, or expelled from Jerusalem in 1948
by Zionist authorities in that colonial settler territory which was annexed in defiance of the British Palestinian mandate
and which declared itself to be the state of Israel—the Jewish state. Would that simple difference in paternal geography
have made any difference at all in United States history?
Duh!
You bet it would have! This article would never
have been written, because Barack Hussein Obama Jr. would never, never, never have been elected President of the United States
had his grandfather been Palestinian, a people who suffered an almost identical or worse oppression at the hands of the Israelis
(which continues until this very day) than that which was inflicted on the Kenyans by the British.
Never mind Stanley
and Madelyn Dunham, his kindly, Kansas-born, Caucasian maternal grandparents. If Mr. Obama had an Arab-Muslim (even an Arab
Christian) paternal grandfather, that would have made him categorically ineligible for the presidency, by definition.
Talk
about "historical memory!"
We’d probably be talking about history-making President Hillary Clinton now,
because Barack Obama might have graduated Magna Cum Laude and been President of the Harvard Law Review, but he would never
have even been elected dogcatcher in this country, let alone to the U.S. Senate, or to the U.S. presidency had his grandfather
been a Palestinian Arab, instead of a Black African.
