Remember Black History Month? 

President Ford formally recognized it in 1976 during the celebration of the United States Bicentennial “to honor the too-often neglected accomplishments of Black Americans in every area of endeavor throughout our history.”

In normal times, which these decidedly are not, the country would be publicly marking Black History Month, which began in 1926 as Negro History Week, celebrating  achievements while recognizing the still daunting challenges facing African Americans in our shared past and present.  Today also happens to be Abraham Lincoln’s birthday.

As noted in The Contrarian, President Lincoln in his December 1862 address to Congress said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” How fitting, how ironic and how timely.

A year ago during Black History Month, I recalled a time in February 1858 when Shields Green, believed to have been a formerly enslaved man from Charleston, South Carolina, was living with Frederick Douglass in his Rochester, New York home. It was there then he first met abolitionist John Brown. That fateful meeting, 166 years ago, impressed Brown, who would enlist Green to join in his ill-fated October 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry in a failed attempt to incite a slave insurrection.  Brown also sought unsuccessfully to recruit Douglass for the mission, but when the three met at an abandoned quarry outside Chambersburg, Pennsylvania in August 1859, Shields Green was all in. He would, he told Douglass as the weekend parley was ending, “go with the old man.”  Which he did, and, ultimately, he was tried, convicted and executed by hanging on Dec. 16, 1859.

In my 2018 book, Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army, I recount this history and much more related to the Harper’s Ferry raid and the Black men who joined with Brown, of whom only one — Osborne Perry Anderson — survived to write the only insider account of this watershed event. In the past, I’ve always linked the title to Amazon, but there are other options, including Barnes & Noble, The Harpers Ferry Park Association, Bookshop.org, Mahogany Books, and its publisher Chicago Review Press. The price difference between Amazon and the others is a few bucks and the choice is whether or not to support an oligarch-owned enterprise.  To read my earlier Black History Month blog from Feb. 17, 2024, click here.

What today is the relevance of this long forgotten history?

DEI – diversity, equity and inclusion — whatever its institutional or academic excesses — are closely tied to Five for Freedom. What else did they fight and die for? One doesn’t need to be an aggressively progressive activist or ideological crusader to recognize the importance of diversity and inclusion in both our professional and personal lives. Different perspectives emerge from a diverse workforce and diverse friendships.  We humans are by definition a diverse lot, and uniformity of thought, culture, race, or even politics ill serves everyone both as individuals and collectively as a society. Why is that even up for debate?

Obey in advance

Regardless, as historian Timothy Snyder has noted, the road to autocracy is paved by persons and institutions who obey in advance what they anticipate they must do to function and survive in a dictatorship.  Thus, we have the spectacle of companies and universities dismantling their internal programs to assure diversity, equity and inclusion as a keystone of their commitment to creating a more just and open society. Mark Zuckerberg killed DEI programs at Meta, which owns Facebook. In the media “space,” as it’s now called, we have seen the giants of journalism pull their punches: The owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times spiked editorials endorsing Kamala Harris for president, prompting several staff resignations and a flood of subscriber cancellations. The Post recently abolished the post of Managing Editor for Diversity, and its editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after one of her cartoons was killed. It pictured a gaggle of oligarchs — including Post owner Jeff Bezos — slavishly sucking up to Trump.  Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman left The Times to begin his own Sub Stack column after the newspaper editors sought to tone down his copy.

Digging into my own archives, I found a short piece I wrote for Columbia Journalism Review in its Fall 1968 issue. “While the veil of Russian-imposed censorship was descending on the short-lived Czechoslovakian free press, a small American daily took the occasion to to demonstrate the lesson closer to home.”  The paper was the Pottstown, Pa. Mercury, the smallest newspaper in the country (circulation 27,000) to win two Pulitzers–and still printing. Back in 1968, it deleted seven columns throughout its 36-page issue to make the point. Even a front-page wire service story on censorship of the Czech press had two blank spaces.  Today’s self-censorship is not always so obvious: No blank spaces but no context, important stories underplayed, or headlines that soft-pedal reality. The Washington Post, to its credit, recently filled an entire page with government websites that the Trump/Musk administration had taken down.  Democracy Dies in Darkness? The light is still on if sometimes only dimly.

Slingshot.

As if newspapers didn’t have enough competition and criticism from all corners, now along comes Sling TV, the streaming service that promises “the best of cable for less.”  Okay, so far.  But then the streaming service runs an ad that shows a newspaper delivery boy on a bicycle tossing the paper into driveways, only to have it flung back at him, causing the poor guy to tumble onto the ground with his newspapers scattering all around.    “I told you I don’t need these anymore. I have Sling,” a rejecting homeowner declares.  “Nope. Sling gives us all the news we want in a quick and reliable manner… This critical time calls for all the critical news coverage that Sling provides…”   Well, not really. Silo alert!  The Sling “news” lineup is all cable commentary.

Andrea Mitchell

In the 1960s, as a young City Hall reporter for the Philadelphia Evening and Sunday Bulletin, I was privileged to work alongside a young radio news reporter.  Her name was (and still is) Andrea Mitchell, who has just completed a 17-year run as the host of Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC. In my work-in-progress memoir, I fondly remembered her and our one-time collaboration on an article for Philly Talk, a short-lived Black-owned magazine.  Andrea must have been all of 23, just barely graduated from the University of Pennsylvania.  I was just three years older.  They were exciting, also fraught times.

The City Hall press room 212 was a throwback to the Front Page era, a place full of character and characters.  “Hangers-on included Edward J. ‘Scoop’ Lieberman, a public relations man for a beer distributorship, and Eddie Chamblin, still on the Inquirer payroll but easily in his eighties (or so it seemed from my mid-twenties vantage point) and rarely in the newspaper,” I wrote. “Radio and television reporters often stop by.  These include Andrea Mitchell, a young, aggressive radio reporter who does not shy from asking tough questions, even of larger-than-life figures such as then Police Commissioner (later mayor) Frank Rizzo. Commanding a force that beats up black student protestors at the board of education, Rizzo is an unabashed racist. He is especially hard on Andrea after she marries a black man, but she more than holds her own against the swashbuckling bully in charge of ‘law enforcement.'”

My City Hall beat extended to transportation and housing, which inevitably involved hot-button issues of race and injustice.  Andrea and I were simpatico and so we worked together to produce a joint-bylined story “The Life (And Death) Of A Public Housing Site” for Philly Talk. It was about an ill-fated effort to build public housing “not in the anxious, depressing streets of North Philadelphia but in a quiet, green setting in the bucolic Northwest, close by the serene Schuykill.” The headline gave away the ending. White racism carried the day, and the hoped for housing never got built.

Andrea was a hard-nosed reporter with a soft heart whose passion for social justice seemingly never dimmed over a career spanning half a century.  She began her career with KYW radio, the NBC Philadelphia affiliate. She will continue to report for the NBC TV network on issues of national and foreign importance.