Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America
An Oral History
By Wallace Terry
Carroll & Graf
368 pages, $15.95

In the spring of 1944, John Q. Jordan told his local draft board chairman, “I’m a fairly good journalist but I don’t know what kind of marine I’ll make. I’ve never fired a gun.”

The chairman was apparently persuaded. Jordan, a correspondent for a black-oriented newspaper, The Norfolk Journal & Guide, bought a uniform, was issued an army captain’s insignia and headed to Italy to cover all-black units.

While there, Jordan did, indeed, file regular dispatches. He also helped to carry the wounded from the battlefield, prepared black soldiers for interviews before white audiences, and, on one occasion, issued orders after he was mistaken for a real Army officer.

That’s just one of the remarkable stories told by the pioneering black newsmen and newswomen featured in Wallace Terry’s oral history. With this final project, Terry intended to fill the gaps in the historical record, to remind readers that black journalists, too, covered some of the premier news events of the last century. He accomplished that and more.

Terry interviewed nineteen journalists whose body of work spanned a couple of generations. The earliest had careers starting before World War II; others worked during the era that included the civil rights movement and Vietnam; the successful broadcast careers of Bernard Shaw, Carole Simpson, and the late Ed Bradley ended more recently.

With this treasure trove of history, readers are reminded of not-so-long-ago events that made journalism history. There’s Earl Caldwell’s historic legal battle against the FBI, which tried to press him into service as an informant against the Black Panthers. Then there’s the rollicking testimony of Chuck Stone, who as a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, was a...

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