Oct 13, 2020
‘Coming Full Circle from Jim Crow to Journalism’ Author Wanda Lloyd Speaks to UNR Students On Diversity
2020 has had many conversations about Blacks in America, including in the field of journalism. Saralynn Lindsay reports on Wanda Lloyd’s experience over several decades, starting during the age of racist Jim Crow laws.
Reynolds School Assistant Professor of Media Studies Ben Birkinbine hosted a Q and A during a journalism class with Wanda Lloyd. Lloyd has had many successes during her journalism career including being senior editor at USA Today and executive editor at the Alabama-based Montgomery Advertiser. She also worked as an editor at The Washington Post, the Providence Evening Bulletin, the Miami Herald and the Atlanta Journal. She was also an associate professor/ former chair of the Department of Journalism and Mass Communications at Savannah State University, Savannah, Georgia. She was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2019. Here is an abbreviated transcript of some of her answers.
Q: First, I’ll ask you a bit of a personal history question. I’m just wondering if you could begin by talking a little bit about how you view the role of the student press and the importance of student press and to journalism education for the next generation of journalists?
A: Well, I think the role is very important. I found it difficult as chair of the [journalism] department at Savannah State when I went there to chair the journalism program to get students to understand the importance of journalism because they had not had those lessons in high school for the most part. I found it a chore sometimes to get students to understand how important it is to know, to follow what’s going on in the news every day, they tune in and out. So I think it’s really important for people to understand that even though the media is changing, having that foundation in high school, even if it’s a digital publication or broadcast in high school, is really, really important. I would hope that college students would understand their role also to mentor a younger journalist.
Q: I’m just wondering if you could maybe speak a little bit about how you learned to navigate various publications and particularly, you know, as a woman of color. Just maybe talk generally about how you navigated various institutional situations.
A: There were no professional journalism role models for me because everyone who worked in our local media was white and male and we didn’t even know those people. I mean, we saw them on television. But there was no way for us to get to know them. And so I think the way I navigated it was just to observe. I mean, this is the sort of observation of what’s going on around me. I also did not have, for the early years of my career, very many people who looked like me, even in my newsroom, my first newsroom there really was one other woman in the newsroom in a professional role. There were some other ladies who were taking dictation from the reporter back in the day when everything was on typewriters and stories got called in. In Miami, there were a few other journalists of color. And we sort of bonded together and we taught each other a lot of the things that we needed to know about how to navigate in the newsroom.
The Knight Ridder company, which owned the Miami Herald at the time, did a really good job of reaching out to journalists of color, especially African-Americans. And in fact, I think we were all African-American at first. They did a really good job of bringing those numbers into the newsroom. I was the only copy editor. And so we supported each other, but what they did not do, they did not train the editors on why we were there and how to make us feel welcome and how to make sure that we were getting an equal shot at the kinds of assignments that reporters liked to get, assignments for page one, assignments to position us to to have stories that would be in line for awards. It was really quite difficult.
Quite frankly, most of the black journalists in the newsroom at that time had a master’s degree already. There were journalists in the Miami Herald, white journalists who didn’t even have a college degree because you didn’t really have to have a college degree to start in journalism. When I started in journalism, I was a little bit rare in that regard as well. And so that would be one of the situations where we just had to support each other.
Q: What is your vision for better media and representation for black voices and how do we support that? How do we best support that as students and practitioners?
A: You know, we have been working on this diversity and media topic for decades, literally decades… In 1978, the American Society of Newspaper Editors started what we call a census or a count of the people of color specifically in those years, African-Americans, to be sure that our voices were in the newspapers, that our presence was within the newsrooms, and that we had representation on certain kinds of stories. There was something called the year 2000 goal where we were dead set on having this goal, where we would have representation that equaled parity in the community.
The percentage of people in the community would also be the percentage of people in newsrooms. We very soon recognized that that wasn’t going to happen, that newspapers weren’t hiring fast enough. And also, the percentage of people of color was growing because guess what? Not only was the birth rate changing a little bit, but we encompass all the other kinds of diversity, people who were Hispanic, people who were Asian-American and Native American. And, of course, black people. And so the year 2000 goal was changed, I believe the year 2025 is the new goal.
Q: For educational purposes, can you explain who is Jim Crow and what exactly were the Jim Crow Laws?
A: When I worked at Savannah State University, I was having conversations with the seniors because as you know, as a department chair, all the seniors have to come to my office at some point so that I can make sure that they’ve taken all the classes that they have to take. And after those conversations, they would ask me questions about my background, where did I come from? And so I would tell them about the fact that I had been an editor at seven daily newspapers.
But where did you come from? I told them that I grew up in Savannah. I was gone for 40 some years. I came back with Savannah to take that position and they would say something like, well, what was your favorite restaurant when you lived in Savannah? Excuse me, but we didn’t go to restaurants when I was in Savannah. Well, what school did you go to? Did you go to Savannah High School? Well, no. I went to a school that was segregated. And so this was news to a lot of us today.
It appeared that in their education there were lessons in high school about slavery, a little bit of Reconstruction. And then the civil rights movement and everybody sort of skipped over Jim Crow. And so I had to explain to them that Jim Crow was a legal restriction. It was the law that separates our society, there were Jim Crow laws all over the country, but especially in the southeast, where slavery had been so much of the tradition. And we couldn’t go to restaurants or certain schools and almost all places of worship were segregated. We had our own businesses. We had our own Little West Broad Street as the street of commerce in our community. We often, in some stores could not try on clothes in the store because we were Black. Jim Crow was also a time when people were threatened for sometimes saying the wrong things to a white person or whistling at a white woman. That’s what happened to Emmett Till, that’s why he was killed, because people believed he was whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. And so we had to learn at a very early age how to be safe, how to protect ourselves.
Q: Are organizations like the National Association of Black Journalists or Hispanic Journalists still necessary ?
Yes, they are still necessary. Until inequality and racism are erased, they are still necessary. When we go to the National Association of Black Journalists conference every year, the same with the other affinity groups, we are around a family of people that will take students under our wing. There are groups at these conferences called Coping in the Newsroom. Here I am. I’m Black. I’m young. I want to have better assignments. I want a better job in the same place I am. Tell me, what did you.How can I cope? How do I have those conversations in my newsroom? Should I go to my editor? How do I find a mentor? Those are still very necessary. What I’m happy about is that every four years the Black and Hispanic journalists get together and have a conference, which we had this past summer. And so we’re starting to understand that a lot of the issues that we are facing are some of the same issues for all people of color. And so many times we are sharing resources. But it is still necessary. And I will encourage universities to have that kind of group.
