“I grew up in apartheid,” he told the News & Record of Greensboro, N.C., in 1996. “And yet it never induced my parents to teach us anything else than that we were responsible for our own behavior, for our own minds.”
Mr. Raspberry left Mississippi to attend Indiana Central College (now the University of Indianapolis). In college, he worked at the Indianapolis Recorder, a weekly newspaper geared toward black audiences.
Read past columns by Post columnist William Raspberry, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1994.
After graduating in 1958, he served as a public information officer with the Army. In 1962, Mr. Raspberry was hired as a Teletype operator by The Post. Within months, he began working as one of the first black reporters for the newspaper’s Metro desk.
Seeking a way to stand out, he recalled in a 2005 interview with NPR, “I started asking myself, ‘What is it I know that the other guys don’t know? What am I better at?’ And my thought was that I’ve had a couple decades being black, and they haven’t.”
Mr. Raspberry made a name for himself in 1965, when The Post dispatched him to cover riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles. A year later, he was a columnist.
After the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, Mr. Raspberry wrote a series of dispatches from the strife-torn streets of Washington, chronicling a city on fire.
Mr. Raspberry was known as a careful monitor of racial politics, but some readers were incensed in 1990, when he appeared to voice grudging respect for the polarizing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. A year earlier, Mr. Raspberry had excoriated what he called the “gratuitous antisemitism” of Farrakhan and some of his supporters.
“Blacks in particular are at pains to force America to face up to racism, blatant and subtle, and to demand that others be sensitive to our special concerns,” Mr. Raspberry wrote. “Is it too much to suggest that those who demand sensitivity have a duty to practice it?”
Survivors include Mr. Raspberry’s wife of 45 years, Sondra Dodson Raspberry of Washington; three children, Patricia D. Raspberry and Mark J. Raspberry, both of Washington, and Angela Raspberry Jackson of Detroit; a foster son, Reginald Harrison of Manassas; his 106-year-old mother, Willie Mae Tucker Raspberry of Indianapolis; a sister; and a brother.
Mr. Raspberry taught journalism for more than 10 years at Duke University and received more than 15 honorary doctorates. A collection of his columns, “Looking Backward at Us,” was published in 1991, and he received awards from the National Press Club and the National Association of Black Journalists.
In retirement, Mr. Raspberry devoted much of his time to an educational foundation, Baby Steps, that he organized in his hometown in Mississippi. He funded the project for low-income parents and children from his own pocket.
After writing more than 5,000 opinion columns, Mr. Raspberry said in a speech at the University of Virginia in 2006, he had learned two important lessons.
The first, he said, “is that in virtually every public controversy, most thoughtful people secretly believe both sides.”
“The second, which has kept my confidence from turning into arrogance, is that it is entirely possible for you to disagree with me without being, on that account, either a scoundrel or a fool.”
