For Young Journalists, Gerald Boyd Pointed the Way

By Marcia Davis
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 25, 2006

The chair didn't so much as fly at me, as it rattled and rumbled across the floor, stopping close to where I was standing.

Gerald M. Boyd, who decades later would become the first black managing editor of the New York Times, and who died Thanksgiving Day at the heartbreaking age of 56, had just kicked it. Hard.

His voice was urgent, his eyes piercing, as he collected the newspaper stories we had filed 10 minutes late. We were among a small number of high school kids attending a summer journalism workshop at the University of Missouri at Columbia. The other participants had all gone by then, and there were just three of us left-- two students desperately typing, and Boyd, pacing and waiting, pacing and waiting.

"You can't blow deadlines, you just can't do it," he'd said, using that heavy wooden chair as his exclamation point.

It was the mid-'70s and I was between my sophomore and junior years, and had already made up my mind. I was going to be a journalist. I knew it, and Boyd did too. This was serious business going on between us. He was passionate about journalism's critical role in society and what it meant to have people of color in the profession. Mainly, though, he believed that the world needed disciplined journalists of integrity, regardless of race or gender.

He would raise generations of reporters and editors, starting with kids like me, kids from his home town of St. Louis, where Boyd had grown up in the care of his grandmother. He had worked hard and won a scholarship to the University of Missouri and then went on to become a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. And our teacher.

That summer at Columbia was not my first encounter with Boyd. I had met him and George Curry, another brash young reporter, when they established a seven-week journalism workshop, a program for black high school students taught on Saturday mornings at a community college. Their model would be repeated all over the country. Under the program's guidelines, I was too young to participate, but I'd written a letter pleading my case and they had opened the door, had let me in.

I and others learned about asking tough questions, being fair and accurate and how credibility was all any journalist had. Questioning authority meant everything. If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

A few times I tagged along with Boyd while he worked. Once, when he went to a city agency where senior citizens had gathered to complain about ill treatment, who would I find there but my own grandmother, sitting with a number of other women from the public housing complex where she lived -- and where I had spent a big part of my own life.

Journalism was about people, their tragedies and their triumphs, their struggles and their successes. Journalism was about challenging those in power to get it right. And when they got it wrong, it was a journalist's job to call them on it.

Boyd was never shy about his belief in the purity of these notions and his belief in newspapers to honor them. That can sound like a bunch of hokum to those who complain about the liberal media or corporate-run media (as I did when I got to college), but he believed it deeply, lived it fully.

He wasn't shy about his own ambition either. His dream, he told me once, was to work at the New York Times and eventually to be on its masthead. It was ambition born out of a belief that he had much to contribute to getting it right. And he did, first covering the 1980 presidential race and the Reagan White House, for the Post-Dispatch, then moving to the Times in 1983, where he covered subsequent presidential races and eventually became an editor.

Accurately covering race in America was another one of Boyd's passions. During his career he would help guide his paper to several Pulitzer Prizes on many topics, including terrorism, poverty and one for the series "How Race Is Lived in America."

We didn't talk regularly. We didn't have to. But whenever we did, it was not so much as student-teacher anymore but as colleagues. And that made us both proud.

I saw him that first year he became managing editor at the Times. I was in the city for work and stopped in to say hello. He was in his new office and he talked about how excited he was to have the job, and how hard a job it was.

There was a lot of work to be done, he said. I knew, too, that throughout his climb at the Times there had been all kinds of pressures, including those that come with being a black man in management.

It would be a year later when Jayson Blair would blow up the New York Times. Blair was a troubled young man who fabricated stories and shook the newsroom -- and the paper's credibility -- to its core. The scandal ended the two-year leadership of top editor Howell Raines and Boyd. It was a heartbreaker. But I wasn't just sorry that my teacher and friend had been short-circuited. I was angry.

I, like many journalists, and not just black ones, was incensed when some charged that because Boyd and Blair were black men, Boyd had gone easy on the young reporter. How, after Boyd had proved himself for so many years, could his integrity, and the integrity of all black journalists, be called into question simply because of race? Boyd was a black man, and a black man who cared about race in America, but he was not crippled by it.

I knew how exacting and tenacious he was, how much he demanded excellence, and how much he believed in what he was doing. I had even fended off complaints from other black journalists who charged that he was too hard or didn't care about them. Though Boyd acknowledged that he and Raines had made mistakes, coddling Blair because of his race wasn't one of them.

When I called him after his resignation, he assured me that he would be all right. And I knew he would, but I also knew how much he had loved the work and how long he had loved it.

As his wife, Robin Stone, who is left to care for their young son, Zachary, said the other day, "Journalism was his life."

And though I still miss deadlines on occasion, I know I have been enriched by that life. As have we all.