Reflecting on 50 years of national Black media

Marking NABJ’s half-century milestone – for me and us

By: Norma Adams-Wade

What?! Did you say 50 years?! Really!! Come on. You’re kidding, right?

No. The calendar and history are not kidding. A half-century has passed since a group of African-American journalists, who worked in major media, gathered in a suite in a Washington D. C. hotel and voted to become a groundbreaking national group of modern African-heritage heritage griots – the storytellers and history chroniclers of the U. S. and the world.

By the end of the gathering, 44 of the more than 75 Black Journalists in the room had signed a document and declared ourselves as the National Association of Black Journalists.

My name is #23 on the co-founders’ list that is now in the NABJ archives. Some journalists present decided not to sign up and join. Some of them later stated they chose to avoid the risk of being fired from their jobs for joining an organization that employers might have feared as a threat.

Year 2025 in Cleveland, Ohio

Fifty years later in August 2025 in Cleveland, Ohio, more than a dozen of us original 44 founders gathered with new generations of Black journalists to celebrate NABJ’s half-century mark. There was pride and anticipation in the room, also a bit of trepidation about the state of the nation. Some of the anticipation was not unlike that same emotion that filled the room on December 12, 1975 at the Sheraton-Park Hotel (renamed the Marriott Wardman Park hotel) in the nation’s Capital.

Memories flowed as founders gathered over meals and on plenary discussion panels. My thoughts regressed to the Motherland where the griot tradition began. The griot was assigned to memorize and, when needed, relate the oral history and happenings of the village people. Our modern variation, though, is that we relate history and happenings by writing it down or broadcasting it across the airwaves.

Impact of Kerner Commission

The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, was an impetus for the rise of African-Americans in major media newsrooms.

Illinois Governor Otton Kerner Jr. chaired the commission that was established in July 1967 under President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas native.

The era was during what media described as the 1967 “the long hot summer” of civil unrest that a number of reporters described as “race riots” in about 150 mainly urban cities. The commission report concluded that lack of diversity in media and the viewing of the nation through strictly white, male eyes created division and exclusion that led to the revolts.

The report stated: “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white–separate and unequal.” The report strongly suggested that the closed-door media open up to diversity.

Around the same time as the “long hot summer” of ’67 and the commission investigation, The Dallas Morning News recruited and hired Julia Scott Reed from the local Black press in July 1967. Reed, a smart, self-assured, largely self-taught reporter and photographer, exclusively covered the Black community in her thrice-weekly Morning News column The Open Line.

 I came to the Morning News seven years later with a journalism degree from the University of Texas at Austin and was the Morning New’s first full-time African-American journalist to cover news citywide. Reed, who had been the Morning News’ “one and only” Black news staffer, became my mentor, and the two of us were now the only two Blacks on the News staff.

NNPA and NABJ both tell our story

During the NABJ convention, my thoughts also wandered to the two different but vital paths of two organizations that signify Black representation, interpretation, and decision-making in news by and for African-Americans. These are the two historically-Black National Newspaper Publishers Association (NNPA) and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

NNPA avidly defends Black press ownership and its power to make its own decisions about disseminating news to our own people.

NABJ is dedicated to maintaining diversity in major media and helping African-Americans ascend to decision making positions there in print and broadcast media.

I view NNPA and NABJ as unofficial sister organizations, although there is no legal affiliation and limited interaction. NNPA was founded 85 years ago in 1940 as the National Negro Publishers Association. In 1956, the group changed “Negro” to “Newspaper” in its name.

This year’s NNPA national convention was held in June in Savannah, Georgia, two months ahead of NABJ’s August gathering in Cleveland, Ohio. NNPA announced that during its 87^th anniversary in two years, it will observe the 200^th anniversary of Black-owned media, pay homage to Freedom’s Journal — the first Black-owned newspaper founded in 1827 in New York City by two free-born Black males, John Russwurm and Sam Cornich. That newspaper’s mission statement was: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.”

NNPA and NABJ still are pleading our own cause in their distinct ways. For NABJ, a half-century has delivered some hard punches and some heady victories. Further, that half-century has led us to a new horizon with technology and challenges beyond our imagination. We can sink, swim, or soar as we move forward. I’m banking on soaring.

My NABJ reflections over more than five decades

I recall:

• Being #23 on the list of journalists who signed-on to found NABJ.
• Being the only representative from Texas, thus became founding director of the original NABJ Region VII ( now restructured to Region III) that included southern states.
• Because my last name, Adams-Wade, begins with an A, I am the first name on any recorded alphabetical listing of founders.
• Being in the room with noted Black journalists who signed on as founders. The names and work places at the time included TV news anchors Max Robinson and Maureen Bunyan, Washington, D. C.; Les Payne, Newsday; Vernon Jarrett, Chicago Tribune; Francis Ward, Los Angeles Times; Jeannye Thornton, U, S, News & World Report; Alex Poinsett, Ebony Magazine; Acel Moore, Philadelphia Inquirer, H. Chuku Lee, Africa Journal; Toni Jones, Detroit Free Press; Joel Dreyfuss, Washington Post; Paul Delaney, The New York Times; Reginald Bryant, Black Perspective on the News; and Norma Adams-Wade, The Dallas Morning News.
• Always a treat, this year and in previous years, was seeing media standout Kevin Merida whose career I had observed first-hand. Merida rose from an apprentice, advanced through various national newspapers, and became executive editor of the Los Angeles Times, ESPN senior VP and editor-in-chief, and chaired ESPN’s editorial board. Merida was a frontrunner student in the late media guru Bob Maynard’s 1979 Institute for Journalism Education’s Summer Program for Minority Journalist at the University of California at Berkeley. I was recruited from The Dallas Morning News as one of various major media journalists to be an editor/trainer for the students that summer. Merida’s numerous honors include NABJ’s 2000 Journalist of the Year and the 2020 NABJ Chuck Stone Lifetime Achievement Award.
• Some memories carry pain — the price paid for losing individuals who impacted your life and inspired admiration. Some of these late champion NABJ journalists include the late Les Payne, Gwen Ifill, Chuck Stone, Vernon Jarrett, Mal Goode, Max Robinsion, Paul Brock and Linda Lockhart.
• Other thoughts were of new technology, i.e., drones and AI; the new world-view of Millennials and Gen Z Black communicators; and the increased physical danger of being a journalist in current society.

Dallasite Norma Adams-Wade is a Texas Metro News senior correspondent, The Dallas Morning News retired writer, and a National Association of Black Journalists founder.