Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 21, 1993 TAG: 9302180088
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE D'ORSO LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
`BLOOD' LINES
THIS is what it was like to be a black journalist in America in the 1960s.You were 22 as the decade dawned, a rookie at the Washington Post, the only black reporter on the entire staff, and you wanted to make a mark. So you went undercover, joined a little-known group called the Nation of Islam, attended their fiery meetings and feared for your life. You met their leader, a man named Malcolm X, and wrote about it all that winter in a seven-part series, for which you were rewarded by being put on the Post's night shift, rewriting cop stories and typing church briefs.
A year later you packed your Rambler with notebooks and pens and pointed it toward Alabama and Georgia because what else could you do? Where else could you go to find a story that meant more to your nation, to your people, that meant more to you than the movement for civil rights in the South? It was Freedom Summer, 1961, and you rode alone.
Yes, you had to take a leave from the paper because it wouldn't send you on its time, and yes, you had to preach a sermon here and there to gather enough gas money to get you to the next town, and yes, you carried a large cup in the front seat to relieve yourself because you weren't about to risk the restrooms or even the side of the road in a region where black men's bodies bobbed up from riverbeds and no one blinked an eye.
But you did it. You spent six years doing it, meeting the men who led the struggle, moving in the circles they moved in. Men like Malcolm and Martin. And Medgar Evers, who asked you one night over a meal at his home - you always stayed with Evers when you were in Mississippi - what it was going to take to win this fight. It would take funerals, you told him. Hundreds of funerals. And you cursed yourself when the next funeral you wept over was his.
That was in 1963, the year of Birmingham and bombings, of Bull Connor and dogs and hoses. Martin Luther King was there, and so were you, as a reporter for Time magazine. You and King were close by then. You'd watched him preach, and he'd even watched you. When your first son was born early that year, King insisted on being the godfather. When King marched from Selma to Montgomery in '65, the combat boots he wore were bought by you. And when he was gunned down in '68, you wept again, half a world away, in a place called Vietnam.
You were chasing another story by then, the story of black and white soldiers fighting side by side in America's longest war. When you'd first arrived in '67, you liked what you saw. So did Lyndon Johnson, who invited you to the White House after reading your piece on racial harmony among the troops. Same mud, same blood - that was your theme.
But a year later the story had changed. The rage exploding across America had spread to 'Nam. Cross-burnings, Confederate flags and Klan costumes had crept into the Asian jungle now. This time you had more than a magazine piece. You had the story of the decade. You had a book.
But no one would touch it. People were sick of the war. They didn't need more bad news. They didn't need to hear about angry black soldiers armed with guns. So they turned away.
But you couldn't. The book became a crusade. You brought it to more than a hundred publishers, and they each handed it back. Another decade came and went, the '70s, and still you kept pushing. Finally, the war became touchable. Vietnam books began to appear. Vietnam movies began to hit the theaters. In '82 your story got a nibble, and in '84 it was published.
"Bloods."
It became a best-seller, but that wasn't enough. It spawned a stage show, speaking tours, more honors and awards than you could count, but were you satisfied? Hardly. Because by then you had been pushing so long, driving so hard that there was no way to stop. You'd put your three kids through college, launched them into a life made better by the struggle you had chronicled, the struggle you'd been a part of, and now there was no way to leave that struggle behind.
So you came back to college to teach kids younger than yours, kids who weren't alive in the '60, why any of this should matter to them now.
Which is how you found yourself on the campus of the College of William and Mary on a cold January afternoon in 1993, hurrying to confront an auditorium full of undergraduates who were waiting to hear just what it was that you went through 30 years ago.
This is what it was like to be a black journalist in America in the 1960s.
And this is what it is like to be Wallace Terry today.
He's 54 years old, and he looks like a gangster on this winter afternoon, striding across the staid Williamsburg campus in his black shoes, black socks, black slacks, black turtleneck, black jacket and overcoat, black scarf and black wide-brimmed hat. Even his wristwatch is black, as is the Cherokee Jeep he's driven down from his home in Reston.
Once a week he makes that 2 1/2-hour commute, to serve as this semester's journalist-in-residence at W&M. His class meets Thursday afternoons: History 491, "Eyewitness to the '60s."
He thought he'd see maybe 20 kids in a small seminar. Instead 120 are enrolled, and even more are crowded into the school's Millington Auditorium as Terry enters the room.
Earlier in the day he had sat on a sofa in the basement of the school's English Building, explaining to a group of students from the campus newspaper what sets his class apart from the half dozen other courses already offered at W&M on civil rights, Vietnam and the '60s.
"What I'm focusing on is what I covered," he told them, "where I was and what I saw."
What he didn't tell them about were the seeds of his career, the forces that drove him long before the pursuit of history and the publishing of a book.
He didn't tell them about his parents' divorce.
He didn't tell them about his dead brother.
He didn't tell them about his white stepfather.
But later, alone in his spare office, he talked about all these things in the relaxed, graceful manner of a man at ease on either side of an interview.
His resume - two pages, single-spaced - covers his career from Brown University to the seminary, from the Post to Time, from radio and television work to a stint as an editor for USA Today, to his current job writing profiles for Parade Magazine. Then there are the half-dozen book and film projects he's got going right now, all subsidized at the moment by the salary William and Mary is paying him to teach this class.
When asked where the money went from "Bloods," when asked why he and his wife, Janice, rent their home in Reston instead of owning it, he says, "We didn't buy a house with our money; we bought three college educations."
Those would be for Wallace III, a 29-year-old graphic artist who followed his father to Brown; Lisa, a 28-year-old law clerk who went to the University of Virginia then Vanderbilt; and David, a 23-year-old sculptor with an art degree from W&M.
Wallace Jr. - and II Terry has tried, he says, to give his children what his own father could not give him. His parents divorced when he was 6, after the family had moved from New York to Indianapolis, and that, he says, is where his story truly starts.
"Their breakup had a traumatizing effect on me," he says, leaning back in his chair and running his hands together.
His father's name was Wallace Terry. His is Wallace Terry II. It was not until he was 11 that he discovered there was another Wallace between them, a baby buried in a cemetery in Harlem, a brother born a year before him and accidentally smothered by a careless nurse in the newborn section of a Harlem hospital. That baby was named Wallace Jr., and Terry still is haunted by him.
If that weren't enough, there was the legacy of his mother's family - black aunts and uncles who were known throughout Indiana for their groundbreaking achievements in athletics, education and religion. He was always being compared to them, always reminded that as a black man "you've got to work twice as hard to get half as far," and always told how far they had gotten. He heard the message, and he still hears it today.
"One of the things that's probably troubled me most about my life is I've always made decisions based upon `Am I going to be remembered?' Sometimes I've done things that were not wise, that were perhaps harmful to me financially, career-wise or even physically, simply because I want to make sure that I do something that's going to be remembered 50 or 100 years from now."
That's why he was always at the top of his class at the black grade school he attended in Indianapolis. That's why his family sent him one summer to a private all-white school - "to give me the experience of being around white kids." And that's why after the Indianapolis schools were integrated in 1949, Terry was chosen as one of the few blacks to attend the city's elite Shortridge High School, where writers Booth Tarkington and Kurt Vonnegut had prepared for college.
His mother was remarried by then, and Terry's new father, a white man known for his liberal bent became his mentor. Terry's involvement in everything from student government to the school paper was steered by his stepfather, whose dream was for him to go into advertising.
That was his goal when he entered Brown on a scholarship in 1955, one of three blacks in his class. Before he was through, he had become the first black student newspaper editor in the Ivy League. Almost everything he did made him the first black to do it. That's the way it was in a white world in the 1950s, and that's what Terry expected. Still, it wasn't easy.
And so, after making the front page of the New York Times in 1957 for getting an interview with Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus during the Little Rock showdown over school integration, after graduating from Brown with a degree in religion in 1959 and entering the seminary in Chicago, where he was ordained as a minister in the Disciples of Christ church, Terry joined the staff of the Washington Post in the summer of 1960.
He had no plans for a journalism career. There were precious few black reporters and no black editors or publishers in the mainstream press. As for specialized black newspapers and magazines like Ebony or the Chicago Defender, they were out of the question - "I didn't want to be ghettoized." Terry's plan was to write for the Post by day, take law classes at night and eventually go into politics.
"But that idea faded quickly," he says, "as I stepped into the most incredible decade of my life, the decade that has dominated the rest of my life."
Too early, too black
Ask him why - with all the stories he broke during the '60s, from the rise of Malcolm X's Black Muslims to the birth of Stokely Carmichael's Black Power movement, from the Supreme Court nomination of Thurgood Marshall to the news that black and white U.S. soldiers were killing one another in Vietnam - he never became as fabled a figure as many of the white reporters beside whom he worked, and Terry gives two reasons.
One is that his timing was bad. He found and wrote his stories far too early. Malcolm X was still unknown when Terry encountered him in 1960. No one understood what Black Power meant when Terry first reported on the shift in the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee movement in 1962. No one believed U.S. soldiers could actually turn on one another when Terry came home with that story in 1968.
"I believe I would have won Pulitzer Prizes for a number of pieces I did," he says, "if people would have realized what I was doing. They didn't know the impact or the power of these events. They didn't know what I had."
The other reason, he says, is simply because he was black.
Like any good reporter, he makes his point with a story, describing the spring afternoon in 1967 that he met with Johnson to talk about Vietnam. The president was so taken by Terry's good news that he gave him some good news of his own.
"You've done something for me," said Johnson. "I want to do something for you."
So he told Terry he was going to announce the following Monday that he was nominating Thurgood Marshall to be the first black justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
"That was one of the greatest scoops of my life," says Terry. "I mean, I literally ran out of the White House, ran all the way up Connecticut Avenue."
But when Time came out that week, Terry's story was not in it. By the time his piece appeared a week later, Newsweek had already published its story.
"That killed me, seeing my scoop in Newsweek," says Terry. "Time told me they didn't want to break the story. They said they'd rather have the details once the story was broken by someone else.
"What that told me was I didn't have the credibility I thought I had with them. If a white reporter had brought that back, I daresay it would have been handled differently."
Still, Terry stayed with Time from 1963 to 1971, filing memories for himself as well as stories for the magazine. He plans to share those memories in an autobiography he is writing, a book called "Correspondent."
Malcolm X will be in there, of course, along with King and the man Terry was drawn to most, Medgar Evers. All three had an aura about them, says Terry, an allure that made other men want to follow them. But their styles were totally different.
"What I liked most about [Evers] was he was fighting on his own turf in Mississippi, the worst state in the nation. Here was a man who had belonged to the Red Ball Express in World War II, a soldier who had come home and who was willing to fight in the one state where Martin never took his movement. Martin visited Mississippi, but he never led a movement there because he knew how dangerous it was, he knew his methods would have never worked there, just as we know nonviolence never would have worked in Nazi Germany."
Terry admired King and Malcolm X as well, but he never felt the connection to them that he felt with Evers.
"Martin, though he wasn't much older than me, always seemed so old. He had this overpowering presence and this incredible voice, one of the great voices of this century. Sitting down with him was like sitting down with your father.
"Now Malcolm, he was the guy I wanted to walk the streets with, no question about that. He had this degree of confidence in any kind of environment. You always figured no matter where you were with Malcolm, you were safe. He knew his way around."
Terry says Malcolm saved his life after that 1960 series appeared in the Post. He received death threats from the local chapter of the Nation of Islam, whose members were outraged at his deceit. The Post put him up in a hotel with police guards, where he stayed until Malcolm stepped in.
"He got them off my back," Terry says with a small smile. "It turned out he liked the story."
After that, Terry became one of a handful of black journalists - Alex Haley was another - whom Malcolm X would routinely call or visit to get a sense of the shifting national scene.
"Malcolm understood the press and how to use it. That was part of what made him successful. He courted the press. He had an act. You knew when he went up to speak that he was gonna give the white man hell. . . .
"That was the difference between Malcolm and Martin. You always felt like Malcolm was kind of stage acting, even when he sat with you. Then there were moments where the act would end and another Malcolm would come out, more relaxed."
Terry says he will never forget his last meeting with Malcolm X, in New York in 1965.
"It was a few weeks before he was murdered, and we were driving through Harlem together, riding around the streets. He had two guns between us, one on the dashboard and one on the seat.
"I remember thinking that I didn't take that seriously. I took it as part of Malcolm's act. I didn't think that anyone would actually try to kill him. I guess that's because he was so exciting and so important to the cause of black nationalism that I couldn't imagine he could be in danger from his own people, no matter how much the Muslims were angry about what he had said or done, no matter how threatened they might have felt because he was pulling away.
"I just couldn't believe that a black person - any black person - would kill someone of Malcolm's influence and importance. Medgar Evers being murdered by white racists was one thing. But to imagine blacks killing a black leader - who could imagine that?"
The `Bloods' bond
By 1968, Terry had seen something even more unimaginable - a race war among the American troops in Vietnam.
The man Time had put on its cover for Terry's first story in '67 found a cross burned outside his tent soon after the piece was published. Another man, a soldier named Leroy Pitts, who had been Terry's guide a year earlier, died after covering a grenade with his body to save the soldiers around him.
It was because of these two "bloods," and thousands of black soldiers like them, that Terry turned a single story into a lifetime mission.
"I'd already had the idea of writing this book, but now it became even more important, because now it was going to be a tribute to guys like these, so they wouldn't be forgotten."
It has been 25 years since Terry brought his story back from Vietnam, a quarter-century for the military to deal with racial tension within its ranks, and Terry is the first to say the situation has dramatically improved.
"The very fact that you've got more than 100 black general officers and Colin Powell sits at the very top means that there are role models for black advancement like you can't find in any other industry in this country, except maybe entertainment. And there, blacks are basically the performers. They don't control the industry."
As far as Terry is concerned, it was men like Leroy Pitts who paved the way for a man like Colin Powell.
It is for men like Pitts that Terry continues to write books - three more volumes of "Bloods" are in the works, as well as a history of black journalists since World War II and two children's books on the contributions of black Americans.
It is for men like Pitts that Terry wants to make movies - he is meeting with Spike Lee this month to discuss a film version of "Bloods."
And it is for men like Pitts that Terry teaches classes like the one he faced late on this Thursday afternoon.
He spent the first hour covering the blackboard with the names of dozens of men and women, white and black, famous and obscure, who shaped the civil rights movement in America both before and during the 1960s.
Names like Sojourner Truth and Hosea Williams. Frederick Douglass and Morton Delaney. David Walker and Ida Wells Barnett.
He didn't put his own name up there, but perhaps someone else will one day, maybe 50 or 100 years from now.