The Washington Informer: Opinions/Editorials

Simeon Booker, the first Black Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, worked practically his entire professional career in the Johnson Publishing Co. Bureau in Washington, on Pennsylvania Avenue, just one block from The White House. Lerone Bennet, Hoyt Fuller, Hans Massaquoi, and are just a few who are well known bylines in the Johnson magazines.

He was an affable and friendly man, with a winning, mischievous charm.

Prodigious writer Chester Higgins Sr. once remembered the Friday night poker games that took place in the old Johnson Publishing Building on Michigan Avenue when he worked there. If Johnson encountered a losing streak Higgins told this writer once, he had no problem opening the company walk-in safe behind his chair, guaranteeing eventual victory for him in the “sky’s the limit” game stakes.

In 1995 when she was president of the National Newspaper Association, I presented Dorothy Leavell, publisher of The Chicago Crusader newspaper to Johnson at a reception in his honor at the National Association of Black Journalists convention in Philadelphia. He, of course remembered, Leavell, and recalled how he and her late husband, Balm Leavell, were once rival political assistants to a powerful Southside alderman with ties to City Hall.

Every day, Messrs. Johnson and Leavell would vie to have the most influence on the boss. But Johnson was often able to out-position Leavell by frequently being the last person from his office to speak to the politician each day.

Johnson, single at the time, would make himself available after-hours to be the official “escort” for the married alderman’s particular lady friend for the evening, at all public events and nightclubs. When the public appearances were done, Johnson would excuse himself from the alderman and his lady friend, but not before reminding him what he wanted the boss to know. That’s how he got the top job in that office, Johnson said.

When Watts came along, something happened that had never happened before. The major White news organizations discovered that they had to have reporters with “Negro” faces. As the riot, and the looting spread - “Burn, Baby. Burn!” - business owners found that Black owners who went to their businesses could often stave-off the mob. A sign “Negro-owned” or “Soul Brother” or something identifying a business as that of a Black person sometimes resulted in more than just a few businesses being spared.

News organizations also got the message. White reporters were just not safe in the center of a Negro race-riot. I was a 20-year-old college student in the widely-respected journalism department at L.A. City College that year. In September 1965 a tall Black man entered the program. He had been a telephone-classified ad sales person, typing ads dictated over the telephone, when The Los Angeles Times discovered that he was the only Negro the company employed, who already knew how to type. So they made an instant reporter out of him and sent him into Watts, hoping he could get something, anything, since no White reporter would even dare to attempt to travel into the Watts curfew zone. By that circuitous route that man became the first Black reporter ever hired by The Times. That’s amazing, in and of itself.

My hat’s off to John H. Johnson. He was the Black Journalist Employment Agency of first and last resort, until Watts came along.