Paul Brock, 89

Founding executive director of the National Association of Black Journalists

Paul Brock, who was the founding executive director of the National Association of Black Journalists and had a long career in the news media, public relations and Democratic politics, died March 14 at his home in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. He was 89.

His daughter, Paula Shelley Rodgers, said the cause was complications of diabetes.

Brock played a central role in 1975 in organizing the 44 founding members of the NABJ, the premiere organization of Black journalists in the United States.

The group was formed in the years after the White House-appointed Kerner Commission concluded that poverty and institutional racism had led to the urban riots of the late 1960s and that for too long the news media had covered the country “with white men’s eyes and white perspective.”

The “journalistic profession,” the commission said, had been “shockingly backward in seeking out, hiring, training, and promoting Negroes.”

The report helped spur Black journalists to form their own professional organizations in several cities. But Brock, who had already helped found the Washington Association of Black Journalists, was among those who believed that a national organization was needed to promote more aggressive hiring practices across the industry and to improve how people of color were covered.

The idea for a national organization had been floated since 1967, but Brock, along with the television journalists Maureen Bunyan and Max Robinson, helped make it happen. When several Black journalists were planning to be in Washington in December 1975 to cover a conference of

Black elected officials, Brock, Bunyan and Robinson suggested that they take that opportunity to organize. Brock reached out to more than 100 other Black journalists across the country and encouraged them to join.

The group had intense discussions over its bylaws and mission as well as who would be eligible to join. They decided that members had to be working journalists and could not be involved in public relations, academics or politics or be otherwise perceived as having agendas.

Brock, who had worked chiefly in radio, was by this time the deputy director for communications of the Democratic National Committee and was therefore disqualified from becoming a member of the group he had just helped found. But he had been so pivotal in its formation and committed to its mission, Dawkins said, that he was given the title of “founding executive director” and worked in that capacity without pay for several years.

Brock held many positions over the years, perhaps most prominently with the NAACP, where he produced radio and TV programs and public service announcements, and with the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign. But he always said that his “heart and soul” belonged to the NABJ.

Over 45 years, his family said, Brock attended every one of the group’s conventions, which have become major recruiting opportunities for news organizations. The association now has more than 4,000 members and is the largest organization of journalists of color in the United States.

Dorothy Tucker, president of NABJ, said in a statement that Brock’s “long and fruitful career served as inspiration to many of us that hard work and commitment to community can open many doors.”