Book details Block newspapers’ treatment of race
In January 2018 — on Martin Luther King Day, no less — the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published one of the most controversial editorials in the paper’s history. Entitled “Reason As Racism,” it featured a full-throated approval of President Donald Trump’s hardline position on immigration. It acknowledged that Mr. Trump’s language may have been crude but argued that, whatever the language, America should not admit uneducated immigrants from backward countries. Such a position, the editorial said, “[is] not racism, it’s reason.”
The editorial was condemned both locally and nationally. The Columbia Journalism Review called it “baffling.” Maxwell King and Grant Oliphant, heads of the Pittsburgh Foundation and the Heinz Endowment, jointly decried it as “provide[ing] cover for racist rhetoric while masquerading as a sense of decency.” Sixteen members of the Block family denounced it as a betrayal of the legacy of Paul Block, the family’s patriarch and former owner of the Post-Gazette and Toledo Blade.
Stung by the reaction, Allan Block, chair of Block Communications Inc. and grandson of Paul Block, commissioned Jack Lessenberry, a former reporter and editor of The Blade, to write a book-length history of the family’s newspapers and their treatment of race. The result, “Reason vs. Racism: A Newspaper Family, Race, and Justice,” is based on extensive research into 14 or so papers that were owned and/or operated by the Block family, beginning with the Newark Star-Eagle in 1916 and continuing up to the present-day ownership of The Blade and Post-Gazette.
Given the author’s connection to the Blocks, and the fact that the book is published by Block Communications, one might expect something of a biased puff piece. Quite the contrary.
A self-avowed racial liberal, Mr. Lessenberry avers his personal disapproval of Mr. Trump’s immigration policies, and does not shy away from the historically sordid history of American race relations. And, as a gifted writer, his lively and engaging prose makes for a good read.
On the whole, this is a story the Blocks can be proud of. It begins with family patriarch Paul Block (1875-1941), a Jewish boy who at the age of 9 emigrated from Lithuania by way of Germany. Settling with his parents in Elmira, N.Y., young Block worked as a messenger boy for the local newspaper and, in a version of the quintessentially American rags-to-riches story, worked his way up the ladder, holding a variety of positions that gave him a good sense of the publishing industry and of ways to increase sales and maximize profits.
Beginning in 1916, Block purchased some 14 newspapers, most in second-tier cities like Newark, N.J., Lancaster, Pa., Duluth, Minn., and Memphis, Tenn. In an age of rampant racism, Paul Block was remarkable for pledging publicly that his papers would be fair in their reporting, regardless of the race, religion or political beliefs of those whom they were reporting on. At a time when President Woodrow Wilson had enshrined racial segregation in the federal government and the Ku Klux Klan was flourishing in both the North and the South, this was no trivial promise. Block became a staunch Republican because he admired the party for emancipating the slaves as well as for championing private enterprise.
Mr. Lessenberry does not explore the source of Block’s staunch opposition to racism, but one can assume that it stemmed from a European childhood that left him pained by the pogroms in Russia and the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Germany.
Two dramatic examples of Block’s commitment to racial justice occurred in 1925. In Memphis, a riverboat sank, throwing a visiting group of civil engineers and their families into the Mississippi River. Tom Lee, a Black laborer who happened to be operating his boat nearby, pulled as many aboard as he could, saving 32 men and women. The city hailed Lee as a hero, but Block, who owned the Memphis News-Scimitar, went further. In addition to praising Lee fulsomely, Block took him to Washington to meet his friend, President Calvin Coolidge.
Locals were outraged at a Black man receiving such prominent attention, and became increasingly critical of the News-Scimitar, ultimately causing Block to sell the paper and leave Memphis. Appropriately, a photograph of Lee and Block meeting President Coolidge graces the cover of Mr. Lessenberry’s book.
Block considered himself a Republican, but nonetheless became an early supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, feeling that FDR’s policies were better for the working class. However, he broke decisively when Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black to the U.S. Supreme Court. The reason had to do with widespread (but denied) rumors that Black was a secret member of the KKK.
Block assigned Ray Sprigle to thoroughly investigate the rumor. One of Block’s best investigative reporters, Sprigle worked for the Post-Gazette, a paper Block had acquired in 1927. Told to spare no expense, he turned up compelling evidence that the rumor was true. Sprigle’s devastating series of articles did not prevent Black from ascending to the nation’s highest court, but they did garner him a Pulitzer Prize.
During the Great Depression, Block lost a lot of papers, such that, when he died in 1941, his two sons, Paul Block Jr. and Bill Block, became co-publishers of the only two papers the family still owned: The Blade and Post-Gazette. Maintaining their father’s commitment to racial fairness, The Blade and PostGazette became two of the first mainstream papers to have a Black reporter on staff — William Brower in Toledo and Regis Bobonis at the Post-Gazette. Thereafter, both papers maintained a small but steady flow of Black reporters who were not confined to a “racial” beat.
In the late 1940s, the Post-Gazette sent Sprigle on a second major assignment, this time to tell white America what life was like for Blacks in the South. Audaciously darkening his skin, Sprigle passed as an African American and journeyed through Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, living among Blacks and gathering testimonies and observations of racial oppression. He should have won a Pulitzer for this highly original series of articles, published in 1949 as “In the Land of Jim Crow.” Unfortunately, newspaper publisher Hodding Carter — ironically a selfproclaimed Southern “liberal” — was on the Pulitzer board. Carter considered Sprigle’s report defamatory, and killed its chance for a prize. A decade later, John Howard Griffin won national fame — and a Pulitzer Prize — for a similar, but less insightful, investigation, entitled “Black Like Me.”
With these and other examples, Mr. Lessenberry demonstrates how the Block family newspapers were ahead of their time in covering race and race relations. In doing so, Mr. Lessenberry holds the papers to a high standard, such as chastising their Duluth, Minn., paper for remaining silent on the first anniversary of a lynching that took place there a year before Block bought the newspaper.
The Block papers’ progressive coverage of race continued long after the founder’s passing. In 2008, the papers endorsed Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency well before his nomination. And, calling Mr. Obama’s life story “quintessentially American,” they supported his re-election in 2012.
In 2016, however, the Block papers endorsed neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump. But, as I have learned from other sources, their support was shifting toward Mr. Trump. They did so despite such unfounded Trump contentions that Obama was born in Africa and that Mexican immigrants, by and large, were rapists, murderers and all-around “bad hombres.” Support for Mr. Trump, including his position on immigration and race, set the Block papers on a course that, in 2018, led to the “Reason as Racism” editorial. Admitting that Mr. Trump’s language may be crude and inelegant, the papers used a narrow definition of racism to insist that his policies were not racist.
“We need to confine the word ‘racist’ to people like Bull Connor and Dylan Roof,” the editorial maintained. “For if every person who speaks inelegantly, (!!) or from a position of privilege, or ignorance, or expresses an idea we dislike, or happens to be a white male, is a racist, the term is devoid of meaning.”
A reader might see this shift as out of harmony with Paul Block’s founding message. Mr. Lessenberry maintains it is not — and he has a point. More than a few Trump followers had voted for Mr. Obama, making it difficult to argue that they were ipso facto racists. However, unlike in the earlier chapters, Mr. Lessenberry does not explore the racial implications of the Block family’s political shift. We learn little about the staff and policy changes that preceded the editorial. Nor do we learn how the Post-Gazette, under the leadership of John R. Block, reacted to Mr. Trump’s kind words for the white nationalists who in 2017 marched in Charlottesville, Va., shouting racist and anti-Semitic chants.
Most distressingly, Mr. Lessenberry ends his coverage largely in the year 2018. He answers charges of racism mainly by relying on brief testimony from Black community leaders like Esther Bush of the Urban League and Joe Trotter of Carnegie Mellon University, who feel that the Post-Gazette’s sympathetic coverage of the civil rights movement demonstrates that the paper and management are (or were) not racist. Tony Norman, outspoken Black columnist at the paper, was quoted as saying the editorial was “indefensible.” The editor “knows better,” he said.
All this shows how unfortunate it is that Mr. Lessenberry cuts off coverage just as things get timely and controversial. One can only hope that a future writer will take up the challenge.