Paul Brock, a founder of a Black journalism group, dies
Paul Brock, a former public relations consultant, radio news broadcaster, movie producer and Democratic National Committee communications official who in 1975 was one of the principal organizers of the National Association of Black Journalists, died March 14 at his home in Upper Marlboro, Md. He was 89.
The cause was complications from diabetes, said his wife, Virgenia Embrey-Brock.
One of Brock’s earliest jobs in journalism came in 1968, when he became news director at the public radio station WETA-FM in Arlington, Va., for which he hosted a weekly nighttime news program called “The Potter’s House.”
In 1971, he joined Howard University’s commercial radio start-up WHUR-FM as news director and focused on covering stories about the growing political turmoil across the country, federal trials of anti-Vietnam War activists, the political and social movement of Black-pride activists and the occupation protests of the American Indian Movement.
Around that time, Brock helped found the Washington Association of Black Journalists and served as its first president. By the mid1970s, Brock and television journalists Maureen Bunyan and Max Robinson began a campaign to unify the various Black journalists associations from different cities into a national organization, which became known as the NABJ.
Brock, who by then was working as deputy director of communications for the DNC, developed an extensive media contact list and wrote letters inviting Black journalists to Washington to attend an organizing meeting in December 1975. The date was selected because many of the reporters were already scheduled to be in D.C. to cover a gathering of Black municipal officials from across the country.