The Post-Gazette’s history on covering race
The newspaper and its editors have a long history of trying to do better.
SDETROIT o what is the truth about the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and how it covers issues related to race?
Last week a story in The Washington Post attacked this newspaper for allegedly preventing black reporters from covering the protests that erupted in the city after the killing of George Floyd.
Keith Burris, the executive editor of the Post-Gazette, responded in a front-page letter to the readers that nobody had been singled out and kept from covering the news because of their color.
I have no knowledge of this incident beyond what I have read in these newspapers. Nor am I going to second-guess any journalists who were on the scene, involved in the coverage or directing it.
But I may know more about how the Block family has covered race, and issues dealing with race, over the last century than anyone.
That’s because I have been working on a book about that topic for many months. Nearly two years ago, Allan Block, the chair of Block Communications Inc., the company that owns the Post-Gazette, asked me if I would be willing to research and write a book on his family’s history of reporting and covering race.
They had been called “racist” by some because of an earlier controversy involving an editorial on immigration policy. He and his brother, John Robinson Block, the Post-Gazette’s publisher and editor-in-chief, believed they had a long and proud history of fairness.
I am not a professional historian, but had taught journalism history for many years. I had once been a national correspondent for the Toledo Blade, the sister paper of the Post-Gazette, and later served as its non-employee ombudsman.
“I don’t want you to sugarcoat it,” Allan Block told me. “Look at all the papers we ever owned and see what you find.”
I did exactly that, beginning with the first papers his grandfather had owned more than a century ago.
I read Block newspapers in cities from Brooklyn to Los Angeles; papers in Lancaster and Pittsburgh; Duluth and Detroit; Newark and Nashville, where his Memphis papers’ microfilm is housed, and more.
What I found was a company whose record on covering race and employing minorities was, while not perfect, mostly remarkably ahead of the times. The original Paul Block (1875-1941) was no civil rights crusader, but stoutly opposed the Ku Klux Klan, and sent Post-Gazette’s legendary Ray Sprigle to Alabama to expose that yes, despite his denials, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was a life member of the Klan. Sprigle got a Pulitzer Prize for that story,
He, and the Post-Gazette, should have won another for a 1948 series in which Sprigle risked his life by pretending to be a black man in the Jim Crow South for a month. As former Post-Gazette staffer Bill Steigerwald showed in his remarkable 2017 book “30 Days a Black Man,” his second Pulitzer was sabotaged by a supposedly liberal but xenophobic Southern editor who couldn’t bear criticism of his region.
The Post-Gazette became the first majority white newspaper in Pittsburgh to hire a black reporter, the late Regis Bobonis, in 1955. Six years later, Bobonis became Pittsburgh’s first black TV reporter when he was hired by WIIC-TV (now WPXI), a station that was half-owned by the Block family; it is quite likely that Bill Block Sr. was instrumental in getting Bobonis hired at both institutions.
Meanwhile, Paul Block Jr. (his brother and the father of both Allan and John Block) arrived in Toledo in 1943 and almost immediately ordered his editors to stop identifying suspects by race.
When the war ended, he pressed his editors to hire a superbly qualified black reporter. That man, Bill Brower, stayed nearly half a century at the Toledo Blade, and served as mentor for many young black reporters. During his career, Brower traveled the nation three times in three different decades to report on race in America.
The Post-Gazette hasn’t always gotten it right. The paper did not ask enough questions about the urban renewal programs in the 1950s and ’60s that wiped out thriving black neighborhoods.
When riots engulfed the Hill District following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, the paper showed a lot of concern for the white merchants whose stores had been damaged and little for the blacks who had been burned out of their homes and jobs.
But the paper made up for it to some extent half a century later with a stunning series, “The Week the Hill Rose Up.”
The Post-Gazette may or may not have made the right decisions on who should have covered what earlier this month, when this nation’s legacy of racism was thrown in all our faces again.
However, the newspaper and its editors have a long history of trying to do better in assessing what the Swedish academic Gunnar Myrdal famously called “The American Dilemma” long ago.
That history deserves to be better known.