A Black reporter who traveled the country to report on racial conditions
Editor’s Note: Few newspapers, other than exclusively Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, employed any Black reporters prior to World War II. Even as late as the 1950s, there were only 38 Black reporters among the 75,000 newsroom employees in “mainstream” whiteowned papers. But The Toledo Blade was a leader.
Bill Brower joined The Blade in 1946, and stayed on staff as an award-winning reporter and editor for half a century.
The following is excerpted from “Reason vs. Racism, A Newspaper Family, Race, and Justice” by Jack Lessenberry, a former national editor of The Blade. It looks at how the issue of race has been handled by the Block family of newspaper owners since 1916.
“I am a Negro. I am writing this at the conclusion of a three-month tour of 15,000 miles to all parts of the nation for a personal inquiry into the status of the 15,000,000 Americans who constitute what is called ‘the Negro problem.’ ”
-- Bill Brower, Toledo Blade, December 1951
Those were the opening lines of one of the most stunning and perhaps most overlooked series in American journalism.
For 16 days, William “Bill” Brower’s reports on racial conditions across the nation, from housing discrimination to school segregation, from hypocrisy in the North to the first glimmerings of an end to Jim Crow ran in both the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
He had spent three months traveling throughout 27 states and visiting and interviewing people in more than 50 cities.
Nothing like this -- a nationwide look at racial conditions from the perspective of a Black journalist -- had ever been attempted by a daily, mass-market newspaper. The Blade had hired Brower more than four years earlier.
Brower, who had worked for African-American papers in eastern cities from Philadelphia to Norfolk, had agreed to come only after he had been promised that he would not be used to cover only “Negro News.”
Indeed he hadn’t. The editors had, as noted, assigned him to cover everything from routine stories to the city’s battles against the Licavoli organized crime syndicate to an international sensation: the “Smith Act” trials of American Communist Party leaders in New York.
But who could resist a chance to tackle the race question, something that would soon be one of the biggest stories in the nation?
What isn’t clear is exactly whose idea the series was -though it likely came from the publisher himself, Paul Block Jr. He thought, his son John Robinson Block told me, “that while race might be a problem America would never get beyond, he was determined to do the best he could to try.”
Other newspapers had, from time to time, reported on race; Ray Sprigle, a white man disguised as a Negro, had, after all, reported on the most terrible abuses in the Jim Crow South only three years before.
But no mainstream newspaper had ever sent a Black reporter across the country to report on the status of Blacks in America.
Bill Brower was the first. However, readers who may have expected to find an investigative series as searing as Sprigle’s “In the Land of Jim Crow” may have been disappointed. Brower had a very different style. He was cautious, reserved, judicious, and strove for balance. Brower, who was 35 when he made his own racial odyssey across Americain the fall of 1951, was also a man of another generation. He had also grown up in the Jim Crow South, an upbringing designed to make a young Black man cautious – or dead.
The world had also changed dramatically. The Soviet Union had exploded its first atom bomb; ommunists had captured all of China, and Americans found themselves in an unexpected shooting war in Korea.
These events helped lead to the rise one of the nation’s most dangerous demagogues, Joe McCarthy, the junior senator from Wisconsin, who charged that “cardcarrying communists” had infiltrated the federal government, though he never proved that anyone was a communist.
However, there was a racial dimension to the Red Scare. Moscow had used the oppression of Blacks in America as propaganda. Enlightened anti-communists worried that if blacks felt that the “American Dream” was closed to them, they might become vulnerable to outside agitators.
Brower clearly understood that the battle for hearts and minds was an issue. “Other Americans have a strong stake in seeing that democratic justice is achieved for Negroes,” he wrote in his last installment. “This nation is locked in an ideological struggle with communism.”
The series, which began on Dec. 5, 1951, was well-received. Toledo Blade managing editor Paul Schrader noted, when the series was republished in booklet form the next year, that it “has been applauded for its dispassionate objectivity, amazing facts, and calm conclusions.”
Calm it was, certainly by comparison to Ray Sprigle’s fiery prose. Brower’s series was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, just as Sprigle’s series had been. And it, too, was passed over. Oddly, no prize for national reporting was given at all for 1951.
Once again Hodding Carter II, the man who attacked Sprigle’s series, sat on the Pulitzer board. Carter’s attitude towards Bill Brower’s work is not known. But, ironically, it might have served Carter’s interests as a defender of his region to have called favorable attention to it.
Like Carter, Brower portrayed a South where there was injustice, but where things were getting better. In fact, read today, with the hindsight of what was to come in the bloody and turbulent years ahead, Brower’s series often seems too optimistic. But Brower was far more accurate than Sprigle had been about discrimination in the North.
The author of “In the Land of Jim Crow” had said Northern prejudice against Blacks was an “annoyance and an injustice” at worst. Brower knew better. He knew there was “simmering racial antagonism” in Detroit. “The South never held the copyright on racial discrimination,” he noted.
But overall, “I came back reassured and hopeful,” Brower said.
While there were still problems, Brower said, “the climate is clearing for improved race relations in most places.” More Blacks were voting, and nationally Blacks were making more money, he believed.
This is not to imply that Brower was what militant Blacks might have called an Uncle Tom. Consider this was a time when nobody was yet even using the term “civil rights movement.” Martin Luther King Jr. was an unknown, 22-year-old seminary student.
Bill Brower was clearly striving to be a restrained, carefully objective reporter. By nature a reserved and dignified man, he must have felt under pressure; in a sense, he was sort of a Jackie Robinson of the white newspaper world. He had to pave the way for other Black reporters.
On some issues, especially housing, which he called the “key point of segregation,” Brower took a more openly tough stand. He criticized Washington, noting that “the Federal Housing Administration has refused, in many instances, to approve loans for Negroes who desire to move into areas in which theyare not wanted.”
Brower, a North Carolina native, also made it clear that he had a hard time anywhere Jim Crow laws remained in force. “I was in and out of the South three times. I found that I had barely enough stamina to stand two weeks of Jim Crow at a time.” While he felt things were changing, he “came across too many reminders of the past to make my stay entirely pleasant.”
Those reminders included a bathtub in the “best Negro hotel” in Raleigh, N.C., that was so filthy it “discouraged me from taking a bath.”
But Brower had no great desire to dive into the worst parts of segregation. He had grown up living it.
Brower continued reporting for The Blade after his series ended, and his career made steady progress. In 1956 he returned to the topic of race with a series on Black voters. He became news editor in the turbulent year of 1968.
Three years later he moved into upper management, becoming an assistant managing editor in charge of the demanding Sunday edition, in terms of revenue, the most important paper of the week.
Twenty years had passed since his historic trip and his nationwide survey of racial attitudes and progress. The U.S. Supreme Court had
unanimously outlawed mandatory segregation in schools. The civil rights movement had exploded into being.
Martin Luther King Jr. had appeared out of nowhere to become one of the most famous men in the world, and had been assassinated.
Congress had passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation in everything from employment to housing in both the public and private sectors, and the next year passed the Voting Rights Act, so that no community could prevent Blacks from voting any longer.
But when it came to race, how much had things really changed?
To find out, The Blade sent Brower on the road again in late 1971. This time he didn’t visit quite as many states or quite as many cities.
Still, it was a mammoth reporting odyssey, and he examined more issues in a series that was actually three installments longer than the first. As the newspaper noted, he “retraced his steps in virtually every region of the nation to put in perspective changes over two decades.” He also went to some new places where, as he said, “newly important racial developments had occurred and where events are still stirring.
“Twenty years have made a difference, no doubt about it,” he noted in his first installment on March 5, 1972. While he found that there had been “perceptible progress, both real and symbolic,” he also concluded that “many of the basic problems remain,” and added that “as a Black American moving about the nation, I perceived that the racial challenge in the seventies is far more complex than it was inthe fifties.”
There were more Black millionaires, prominent artists, and recording stars. But many more were still struggling.
Brower noted that this trip, unlike his first, came “in an era when the national consciousness is centered on the struggle of black Americans for civil rights and equality like no other time in history.”
Though he didn’t acknowledge it in the series, there had been a fairly significant linguistic change as well. Only a few years before, Brower called himself a Negro. Now the preferred term was Black.
“Black America – 20 Years Later” was more clearly issue-oriented than his first series. Brower analyzed how politics were changing in the South (he interviewed a young governor of Georgia named Jimmy Carter). He took on tough issues, including that of police brutality against Blacks, and the ugly reality of continued housing segregation.
He looked at the growing success of Blacks in politics. Twenty years before he had somewhat lionized U.S. Rep. William Dawson, D-Ill., one of only two Black congressmen in the nation. Twenty years later, he realized that Dawson, who by then was dead, had been mostly just a compliant cog in the vast Chicago city hall Democratic machine.
Looking at the complex issue of lingering segregation in schools, he wrote about an issue largely ignored elsewhere, that of the great number of Black teachers who lost their jobs as school systems merged.
There were a few odd omissions: He didn’t mention that while more than two-thirds of all Black Americans lived in the South in 1951, by 1971 nearly half lived in the North. Overall, however, his second series is well-written, solid, occasionally fascinating, and more layered than his first.
Read today, “15,000,000 Americans,” his 1951 series, offers a description of life so different from our time that it is stunning to realize that millions are still alive who actually lived in that world.
But much of “Black America – 20 Years Later” still seems stunningly relevant. “There is great polarization today, physically and psychologically,” Brower noted.
“Middle-class, elite, more affluent blacks are enjoying much improved social, economic, and leisure time conditions over their status twenty years ago. Some are following the relentless flow of whites… to the suburbs.”
On the other hand, “I sensed a mood of despair and frustration, sometimes anger, among the ghetto masses … poisoning the atmosphere.”
While a Black journalist writing about civil rights was no longer novel, this series did win a citation from the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation. Later in the 1970s, Brower became an associate editor and part of The Blade’s editorial board, then a senior editor.
In 1977, five years later, he reported and wrote a sevenpart series, “The Black Athlete.” Soon afterward, Brower began writing a column three times a week on subjects from Toledo’s mercurial Mayor Carty Finkbeiner to Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green housing project.
But he wasn’t quite done with reporting on his nation and race. Bill Brower had joined the Blade half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision that made segregation legal. He was at the paper when Brown v. Board of Education reversed that decision in 1954, and a day in which, he wrote in his second series, “I jumped for joy.”
Nearly half a century later in 1996, a full century after Plessy, Bill Brower, who would be 80 that fall, was still a columnist for the Blade. Forty-five years had passed since his first crosscountry trip to take the nation’s temperature on race; a quarter-century since the second.
And The Blade decided it was time to do it again.
Race was as important a story as ever, the editors knew. In the mid-1990s there had been were new outbreaks of racist incidents.
So they decided to send Bill Brower to do a third series – but this time he didn’t go alone. He was accompanied by Eddie B. Allen Jr., the
newspaper’s energetic, 23year-old urban affairs reporter, a recent graduate of Wayne State University in Detroit.
Some younger reporters might have rolled their eyes at having to play understudy to “grandpa.” Thankfully, the men seemed to genuinely respect each other. Mr. Allen, who had covered the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., said that when he was asked to work with Brower on his third trek across the country he “considered it a high honor.”
Brower said he was happy to work with Mr. Allen, noting that his “younger eyes and ears lend a fresh perspective to the issues and conditions still challenging the nation.” This series was called “America in Black and White.” Some of the territory covered was familiar – the second-to-last installment dealt with discrimination, poverty and police corruption.
Some were new; an overdue look at the role of Black women in the community, and in politics. One story, written by Mr. Allen, would have been unimaginable in 1951 and unlikely in 1972 – a look at the double discrimination Black gays and lesbians faced.
When it was over, Mr. Allen wrote that the experience was “a combination of journalism, history, sociology, and comedy.” While at times his companion was “deadly serious in his approach to examining the issues that have affected his life” at other times he was like “the fun-loving mischievous child in the back of the classroom.”
Bill Brower retired after the series’ end. Belatedly, he finally began to be recognized for his remarkable career.
His final series won an award for best minority coverage from the Ohio chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. NABJ, the National Association of Black Journalists, gave him a lifetime achievement award and cited him as one of the century’s most influential black journalists.
Perhaps symbolically, Toledo’s city council named a highway bridge after him. He was a bridge, after all, between not only generations, but eras.
Soon after he retired, Brower’s health began to fail. He died on May 28, 2004. His wife Louise had died the year before. Both were buried in Toledo, their adopted home.
Bill Brower never knew that when he was reporting his first series there was a 9year-old girl in Kansas who would someday be mother to the first Black man ever to sit in the oval office. Nor did he suspect that during his second series there was a 10-year-old African-American boy in Hawaii who one day would occupy the White House.
Barack Obama won the presidency four years after William Brower died, clinching victory with a big win in Toledo and a solid one in Ohio.
Maybe, just maybe, Brower’s conscience-raising reporting played a part in getting America’s first Black president there.