Roy Exum
In the fall of 1968, a gaggle of high school basketball coaches had crowded into Jim Phifer’s house in Brainerd on a Saturday night, this just prior to the start of the season. They were swapping wonderful stories and among the uproarious laughter I found myself sitting on the sofa with Howard High coach Henry Bowles, We were drinking a few beers together – sure, I was underage but back then folks gave this cub reporter a lot of undue slack. So, I asked Henry a question he’d never heard before or after many years later would never forget. “Coach Bowles, would it be okay if I covered your game against Riverside?
Henry sipped on his beer and said, “It would be the biggest thrill I could possibly imagine.” Again, this was 1968, the year after Dr. Martin Luther King had been killed by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis. I was a student at Ole Miss, some 70 miles south of the Beale Street blues. And not 30 minutes after the shot rang out, an ancient Army car with huge speakers on top, cruised through the University of Mississippi campus, announcing spring vacation would start immediately – right then – “and please leave campus no later than 6 p.m. tonight.” That’s how tense race relations were. “Get the kids off campus before ‘ugly’ can get here.”
In Chattanooga it was much softer but at the time no Chattanooga newspaper had ever covered “the colored schools,” not until the night I showed up with a photographer in tow. I remember I thought nothing about it … it wasn’t a brave thing, a landmark moment, a white/black thing. I was there to have fun and report on a great game. oh, my lifetime friend Napoleon (Do-nut) Williams was lurking close and Riverside’s coaching genius Dorsey Sims and ecstatic Henry both welcomed me like I’d just come home from the war.
So, help me, it wasn’t a big thing at all to me but the next day, when my story was the headline and we ran four of five pictures of stellar black athletes who had never seen their face, much less their name, on the sports pages, it was huge. It taught me a large lesson in what it means to be “included,” and, brother, our staff covered every “colored” game the rest of the year, and ever since, with careful orders skin color was forbidden mention in any sports story from that day on. In sports achievement, it matters not.
I thought about that divine night that happened 53 years ago when I read yesterday afternoon that Lori Lightfoot, allegedly the worst mayor of a major city in America, announced she would only be accepting interview requests from “black and brown journalists” as a matter of policy. Yet, as a matter of fact, in just the last 30 days Chicago had had 280 people shot within the city limits, another 50 fatally. So far this year – from January 1 – there have been 234 homicides, 1,051 shot and wounded. Racially? That 81.6% black, 14.1% brown (Hispanic) and 4.4% white/other.
Lightfoot, who has been Mayor since 2019, said, “I ran (for mayor) to break up the status quo that was failing so many. That isn’t just in City Hall. It’s a shame that in 2021, the City Hall press corps is overwhelmingly white in a city where more than half of the city identifies as Black, Latino, AAPI or Native American. This is exactly why I’m being intentional about prioritizing media requests from POC reporters on the occasion of the two-year anniversary of my inauguration as mayor of this great city” Lightfoot added, before noting that “we must be intentional about doing better.”
The response to Lightfoot’s edict was almost universal: “That’s racism that has been banned in the United States since 1965,” one tweeter tweeted. “The announcement by Lightfoot’s office that she would grant interviews ahead of her May 20 mid-term “only to Black or Brown journalists” drew heavy criticism online,” said a Chicago newspaper with a reporter quickly chiming in: “I am a Latino reporter… whose interview request was granted for today,” Gregory Pratt of the Chicago Tribune tweeted on Wednesday. “However, I asked the mayor’s office to lift its condition on others and when they said no, we respectfully canceled. Politicians don’t get to choose who covers them.”
From Fox News: “In a two-page letter to the media, Lightfoot, the first black woman as well as the first openly gay mayor in Chicago's history, praised her own 2019 election for "breaking barriers" and took a shot at media organizations in the city for not adequately addressing "institutionalized racism" in their ranks. Her decision to temporarily only speak to black and brown reporters, she said, was part of her lifelong battle to fight for diversity and inclusion.
Lightfoot wrote, “In looking at the absence of diversity across the City Hall press corps and other newsrooms, sadly it does not appear that many of the media institutions in Chicago have caught on and truly have not embraced this moment," she wrote. "I have been struck since my first day on the campaign trail back in 2018 by the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of Chicago media outlets, editorial boards, the political press corps, and yes, the City Hall press corps specifically."
Unbelievably – or at least beyond my comprehension to such reverse-racism, Fox reported, “Lightfoot said she frequently received concern from "Black and Brown community leaders" that media coverage was biased in some form, but she often stayed quiet publicly for fear of being accused of playing the race card. "This isn't my job. It shouldn't be," she wrote. "I don't have time for it. But as with so many festering problems, it has only gotten worse with time. So here I am, like so many other black women before me, having to call your attention to this problem."
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Lori Lightfoot’s whine over something so innocuous in the face of Chicago’s begging woes affirmed her mind is not where it should be. In 2020 Chicago’s kill rate by firearms inside the city limits was a record of 792 dead and 4,794 wounded. Chicago has what is believed to be the strictest municipal gun laws in America but, by every measure Lori Lightfoot and the city are a national travesty.
And her answer is not to be interviewed by white people? Just you wait, sis, when they quit showing up …
royexum@aol.com
Lori Lightfoot