NEW YORK - 3 June 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com / -- How fitting that Vernon Jarrett, the veteran black journalist who died May 23 in Chicago at the age of 82, should have passed away so close to Memorial Day, the holiday especially reserved for honoring those who’ve met the highest standards of patriotism.

For Vernon Jarrett’s life and career in journalism, which spanned nearly sixty years, embodied several of the most powerful forces within Black America that in the 1940s, began to coalesce and, by insisting upon a full measure of citizenship, push America toward becoming a democracy in fact not just rhetoric.

One was that Jarrett was a Southerner whose parents had been born when Negro Slavery was still a living memory within Black America.  

Both his parents, filled with the zeal that energized black Americans after Emancipation, had become schoolteachers, and had sent their own children on to college; Vernon to Knoxville College in Tennessee.

That spreading of education, and especially higher education, would lift horizons and aspirations throughout Black America, quickly outstripping the glacial pace of progress the majority of white Americans thought blacks should be satisfied with. 

A second force Jarrett represented was his war service in the Navy. 

The demands the country’s mobilizing to fight the two-front war required, and, most of all, the rhetoric identifying its central issue as a struggle against tyranny and for freedom, threw into sharp relief the stark mismatch between America’s pledge of allegiance to liberty and justice for all and its actual practices. 

 It took no prompting at all for the million or so black men and women who served in the military, and the millions more who worked in the defense industry, to view the war against tyranny as having one front overseas—against the tyranny of Germany and Japan; and a second front within America’s borders—against the tyranny of white-supremacist practices.

Jarrett would return from the war and follow a third great imperative of these years—the decades-long migrations of millions of African Americans out of the South to the urban North and West. 

These cities were not the Promised Land by any stretch of the imagination.  

However, the difference was that Jim Crow ruled in these places by custom, not by law, as in the South; and blacks well understood that opportunity and advancement could be mined from that distinction.

Finally, Vernon Jarrett, now a Chicagoan, in 1946 joined the Chicago Defender, one of the greatest of the Negro newspapers of the twentieth century’s early and middle decades, fully imbibing the crusading spirit that made the Negro Press a building block of the modern Black America.       

It was that not only because it investigated and publicized the brutality of racism throughout America.

In fact, as Chicago Tribune columnist Dawn Turner Trice, a former colleague and friend of Jarrett, wrote recently, the Black Press’s more prosaic contribution was equally important:  It “showed a community that often was invisible to the rest of the world,” she wrote—and, one might add, largely to itself.

She recalls Jarrett pointing out for a 1999 documentary that “African Americans didn‘t exist in other papers.  

"We were not born.  We didn’t get married. We didn’t die.  We didn’t fight in any wars.  We never participated in anything of a scientific achievement.  

"But in the black press, we did get married.  They showed us our babies being born.  They showed us graduating.”

The communal sense of itself that formed from these and other forces became the rock from which Black America launched the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

And Vernon Jarrett, crusading journalist, put himself in the thick of the action.  

His obituary in the Chicago Tribune noted that he once described himself “as one of the thousands of dreamers who had left the South and journeyed to the big cities of the North.”

But there’s no doubt that Jarrett was a doer, too. 

Whether it was being part of the nation’s first daily black radio newscast in the late 1940s; or using his newspaper columns at the Defender, and then later the Tribune, and, finally, the Chicago Sun-Times, to stimulate black political activism.  

Whether it was his numerous stints teaching journalism to successive generations of college students; or in the 1970s helping to found the National Association of Black Journalists, Vernon Jarrett remained, as the Tribune editorialized, “tough, independent, provocative, and unwavering” in his commitment to making Black America and America better.

Lerone Bennett, Jr., executive editor of Ebony Magazine and a longtime friend of Jarrett’s described the source of that commitment as well as anyone could:  “He had a strong sense of history and felt intellectuals ought to be involved in politics.  

"He thought people, of all races, needed to be involved in a struggle to take control of their own lives.”

 

 

The National Urban League Conference in Detroit from July 21 -25 will include honoring some of Black America’s most dynamic leaders in our “Women of Power Luncheon.”  To register, call toll-free 1-800-263-9926, or register online at www.nul.org. And don’t forget to do your duty in this important Election Year:  register to vote, and vote! 

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