Lenore Jenkins-Allen

The tumultuous 60s inspired young black reporters like Lenore Jenkins-Allen

• Leandra Abbott
• Lenore Allen
• Ed Bradley
• Audreen Buffalo
• Earl Caldwell
• Marquita Pool-Eckert
• Joy Elliott
• Gerald Fraser
• Charlayne Hunter-Gault
• George Goodman
• Charles Hobson
• Jane Irving
• Claude Lewis
• Nancy Maynard
• Gil Scott
• Wallace Terry
• Melba Tolliver
• Mel Watkins
• Hollie West

Social change for African Americans was so palpable she could practically taste its sweetness as she bore witness to the unfolding of the civil rights movement. The feeling of possibilities charged the Newsweek newsroom, too, where she moved through the ranks from a clerk on the mail desk to a researcher/reporter for staff writers. The numbers of blacks in the newsroom began to grow exponentially.

When Jenkins-Allen arrived at Newsweek, sports writer Claude Lewis had been the only African American reporter on staff.

"I remember the day he saw me," Jenkins-Allen recalled. "He was very pleased to see me."

Jenkins-Allen didn't plan to become a journalist. Graduating from South Carolina State College in Orangeburg with a degree in English and art, she knew she did not want to teach, a profession that many blacks were encouraged to enter. She returned to her home in New York and began looking for a job. She applied to every magazine that appealed to her: Newsweek, Time, Redbook. Newsweek was the first to call her back. They offered a job on the mail desk for $75 a week. At the same time she got an offer for an administrative position at Bloomingdales that paid about $95 a week.

She consulted her mother and took the job with Newsweek. It took her a few years to move up the ranks. One year she worked as the executive secretary for the editor of the Nation Department. She watched in great detail as he edited copy, managed a small staff and worked the phones - skills she would use as a reporter and later editor.

Once she became a reporter/researcher for the same department, she got to interview NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, Mohammed Ali, then known as Cassius Clay, comedian Pearl Bailey, Vernon Jordan who was then with Voters Rights in Atlanta and Martin Luther King, Jr. Being an African American reporter sometimes gave her more access than white reporters would have, as was the case with a private meeting between Martin Luther King, Jr. and poet Leroi Jones, who adamantly held the policy of only talking to black reporters.

For Jenkins-Allen, reporting as with subsequent jobs she held, was about fomenting change. She found opportunities for activism in other venues.

She stayed at Newsweek for five years taking a couple to immerse herself in activism. One year she worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Council's Poor People's campaign and trained in civil disobedience. Another year she decided to get her master's in international service, but decided not to complete the degree.

"It was not what I wanted," she says.

Jenkins-Allen knew her future lay somewhere else, but not at Newsweek.

"I had achieved all I could achieve there financially," she says adding that an increasing number of black reporters were coming through the doors at Newsweek with much more journalism experience.

She decided to leave the magazine for good and worked for a period for New York sociologist Kenneth Clark and his Metropolitan Applied Research Center. She also reported for Community News Service, a regional wire service that emerged as a result of the Kerner Commission report, which lambasted mainstream media for contributing to racial tension through it poor coverage of minorities.

Jenkins-Allen found her passion again working for Scholastic, which published a series of educational magazines for children. There she pushed to get more African American representation in the publication.