Chapter 6: Breaking Away

It was not all work and no play. Bob had found himself an old Porsche; I had my MG. We were in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, one of the most beautiful and fascinating regions of America. We made good use of our down time, but the center of everything was our work. We were obsessed with the written newspaper word, and as we pushed to learn how journalism could be done better, our friendship grew. With it grew the respect we had for each other's work.

We did not think of ourselves as black journalists. Bob was the first black on the Gazette staff. I was the first in Lancaster. However, we did not see ourselves as pioneers; we were just two guys breaking through on small dailies. We were learning the craft, working our way up, as young reporters do, from the police beat to the courthouse, to government agencies.

Our reporting did not involve the issue of race. That was still down South. Bob was keenly aware of the civil rights movement gathering momentum then. I was still learning. On the day in August 1963 when blacks and whites converged on the nation's capital for the historic March on Washington, I was so unsure of what it all meant that I drove home to Clearfield. In the living room alongside my parents, I watched the demonstration on television. We sat transfixed as Martin Luther King Jr. delivered the speech that was to be characterized as his finest ever. I went back to Lancaster full of questions.

Ten days after King made his eloquent plea for racial equality, a bomb exploded during Sunday morning services at a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls. Elements in the South had given their answer. What happened in Alabama set blacks and whites on edge all over the country.

Across urban America, where black populations had grown large and restless, editors now began to pick up worrying signals. Finally they wanted to know what was going on in what they called "the ghettos," which were a lot like foreign countries to them. Some editors began searching for reporters who could get inside and gather stories from those black communities.

Within days of the Alabama tragedy, the strangest thing happened to me. The Democrat and Chronicle, the morning newspaper in Rochester, N.Y., began to recruit me aggressively. I accepted its offer, and in the fall of 1963 I left for Rochester.

A different opportunity arose for Bob Maynard. The Bedford-Stuyvesant high school dropout was nominated by his newspaper for a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University. For Bob, this step would not only expose him to some of the great minds in the country but would also provide the educational credential he felt he needed for his career. In the summer of 1965, he left for Harvard.

I would not see Maynard again until 1967. At that point, I had made my way to The New York Times and Bob to The Washington Post, and both of us to the epicenter of the most tumultuous period in the nation's racial history.