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As They Should, Media Offer Diverse Look at 250th

by richard049

But Not All Competing Views Were in the Same Place
3 Ordered Held in Racial Attack on News Crew

Passages:
Henry Mendoza, Chicano Reporter, Editor, News Director
Rosetta Miller-Perry, Founder, Tennessee Tribune
Ahmed Wishah, Killed in Israeli Air Strike
Glegg Watson, Co-Wrote ‘Black Life in Corporate America’
Services for Marlene Johnson

Homepage photo: At left, the image of a scarred Peter, who escaped slavery on a Louisiana plantation in 1863, juxtaposed with the American flag, was part of an exhibition by Black artists in February at the Zhou B Art Center in Chicago.

” ‘American Story: Hands that Built the White House with Robin Roberts’ airs Monday July 6, 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT on ABC News Live, next day on Disney + and Hulu.”

But Not All Competing Views Were in the Same Place

PBS’ “Washington Week With the Atlantic” is among the most intellectually satisfying news-analysis shows on television. But when it aired a special edition Friday (video) on the United States’ 250th anniversary, it blew it. The analysis was from an all-white panel, save one writer with a South Asian background by way of Kentucky.

How much richer the show could have been! From New York’s Amsterdam News and New York Times to California’s Orange County Register and even the South China Morning Post, other outlets showed us how much media consumers can learn from a look at the occasion through diverse lenses.

In some cases, the reaction to the anniversary was like the fable of the blind men and the elephant, in which three blind men touch different parts of an elephant. They all look at the same thing but come up with different answers.

ABC News and American Ancestors, one of the nation’s largest genealogical organizations, found the first confirmed living descendants of an enslaved person who helped build the White House, that network announced.

“Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts spoke with Jackie Smith Sullivan and her daughter Ashley Swain as they learned that Swain’s fourth great-grandfather, Calvert Ambush, helped build the North Portico of the White House in the summer of 1829.

” ‘American Story: Hands that Built the White House with Robin Roberts’ airs Monday July 6, 8:30pm ET / 5:30pm PT on ABC News Live, next day on Disney + and Hulu.”

For his New York Times podcast, Ezra Klein asks Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization in Montgomery, Ala., “What does it mean to love America?” (Credit: YouTube)

The Amsterdam News, part of the Black press, produced a special section for the Fourth, “Unfinished Business,” featuring 16 pieces from a lineup that included New York Attorney General Leticia James and
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League.

Elinor Tatum, publisher and editor-in-chief and Madison J. Gray, executive editor, wrote an introductory piece, “America, time to stop acting brand new — we’ve got unfinished business.”

“Let’s not beat around the bush here: The rise of a white supremacist narrative in the last 10 years, which derived from a century and a half of a political ideal to keep whites at the top of a hierarchy, no matter the cost, clearly means that the Civil War win did not end white supremacy, and now, with 250 years behind us, we are all under threat because of it,” they told readers.

“There is no question in our minds that the MAGA movement is a white supremacist, Christian nationalist platform. Its intention is to permanently solidify whites, especially white men, at the top of the American social, political, and economic hierarchy. Some involved in the movement will openly admit this.

“Others will deny it, saying they are color-blind or have no problem with anyone of other backgrounds. Ask them if they’re okay with their color blindness with a nonwhite president, vice president, cabinet, Supreme Court, and speaker of the House all at the same time, though, and they would wince.”

El Boletín Latino, a newsletter published by the Latino Caucus of the Democratic Committee of Fairfax County, Va., explained that “without Spain and without Latino and Hispanic support, the American Revolution might have ended very differently.

“Latinos were not guests in America’s founding story. They were there from the beginning. They helped win the War for Independence. And America owes them the recognition they earned.”

The Atlantic, edited by Jeffrey Goldberg, moderator of “Washington Week,” posted a piece on Bernardo de Gálvez (pictured), “the Spanish governor of Louisiana whose troops, including Spaniards, Spanish Americans, American Indians, and Black people, both enslaved and free, defeated the British in Florida,” author Geraldo L. Cadava writes.

“He had a hand in securing Spanish silver from Havana that George Washington used to pay and provision the troops fighting for him in the Battle of Yorktown. He also helped draft the Treaty of Paris that ended the war. Washington later recognized that Gálvez had been crucial to the revolution’s success. After the war, Spain claimed Florida and held on to it until the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, which made it a territory of the United States.”

(Credit: El Boletín Latino, generated by AI)

The Mirror U.S. focused on present-day Latinos. “As the United States prepares to mark 250 years of independence, questions about who belongs in the American story have taken on new political urgency,” Maria Villarroel wrote. “Yet for many Latinos, the milestones arrived amid renewed political attacks on immigration and Latino communities, even as generations of Hispanic Americans have helped shape the country’s economy, culture, military, and civic life long before the nation reached its semiquincentennial.”

Asian Americans and Indigenous Americans, too, urges recognition for their contributions.

“For generations, Indian Americans have walked hand in hand with fellow citizens to shape our nation’s story, and their journey is deeply woven into our shared history. Here we spotlight these enduring connections,” that nonprofit organization Indiaspora wrote.

The South China Morning Post headlined, “As the US turns 250, young Asian-Americans weigh identity and China: Many feel more at ease with their heritage but see the future of US-China ties, not anniversary festivities, as more relevant to their lives.”

With assistance from the UCLA Asian American Studies Department Foundations and Futures and California State University Stanislaus, As Am News spent months compiling “250 milestones in Asian American and Pacific Islander history,” published June 28.

“Our goal is simple and urgent: to ensure that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are fully recognized as part of the American story — their labor, leadership, creativity, and resilience, as well as the discrimination and barriers they fought to overcome. This project seeks to honor those histories, broaden public understanding, and affirm that AAPI experiences are inseparable from the nation’s past and its future,” Raymond Douglas Chong wrote.

Dana Hedgpeth, a Native American reporter at The Washington Post, described how “Three words in the Declaration of Independence paint a cruel picture of Natives.”

“The document’s portrayal of Indigenous people helped establish a moral and legal framework that justified decades of devastating U.S. policies toward Native communities, according to historians,” Hedgpeth wrote.

“Celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration’s signing come amid a striking contrast: Native tribes are working to reclaim ancestral lands, revive lost languages and preserve cultural traditions, while the Trump administration has sought to remove or downplay references to slavery, Native dispossession and other dark chapters of U.S. history in parks and museums and on government websites.”

In HuffPost, Brianna Tucker interviewed former Interior secretary Deb Haaland (pictured), who made history in 2021 when she became the first Native American Cabinet secretary. “Asked what she would want Americans to consider — whether they’re grilling in the backyard or watching fireworks — as they mark the country’s 250th, Haaland circled back to a simple point: remember whose land you’re on,” Tucker wrote.

Haaland also noted that Native Americans shared their knowledge with the colonists. “I am here because they persevered, and I think Native folks across the country recognize that they’re where they are because they persevered. And not without a lot of sacrifice, violence, you know, all of the things that they survived through. They tried to eradicate every single Native American person in this country, and they failed at it.”

It should be no surprise that people of color differ with many white Americans on significant aspects of the 250th anniversary.

A Gallup poll released June 29 showed that white adults were significantly more likely than people of color to display the American flag outside their home, 48 percent to 33 percent.

Feelings of pride in being American are “also lower this year among people of color (down 10 points to 20%) and those who do not have a college degree (down 10 points to 35%). Non-Hispanic White adults and college graduates show more modest declines,” Gallup reported.

“Looking at combined high pride, less than half of women, adults under 35 and people of color say they are extremely or very proud to be American. In contrast, majorities of men, adults aged 35 and older, and White adults say the same.”

Some were more blunt about the differences in perspective.

Joy Reid, the former MSNBC host who now has a show on YouTube, said: “In many ways ― and with apologies to my dear spicy white friends because I know my white brothers and sisters do love a Fourth of July. It is Independence Day. Everybody’s barbecuing. It’s a thing. I can promise you Black folks, we will take that day off. We will barbecue because we off. But Black people ― nobody Black I know is really excited about the Fourth of July ’cause it is what Frederick Douglass said it is. It is the celebration of slaveholders who freed themselves from having to pay taxes to the Crown for their slave empire.”

Others detailed how the Declaration of Independence’s insistence that “all men are created equal” was not originally intended to carry the prominence it has now, and that it resonated more with Black people than others.

“One of the underappreciated facts of American history is that it was Black Americans, free and enslaved, who were the first to interpret the phrase ‘all men are created equal’ as a statement of individual equality and have employed it most often and most eloquently over the past 250 years to advance liberty and equality for all Americans,” wrote Charles Sahm of Constitutional Voices.

In The New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie, who is Black, went into more specifics.

“It is this Declaration that is under assault from a political movement that rejects the credal vision of the American Republic in favor of an exclusionary racial nationalism, that defines American citizenship by blood and heritage, that sneers at the ‘five words about equality’ in the Declaration and that worships at the altar of hierarchy and caste. But it is also this Declaration that still inspires Americans to fight for their place in this country and demand their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” Bouie wrote.

“. . . To read the words of Black Americans, free and enslaved, is to see the Declaration in motion — to see it as a living document with meaning far beyond the circumstances of American independence. And it is to see the fact that this meaning was made: constructed by people with an intimate, fundamental sense of what freedom meant and what it required.”

The editorial page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, led by Richard G. Jones (pictured), took a common theme and went a step further.

“The Great Experiment’s Semiquincentennial should be cause for celebration. Instead, a great malaise hangs over the United States,” Jones’ editorial page asserted July 3.

“While America has an abundance of exceptional qualities, for many, the dream has never matched the declaration. Even worse, the nonstop chaos, corruption, and incompetence coming out of Washington make it feel like the founders’ belief in the fundamental rights of humanity is under attack.

“The country is deeply divided, and the outcome of the battle against illiberalism has never been more uncertain. That has tempered the excitement for this July Fourth.

“Many Americans are so fed up that they are voting with their feet. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people moved out of the country than moved in, with many citizens packing up and looking for a better life elsewhere.

“Then there is the long-ignored elephant in the room.

“While there has been great progress over two-and-a-half centuries, the United States has failed to live up to the promise Thomas Jefferson penned while living on the corner of Seventh and Market Streets: After 250 years, all still are not equal.

“The country continues to live in the shadow of slavery.”

Goldberg, moderator of “Washington Week,” has been inclusive in his hires at the Atlantic, adding Adam Harris, Toluse Olorunnipa and other journalists of color to the staff. As the PBS show’s moderator, Goldberg followed Yamiche Alcindor, who hosted the most diverse incarnation of the reporters-roundtable show since it debuted on Feb. 23, 1967.

Goldberg had it right when he said in 2023, “Ensuring a diversity of voices and perspectives is essential for us. This will come through in the panel of journalists who join the show each week, in the reporting they’ve done, and in the stories we discuss. Just as my predecessors have done, and done exceptionally well, we will involve a wide and diverse group of journalists, including from our diverse team here at The Atlantic.”

Rafael Salinas, 29, Jon Twist, 37, and William Huerta, 41,  all face at least one felony charge and several misdemeanors in connection with the attack on Chicago journalists. (Credit: WGN)

3 Ordered Held in Racial Attack on News Crew

“Three men accused of attacking a CBS news crew near Chicago’s Adler Planetarium earlier this week were ordered detained during a Thursday hearing after prosecutors alleged they targeted the journalists in broad daylight and caused more than $100,000 in damage to equipment,” Rebecca Johnson reported Thursday for the Chicago Tribune.

“Rafael Salinas, 29, of Clearing; Jon Twist, 37, of McKinley Park; and William Huerta, 41, of Chicago Ridge, all face at least one felony charge and several misdemeanors in connection with the incident. Twist was also charged with a hate crime for shouting racial slurs.

“Judge James Murphy said it seemed clear that the men initiated the violence and that their erratic driving when attempting to escape arrest placed many bystanders in danger.

“During the hearing, prosecutors didn’t indicate why the trio targeted the news crew. Assistant State’s Attorney Elizabeth Dibler said that as two CBS journalists set up a live shot on the heat wave just before 4:30 p.m. on Monday, a white tow truck pulled up alongside them.

“Twist got out of the truck with an unleashed German shepherd and allegedly approached one of the journalists ‘in an aggressive manner.’ Twist repeatedly yelled the N-word at the journalist and then asked if he was scared, Dibler alleged.

“The journalist said hearing the racial slur was demeaning and threatening, and that it made him think of his family’s stories of lynch mobs in the South, Dibler said. . . . ”

Passages

Om Malik, Tech Journalist, Co-Founder of SAJA

Om Malik, a longtime technology journalist who later became a venture capitalist, and was a co-founder of the South Asian Journalists Association, died June 24, Chis Roush reported for Talking Biz News. He was 59.

Malik “was the founder of tech news site GigaOm, which he ran from 2001 to 2013. Malik was also a senior writer for Forbes, Red Herring and Business 2.0.

“Since then, he was a partner in True Ventures.

“When he left GigaOm in 2013, technology journalist Kara Swisher wrote, ‘While Om has not been my only touchstone in the critical department of hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a show-that’s-all-ours — hello, Walt! — there is no question that his launch of Gigaom back then was one of the major watershed moments of my career. I remember sitting in my office at the Wall Street Journal and thinking: Wait. What?’

“GigaOm had 6.4 million monthly visitors at its height when it closed in 2015.

“He also authored the 2003 book ‘Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist‘ . . . ”

Henry Mendoza, Chicano Reporter, Editor, News Director

Henry T. Mendoza III, a former board member of the California Chicano News Media Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, which added him to its Hall of Fame in 2014, died on June 19, Legacy.com reported. He was 78. No cause of death was listed.

Mendoza, born in Colton, Calif., worked at several California media outlets, was a news director and editor, taught journalism and worked in public relations.

“I was raised in my mom’s neighborhood — the part of a small town that was diverse but heavily populated by Mexican-Americans,” Mendoza wrote on Facebook in 2024. “Just south of it on what is kind of a mesa, another neighborhood was created and designed for the higher wage earnings of a burgeoning aerospace industry and the U.S. Air Force base.

“There was an unwritten rule about Latinos or Hispanics or Mexican-Americans living in that area. In fact, an Anglo realtor friend of my father’s used to take him house-hunting in that area often. I would hear about it at school in subsequent days. No Mexicans allowed was the unwritten rule.

“I was also raised alongside neighbors who worked in laborious professions, including many who picked fruit and vegetables in the area that surrounded us. They were also nannies, cooks, food preparers, mechanics, car washers, janitors, seamstresses and sometimes even clerks or waiters and waitresses.

“But the unwritten rules of our communities slapped me personally when one of my adolescent ‘crushes’ was a personal frustration when I was told the father of my romantic target forbade her from dating me. That became an annoying memory — less annoying when that also happened in my adult life. But it did. Less annoying but persistent.

“I remember one of my mentors in education surprised me a few years after high school graduation. She told me about how she corrected another graduate who wondered about that father’s forbidding me from dating his daughter. ‘He’s just as good as the rest of us,’ the fellow grad said. My mentor corrected her — he IS the rest of us, he doesn’t have to be just as good or anything. That correction has stayed with me.

“I also remember walking into the L.A. Times newsroom one time after lunch with the boss. A colleague simply said ‘Aha, the Frito bandidos are back.’ Although I didn’t think much of it as I returned to my desk, a Latina intern came to me with tears in her eyes — ‘How can you take that?’ she asked.

“In more recent years a group of former colleagues won the Pulitzer Prize for a series they prepared for months was recognized, despite an editor who did not even want it entered. Anglo reporters on the staff, I was told, stood in the back of the newsroom and made comments about how spray cans must have been used while there was celebrating at the front of the newsroom.”

Rosetta Miller-Perry, Founder, Tennessee Tribune

“Funeral services have been announced for Rosetta Miller-Perry, founder, publisher and chief executive officer of the Tennessee Tribune, that state’s African American newspaper, which is a member of the Black Press,” the Chicago Crusader reported Saturday.

“A wake for Miller-Perry will be held Friday, July 10, at Lewis & Wright Funeral Directors in Nashville. Her funeral will be Saturday, July 11, at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, 7594 Old Hickory Blvd., Whites Creek, TN. Times for both services will be announced at a later date. Arrangements are being handled by Lewis & Wright Funeral Directors in Nashville.

” Miller-Perry died on June 26, nearly a week before her 92nd birthday. She was 91. . . .

“In 1991, unable to secure financing from local banks, Miller-Perry invested $70,000 of her personal savings to launch the Tennessee Tribune. Under her leadership, the newspaper grew into one of Tennessee’s most influential Black-owned newspapers and a trusted voice for civil rights, community advocacy and Black-owned businesses. She later moved the newspaper’s headquarters to historic Jefferson Street, establishing its permanent home in the heart of Nashville’s historic Black community.

“In 2021, the Tennessee Tribune opened one of two gift stores at Nashville International Airport.

“The airport stores showcase products from HBCUs and Tennessee-owned businesses, giving small business owners exposure to thousands of travelers while highlighting the creativity and innovation of local entrepreneur. . . . ” Miller-Perry was also a Journal-isms supporter.

Ahmed Wishah, Killed in Israeli Air Strike

“Palestinian journalists have paid tribute to their Al Jazeera colleague Ahmed Wishah, who was killed in an Israeli air attack on central Gaza’s Bureij refugee camp,” Priyanka Shankar and Mohammad Mansour reported June 21 for Al Jazeera. “He is the 12th Al Jazeera journalist killed by Israel in Gaza, which has become the deadliest place for journalists in the world.

“Wishah, 25, was killed on Saturday, weeks after his brother Mohammed, who also worked for the Doha-based network, was killed in deliberate Israeli shelling of his car.

“At least 260 Palestinian journalists have been killed since Israel launched its genocidal war in October 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. . .

“Wishah gained prominence during the Gaza war by accompanying and filming footage for his late brother, an Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent killed on April 8.

“Together, they formed a media duo that documented the suffering of the Palestinian people and the unfolding events of the war. . . .”  [Photo: File: Al Jazeera Arabic]

Glegg Watson, Co-Wrote ‘Black Life in Corporate America’

Glegg Watson, a businessman and author who worked for The Washington Post and co-wrote, with the late George Davis, the 1982 book “Black Life in Corporate America,” an influential best-seller that has been taught in business schools, died June 26 in Belize.

The Jamaica-born Watson had lived in the Central American country for the past 14 years. He was 82. Watson’s wife, Pamela, a native of Belize who has a law practice there, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.

In a 2001 interview with The History Makers, that organization said, “Watson recounts his own involvement in the political movement, which included accepting a job at the ‘Washington Post’ so he could ensure fair and accurate coverage of the Civil Rights Movement.” He participated in the Post’s book about the 1968 uprising, “Ten Blocks from the White House,” published later that year.

Watson wrote this writer in 2023: “I started my journey in the circulation department accounting for each paper that was printed by the Post and then was invited to the newsroom, worked as a copy boy, news aid, intern with Dick Blumenthal [now U.S. senator, D-Conn., who in 1967 was a Post summer intern in the London Bureau], and then staffer.”

Watson sat for 30 years on the board of trustees at Howard University, as well as on the boards of Lincoln University and North Carolina A&T.

“He joined the prestigious consulting firm, Booz Allen & Hamilton as a management consultant in 1972. As a consultant he was instrumental in the restructuring of private companies and public sector organizations,” the HistoryMakers continued. “In 1976, Watson joined Xerox Corporation, as its human resources manager. For years, he has served as the vice president to of public and urban affairs for the U.S. customer operations where he is heavily involved with the Xerox’s philanthropy endeavors.”

Services for Marlene Johnson

Services for Marlene Johnson, former Associated Press reporter who died May 9, are scheduled for Thursday in Washington.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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