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Updated: Monday, December 24, 2007
Published: Wednesday, July 28, 2004 |
Thomas Morgan III
1989-1991
Essay by Katti Gray
From a chair at his dining table, Thomas Morgan III was hunched over, culling water-stained NABJ Journals from a milk crate at his feet, then smoothing the furled edges with his fingertips.
The journals were what he could salvage when the basement of his Brooklyn brownstone flooded, he explained in his slow, deliberate baritone. The vocal inflection and pace owe partly to genetics. But, years ago, he began cultivating the measured voice to mask his stammering speech.
However inaudible, the stutter had always made him self-conscious. And it left him unconvinced that, even with his smarts and pretty black boy looks, he could finagle a career in TV news.
"I was petrified then about talking in public, and I am petrified now," said Morgan, a 20-year newspaperman until retiring in 1994, largely to concentrate on his personal fight against AIDS.
He won NABJ's presidency in 1989 in New York City, after serving six years as national treasurer. In a simmering face-off, he beat his primary opponent, Ruth Allen Ollison, then a television news executive from Texas whom supporters hoped would be NABJ's first female chief.
The gender divide was just one issue that year.
Morgan's homosexuality proved another. At least a few NABJ faithful wondered aloud about whether a gay president would be a pox on the public face of what is the nation's largest organization of journalists of color.
"It was painful," said Morgan, 49. "I struggled with how to represent NABJ without embarrassing the organization but while also being true to myself. I was elected as a black journalist, not a gay one."
A clear majority of voters handed him the job. Flush with whatever extra time being in Harvard University's 1989 class of Neiman fellows afforded him and whatever clout his gig with The New York Times might have generated, he went about his agenda.
As treasurer, Morgan believed he'd already passed muster. When he took that job, NABJ's financial records, literally, were in shoeboxes and the membership roster a collection of index cards. He hired a black-owned accounting firm to conduct the first of what would become annual audits. The next treasurer was handed a $1 million stock portfolio.
If each president builds on the legacy of previous ones, Morgan said he took his cues on management style from Merv Aubespin. "Uncle Merv" had a way of making everyone feel important. So Morgan made a habit of conferring individually with NABJ board members, just as Aubespin had.
Among Morgan's accomplishments was setting up NABJ's national office, with Aubespin and former president Al Fitzpatrick acting as key advisors on that. Morgan focused on helping journalism students and expanding programs for professionals as membership soared.
A student newspaper, The Monitor, already was in place at annual conventions. Under Morgan, a similar project for student broadcasters was created. At black colleges, his administration established mentoring and training projects, including Short Courses. He established NABJ's relationship with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and conferred with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund about NABJ's own legal workshops on such matters as media libel and First Amendment rights.
The Morgan-led board created NABJ's Hall of Fame and the Ethel Payne Fellowship for black journalists to travel to Africa for several weeks of research. (Their writings have been published by their own news shops and in the NABJ Journal.) And the first international conference of black journalists - an idea introduced by former NABJ presidents Les Payne and DeWayne Wickham - kicked off in Jamaica during Morgan's tenure.
With the board's backing, he refused convention jobs fair booths to the CIA and FBI. Older NABJ members had remembered that the government agencies may have used journalists and other people to destabilize or spy on blacks in America and Africa.
But Morgan's singular regret was giving the New York Daily News, its workers on strike back then, NABJ's membership list. Not that such a move was unprincipled to him, Morgan said, but it was untimely and not very smart.
"I was called all kinds of names. Traitor. Uncle Tom," he said. "When the dust cleared, a number of black journalists still wanted to work at the Daily News. We should not be in the business of telling anyone where to work."
Especially when most every newsroom had fallen short in its treatment of minorities. The New York Times and Washington Post, among others, had settled similar lawsuits out of court.
All of the activity still served a purpose.
"I really wanted to raise our national visibility. And if you run a Lexus-Nexus search for the years 1989 to early 1991 you will find more mentions of NABJ then than during any previous period," he said.
Where Morgan might have fretted over his nagging impediment, some who watched him saw a black man standing squarely and upright, his cultivated speech a distinguishing mark, his New York Times' stamp a plus for an organization steadily out to raise its profile and power.
"He brought discipline. He went out and raised money. He brought that New York Times order to the place," said NABJ's first president Chuck Stone, the former Philadelphia Daily News columnist.
Said Sheila Stainback, a veteran New York broadcaster and a regional director on Morgan's board: "Tom was a tremendous conciliator. He had people violently opposed to his presidency. Some were on the board. He worked well with them, and he did not antagonize. He had some very subtle ways of bringing people together."
One in a trio of sons born to a postal worker father and schoolteacher mother in suburban St. Louis, Morgan said he had been a storyteller as long as he could remember. A high school English teacher told him he could write. A stint on his high school paper under his belt, he headed off to the University of Missouri on a ROTC scholarship. Upon graduation, he gave his requisite service to the U.S. Air Force, serving as an information officer under Presidents Nixon and Ford. He left the military in 1975 and hooked his first reporting job at the Miami Herald. Before landing in New York, he spent six years at The Washington Post.
To the left of the doorway of the home he shares with partner Thomas Ciano, an architect and low-income housing developer, hang frames of Morgan's first Page 1 stories from The Herald and The Times, where he also was assistant metro editor.
Today, Morgan is board secretary and virtually a full-time volunteer at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in Manhattan, the world's oldest and largest social service agency for gay men. His regular pottery classes serve as therapy and he is pumping out a book about a well-to-do black family tossed between matters of good and evil.
To stay alive, Morgan takes 40 pills a day. They are part of his chemotherapy, with the side effect of damaging nerve endings of his hands and feet. Painkillers soothe those aches.
He is trying to do as much as he can, while he can. And he is hoping NABJ will forge ahead in ways that make NABJ more familial. Its gay members still feel constrained, said Morgan, recalling the annual convention where he tried to organize a gay and lesbian task force.
"Three people showed up and they took their name badges off before they came through the door because they wanted no one to know their names," he said. "Not much has changed since then."
Still, NABJ's evolution, in general, is apparent to him.
"You can't turn on the TV these days without seeing one of the NABJ babies on the screen. I am very proud of that. To know that when I became treasurer, we had 300 members and now we have 2,500, I am very proud of my role. I spent 10 years on that board and I am very, very grateful for my service."
Katti Gray is a feature writer at Newsday in Melville, N.Y., and parliamentarian of the New York Association of Black Journalists. She was a 1998-99 fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation. |
Foreword
