The Great Black Hope: The Jayson Blair Case and the New York Times

The May 30, 2003, issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education has a letter by Neil Henry, professor of journalism at UC Berkeley and former staff writer for The Washington Post (1977-1992), addressed to his black former students now working at the NYT, the Compost, and elsewhere, reacting to the Jayson Blair story. The general tenor of the letter is anti-white and paranoid. Professor Henry remarks at one point:

"It's a truism among black people that we have to strive to be 10 times better than the average white person in society just to catch an even break."

Right. Mr. Henry knew he was ten times better than his white colleagues at the Post, and is ten times better than his colleagues in Berkeley. This kind of rhetoric ensures that no matter what whites do to avoid racism or discrimination, a lot of black people will continue to perceive themselves as unfairly treated...and some who may have succeeded may just give up trying thinking the game is so badly stacked against them.

The following is from an interview Henry gave his alumni magazine at Princeton, in 2001.

You talk in one of the earlier chapters — right around the time when you were starting to get some traction on the book — about "race demons" that were preoccupying you then. Did finishing the book serve to exorcise those demons?

No, they're always there — it's part of black life in America. The vast majority of black people in America deal with race on a daily basis in ways that white people don't, and don't have to, as a majority. So these demons are always there; the question is how you deal with the guy or the woman in the video store who demands to have your bookbag, whereas the white guy, even though he's carrying two big shopping bags, gets waved through. Or think about the incidents that happen with cops — "driving while black" or "driving while brown." These things happen.

I talk to my brother about this. He's fond of quoting a friend of his. Once, in a shouting match, this black guy said, "What you people don't understand is that my mind is like a computer, and a lot of my hard disk is occupied by race, in a way that yours doesn't have to be." So a lot of these experiences get filtered through race. As shorthand, I called that "fighting the demons," and that goes on. I'll carry it with me to my grave.

What are you working on now?

There's an article I want to do on a guy named Woody Strode. He was a trailblazing athlete at UCLA — a tailback, and one of the first black players in the National Football League. Then he became an actor in Hollywood. He was in a movie called Buffalo Soldiers, he was a gladiator in Ben Hur, he was the valet to John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. He was a trailblazing actor for people like Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington, and he was a big medal-winner in World War II for serving in a black battalion in Europe.

He was in many ways — and this is what really interests me — the reality that people think of when they think of John Wayne. John Wayne was total myth. John Wayne avoided the draft. John Wayne was a washout in athletics. Yet he's the white icon that lives on, at the expense of the black hero. I know some of Strode's descendants are still alive, and I thought that would be a good article.

Well ... A few months later, Henry told his other alumni mag, at Columbia Journalism School, that he was writing a BOOK on Strode. so I guess he got his book deal and advance, snap, in spite of all the racism he has to fight on a daily basis.

Hopefully, before Henry publishes the Strode book, he'll discover that Woody Strode was never in a movie called Buffalo Soldiers or in Ben Hur, and that he wasn't a "tailback." The correct movies were Sergeant Rutledge and Spartacus, and Strode played defensive end. It took me about 15 minutes to determine all that. But what do I know, seeing as I'm only 1/10th as intelligent as Prof. Henry.

As far as WWII is concerned, I spent much longer on this matter (30-45 mins.) but could only determine that Strode was a veteran, and was buried in a national veteran's cemetary, after his death in 1994 at the age of 80. I could not find anything about his wartime exploits. But just as Prof. henry determined that, unbeknownst to me, Strode had been in Buffalo Soldiers and Ben Hur, perhaps he will show that Strode was a CMH winner.

As for John Wayne, I am aware that he skipped out on serving his country. However, to my knowledge, he did just fine on the USC football team. But when it comes to living the sor tof charcter that Wayne only portrayed, I always think of the great WWII and Korean War military pilot and "wingman," Ted Williams, who also did pretty well in another field of endeavor.

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