“I realized very early if you wanted to be anybody in broadcast journalism, you had to have a piece of a presidential campaign,” says Kenneth Walker, who at the time was transitioning from print journalism at The Washington Star to broadcast news at ABC. “So as soon as Jesse Jackson made mentions about running, I attached myself to him. Why? Because I knew all the White boys wouldn’t want to cover him. And two, because I knew that whatever happened, Jesse was going to last until the convention, which meant I would have that much airtime until the convention.”
There was a reason that so many Black reporters got a chance to cover their first presidential campaign. “I think that in some ways the news organizations thought that by putting Black reporters and producers on the campaign trail that people might have some special access to Jesse. But I think Jesse was smart enough to recognize the hierarchy and he gave scoops to whoever he thought could get the scoops on the air,” says A’Lelia Bundles, then a producer for NBC News.
Sylvester Monroe, who was a correspondent for Newsweek, agrees. “People felt that, for whatever reason, they needed to put Black reporters on—much like the way that Black reporters had a chance to break into the rooms during the riots of the ‘60s.”
Monroe said many Black reporters did have an advantage over their White counterparts, but not because of race. “I’d covered Jesse Jackson since his1977, 1978 economic boycotts of Coca-Cola and Anheuser Busch,” Monroe said. “There was nobody who knew him better than me. So I had some background as to what he was about, who he was, and also why he was running for president.”
Far from being a side show, as many White news executives had expected, the Jackson campaign drew record crowds, mobilizing unprecedented numbers of Black voters, making voyages overseas to places such as Syria to negotiate the release of Lt. Robert Goodman, who had been captured while on a mission over Lebanon.
African-American reporters covering Jackson came under as much scrutiny as the candidate they were covering. They were asked if a Black reporter could fairly cover a Black candidate? “It was an offensive question,” Monroe reflects. “And the way I used to answer it was that I covered [the campaign] exactly the way a White candidate is covered by a White reporter. There is absolutely no difference.”
Bundles was equally irritated. “Whenever that came up, I was very annoyed,” she said, “I had a situation where, after the situation where Jesse has used a slur to describe Jews [he referred to them as ‘Hymies’ and New York City as ‘Hymietown’], one of the Jewish writers for ‘World News Tonight’ [an NBC evening program] made some suggestions that as a Black person I had some negative feelings about Jews, and that was certainly not true.”
Milton Coleman, a Black reporter for The Washington Post, gave “hymie” scoop to his colleague Rick Atkinson, who subsequently outed Jackson in a Feb. 13, 1984 article. “[Jackson] claimed the whole ‘Hymietown’ thing was an off the record conversation, and I believe him,” Monroe says. “Milton just violated that agreement, saying that it was just too important not to report. “We all went after him saying, ‘If it was important enough for you to violate the off the record agreement, then it was important enough for you to report it fully and properly under your own byline.”
Many of those Black reporters, to this day, still question whether Coleman personally heard Jackson’s remarks or if he was reporting what he’d heard from Jack White, who was the first reporter to hear Jackson use that language. White, in fact, reported what he’d witnessed in a confidential memo, but his editors at TIME chose to do nothing with it.
“I would have never gone to Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama had it not been for Jesse’s campaign.”
But even with all the drama on the trail, Black reporters were able to triumph over challenges, provide quality coverage to the public and still enjoy one of the most rewarding experiences of a lifetime. “I would have never gone to Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Panama had it not been for Jesse’s campaign,” says Bundles.
It was in Cuba that Walker got one of his big breaks. Jackson had been invited by several religious groups to speak at their worship services. While there, he met with Cuban President Fidel Castro to negotiate the release of 22 captured Americans, among other things. The press corps, however, was not permitted in the room. They were escorted to a “holding area” on the basement level of the presidential palace, where they were confined until dinner. After an elaborate feast, they were to be sent back to the basement until the negotiations were through. But not before Walker said his piece.
“I walked up to Fidel and I said, ‘Senor President, I know you speak English, brother. You see all these reporters here? You see how many Black people are among them? I am the only one for an American television network. And if I don’t report on my station tonight your talks with Rev. Jackson, the next time a bunch of American reporters come down here, they’re going to be all White.” Castro laughed, and to Walker’s surprise, he gave him the scoop.
“He agreed to release political prisoners — and this and that— and then he gave me a driver to take me to the state television to report it live on ‘Nightline,’” Walker buoyantly reflects. “The White reporters were furious, and of course they didn’t find out about it until after they were locked back down in the basement.”
The Jackson campaign schedule was hectic, and sometimes covering Jackson, Monroe says, was a nightmare. “Sometimes we’d have these long days— four or five events,” he says. “I remember one time we had breakfast in Washington, D.C., lunch in Chicago and dinner in Los Angeles… There were times when we would arrive at places at 2 o’clock in the morning and there’d be no hotel rooms for us.”
Walker says, it was exhilarating. “You had to strategically plan when and how you were going to wash your underwear and when you were going to eat,” he laughs. “We were always late, but to make up for that you were always in a church, and there was always some great music,” Bundles remembered. “There was always the sister who was the best singer in town singing at the rally for Jesse. So that would always get your spirits up. It just was amazing to see how he inspired and energized people.”
Covering his campaign also proved to be a stepping stone for many Black reporters. Bundles became deputy Washington bureau chief for NBC; Jack White became a columnist for Time; George E. Curry became New York bureau chief for the Chicago Tribune and Gerald M. Boyd became the first Black managing editor of the New York Times.
No matter how high they rose, they always remember life on the campaign trail. Monroe remembers fried chicken and orange juice, Jackson’s favorites and also the recurring items on the lunch and dinner menus for the press corps— that is until they started to complain. “We would say, ‘Give us something other than fried chicken,’” says Monroe. “I get on the Obama campaign plane and there were printed menus. We had a choice between fish or beef or chicken,” he chuckles.
But something more important was lacking. “The disheartening thing is 24 years later, there are very few African Americans on the campaign trail [with Obama],” laments Bundles. “Those opportunities created in 1984 should have been creating a pipeline that remained open where people of color kept being put on the track to success as political reporters.”
But that hasn’t been the case. Monroe said, “You can make those comparisons [between the ’84 and ’08 campaigns], but no one should minimize what Jesse Jackson achieved in that campaign. Jesse helped move the nation forward to a place to make Barack Obama’s campaign possible.”