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Thirty years ago, they fought for a fair chance. Today, there's still work to be done.
In June, seven former Washington Post reporters met at a colleague's home for dinner -- not to mark the 30th anniversary of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel, but of the landmark Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint charging the newspaper with discrimination against its Black employees.
The case, believed to be the first of its kind against a major American newspaper, unarguably accelerated the hiring and promotion of scores of journalists of color. More importantly, it helped solidify the role of Black journalists in the interpretation of contemporary American history. Yet, it seems the complaint and its significance has been largely ignored. There was no formal recognition of it scheduled at this year's NABJ Convention in Milwaukee, where we relished in the ascension of more Blacks to top newspaper posts. African-Americans head bureaus in Mexico City, Paris, and Johannesburg, while Black columnists write on topics ranging from the African AIDS crisis to personal finance. Sure, at first glance, there is much to celebrate.
To the Metro Seven -- as the group of Black Post reporters came to be known -- the struggle for equality in the nation's newsrooms is hardly over, as some wish to believe. Within the complaint's allegations lie stark parallels to scores of issues that still linger. Yet, some of the Metro Seven survived at the Post, in journalism, partly on their own resilience, in the days before there was a deputy managing editor, or even an executive editor, to turn to for counsel. They had nothing but themselves.
Constant challenges for Dash
In 1966, a Howard University student named Leon Dash was working as a copy aide at The Washington Post when then-city editor Steven Isaacs offered him a spot in that summer's intern class. Dash quickly accepted, and was eventually hired as a full-time reporter assigned to cover the District's Metropolitan Police Department. From the beginning, he faced constant challenges from Southern-bred police officers fresh from the Vietnam War, as well as from his own Post colleagues, whom he learned could be "some of your stiffest competition."
Two years later, he left to serve in the Peace Corps, in Kenya -- soon after,...