Vernon Jarrett, activist journalist, dies

By Richard Prince, MaynardIJE.org
May 25, 2004

Vernon Jarrett, legendary Chicago journalist who counted Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois and Chicago Mayor Harold Washington among his heroes, died Sunday in the University of Chicago Hospitals of cancer. He was 82.

"Vernon came out of Tennessee determined to go the distance and to go the distance his way," said Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor of Ebony magazine and author of "Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America," in the Chicago Tribune.

"He had a strong sense of history and felt intellectuals ought to be involved in politics," Bennett said. "He thought people, of all races, needed to be involved in a struggle to take control of their own lives."

Jarrett was a founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists, its second president and president of NABJ-Chicago. Members called him the conscience of the organization on the NABJ e-mail list this morning.

“NABJ meant everything to Vernon Jarrett, and he meant all that and so much more to NABJ,” said Herbert Lowe, a Newsday reporter and NABJ's current president. “Just as important, what Vernon meant to black journalists, meant to black America, meant to America, meant to journalism, meant to Chicago, meant to the world will never be forgotten. There simply can be no overstating his legacy.”

Jarrett worked at the Chicago Defender in the 1940s, "started contributing to the Chicago Tribune in 1970 and became the Tribune's first African-American syndicated columnist. In 1983 he moved to the Chicago Sun-Times and remained there until 1994," the Tribune wrote.

"He broke into broadcasting in 1948 with Negro Newsfront, radio's first daily newscast produced by African-Americans. For many years, he hosted a Sunday-morning talk show on WLS-Ch. 7," a station for which Jarrett produced nearly 2,000 broadcasts.

"He was a senior fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and taught history and journalism at other local colleges.

"In 1977 he founded the Afro-Academic Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO), an intellectual competition for high school students. Under the sponsorship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ACT-SO has awarded tens of thousands of dollars in college scholarships."

An inspiration to younger black journalists, he considered it essential for journalists to know black history and would give presentations to members of the William Monroe Trotter Group of African American columnists on the life of DuBois, the scholar, activist and editor of the NAACP's The Crisis.

“He used journalism as a way of ensuring that the achievements of blacks would never be forgotten, and the struggles of blacks would never be ignored,” DeWayne Wickham, a columnist for USA Today/Gannett News Service, a former NABJ president and a leader of the Trotter Group, said in an NABJ news release today.

“More than just a journalist, Vernon was also an historian whose late-night stories about the places he'd been and the people he'd met were told with the rhythmic voice and unquestionable authority of a griot. His departure from this life leaves a gaping hole in the ranks of those men and women who are true champions of our race.”

"No one could ever clear a public meeting of mendacity like dear Vernon Jarrett," wrote Tom Morgan, another former NABJ president, on the NABJ list. "Vernon was fearless and taught me early on that right is might. I'm sorry now that I never told him that I considered him a mentor to me. From him, I learned passion toward NABJ. He showed me what NABJ could be and, what it ought to be. Aside from NABJ however, Vernon loved his people. Everything he wrote or spoke about exhibited an abiding love for Black folks, especially the young. A titan has passed and his influence will be felt for many years. I will miss his candor and his humor."

In 2002, when the NABJ board chose a group he headed over a rival one to be the organization's Chicago affiliate, Jarrett told Journal-isms that one of his first priorities would be sending black journalists into the schools to help children make public presentations of the works of historic black journalists Frederick Douglass, DuBois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

"We're going to have young people read aloud to their parents once a month at least from the great literature of black people," Jarrett said. "It's almost criminal that those who have lived well through journalism" are not giving back to the community, he said.

"He was a legend of rare vintage," said the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was at the hospital when Jarrett died, Gary Wisby reported in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jackson said he was with the hospitalized journalist the night in March when Barack Obama won the Illinois Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate. "That was exciting to him," Jackson said. "He demanded that his son get him an absentee ballot."