LiveWire 68 - LaGuardia Community College - CUNY

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All Stories Do Not Get Told: Earl Caldwell at LaGuardia only could they not force me before a grand jury investigating my sources, but that I By Victor Rosa, Lecturer, English Department At the English Department’s Black Literature Committee meeting on April 17, legendary journalist, Earl Caldwell, the only reporter present at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the day Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, explained to a captivated audience of LaGuardia students and faculty how he reported on this devastating moment in history. “In the ‘60s, when I covered the riots, I used to meet people who said, ‘you should have been here last night and seen what happened,’” he said to an overflowing crowd. “’You should have been here this afternoon. You’re always coming after whatever it is has happened, so you don’t know.’” He went on to say, “It happened for me on the first week of April 1968, twilight over the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, and I got as close to being there as a reporter ever does, at the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.” Looking back on the day of the assassination, Mr. Caldwell, who was then a reporter for The New York Times, said that when he heard the fatal shot, he was in his room just below the balcony where Dr. King was killed. As he stood in the doorway of his room, “I see this figure directly across from me. This guy doing something…” a man in overalls, crouching in the thicket. The person he saw left right after the assassination. Neither the police, nor the FBI, ever asked him what he saw or ever conducted a doorto-door investigation at the motel, which is standard operating procedure in a case like this. He said that shortly after the assassination the thicket was “cut to the ground,” and when I told them what I saw in this thicket, they said, “What thicket are you talking about?” Mr. Caldwell believes that James Earl Ray, who pleaded guilty right after the shooting but later recanted, did not shoot Martin Luther King. Ray, sentenced to 99 years, died in prison and the case was never reopened. 6 www.laguardia.edu Legendary journalist Earl Caldwell was the guest lecturer for the English Department’s Black Literature Committee meeting. He said he quit “the best job in journalism he ever had to tell this story of what happened to me.” He added: “We are in a period of time when people are saying: ’Let’s be at peace with the official story.‘ But that is not easy to do.” He was there, Mr. Caldwell reminded the rapt audience, and “you cannot argue that I didn’t see what I saw.” Another story that must be told, Mr. Caldwell said, was about “one of the most important cases involving reporters’ rights to go to the Supreme Court, United States vs. Caldwell. The case involved the national police, the FBI, saying to me as a reporter assigned to cover the Black Panthers that you will be an undercover spy for us.” How am I going to be a reporter and a spy? Mr. Caldwell asked himself. He refused, was subpoenaed by a grand jury and asked to turn over his notes and tapes of interviews with the Panthers. He still would not budge and eventually it led to a landmark First Amendment case studied in journalism schools across the country. An untold part of the story, he said, is that it is not The New York Times that paid the court cost, as many believe, but rather the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “We made this case and won it,” Mr. Caldwell said. “The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled that not didn’t have to answer the subpoena.” Although the case lost when it was appealed to the Supreme Court, it inspired the passage of state shield laws that offer varying protection from forced disclosure of a reporter’s sources. Mr. Caldwell started his career in 1959 writing for the Clearfield Progress, his hometown paper in Clearfield, Pennsylvania. Later he joined the staff of the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, N.Y. In 1966, he went on to The New York Herald Tribune, and briefly The New York Post, before reporting for The New York Times. After his tenure at The New York Times, Mr. Caldwell wrote a column three times a week for the New York Daily News from 1979 to 1994. He was the first black columnist for a major daily newspaper. Mr. Caldwell’s columns have been collected in Black American Witness: Reports from the Front (Lion House Publishing, 1995), and they “illuminate events in the lives of people both ordinary and famous. They constitute the most comprehensive record available of how American cities, children, unions, health care, police and race relations got to where they got today.” A recipient of the National Association of Black Journalists President’s Award, Mr. Caldwell is a founder of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Currently, he is the writer-in-residence at the Scripps Howard School of Journalism and Communication at Hampton University. Mr. Caldwell is the host and producer of The Caldwell Chronicles, a radio program on WBAI-FM 99.5, which airs on Fridays from 3-5 p.m. Jamie Davis, editor of LaGuardia’s student newspaper The Bridge, found Mr. Caldwell “charismatic and engaging” and said his talk featured topics “relevant to both faculty and students.” For Raquel Ramirez, president of the Web Radio Club, “it was very informative listening to someone who lived in that era talk about it, instead of reading about it. It gives it more feeling.” The program was also sponsored by The Bridge and the Web Radio Club.
Breaking Barriers for Women – Dr. M. Joycelyn Elders Speaks at LaGuardia Women’s Conference Dr. Joycelyn Elders By Vanessa M. Bing, Faculty Mentor, Student Center for Women The Student Center for Women and the Office of Student Life and Recreation, in conjunction with the Office of the President and the CUNY Women’s Leadership Initiative, hosted a day long conference to encourage the development of leadership skills in women. Healthy World, Healthy Communities, Healthy You was the theme of this follow-up training event held at LaGuardia on April 18 featuring former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. M. Joycelyn Elders, who gave a spirited and engaging keynote presentation: Breaking Barriers & Glass Ceilings: Women Leading for Change. This presentation set the tone for an event that featured prominent women leaders whose expertise in the area of health, education and business provided LaGuardia and other CUNY undergraduates an opportunity to learn from the best. Dr. Elders was an ideal speaker to lead the event, because she is a woman who has broken many barriers and whose life work has focused on bringing change and lifting communities. Dr. Elders became the fifteenth Surgeon General of the Public Health Service in 1993, appointed by President Clinton, and was the first African American woman to serve in this position. As Surgeon General, Dr. Elders was a leading spokesperson in the health care reform effort, attempting to lead the charge for universal health care coverage. Dr. Elders was a strong advocate for comprehensive health education, encouraging sex education in the schools for grades K-12. It was her outspoken views and controversial remarks about sex education that forced her resignation after only 15 months in office. Dr. Elders reminded students that just as she was challenged while holding the position of Surgeon General, so too will they be challenged in life. The conference format was designed to inspire women to challenge themselves to consider how they can make a difference – in their personal lives, in their communities and in the world. Dr. Elders’ address provided the right mix of humor, thoughtfulness, and insight designed to encourage our students to make a difference. Dr. Elders spoke of the need to continue to advocate and fight for universal health care coverage to keep all our citizens healthy, noting how poor women and children are largely affected by the lack of such coverage. In addressing ways women can take up this fight and lead for change, Dr. Elders discussed the various educational and access strategies needed to mobilize our communities. She highlighted several points, including the need to create financial access – making health care available to all; the need to create cultural access – being aware of different cultures and languages; the importance of providing intervention strategies – clear tools and methods to manage and control health problems; and the need to employ media and political strategies – the means of getting the message out and keeping the issue of health care on everyone’s agenda. Dr. Elders concluded by identifying some of the key leadership strategies that women need to assume in order to make a difference. To be a leader, she said, women need Former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Jocelyn Elders encouraged the development of leadership skills in women in her keynote address. “The key is for women to not simply try to lead, but to become transformational leaders.” to be aware of the five C’s: clarity of vision, competence, consistency, commitment and the ability to exercise control. The key, according to Dr. Elders, is for women to not simply try to lead, but to become transformational leaders. In this, women were encouraged to learn, listen, and actively seek out mentors; to be aware and to show determination. “When dancing with a bear, you can’t get tired and sit down,” she said. The goal is to keep dancing so that the bear does not sit on you and crush you. Such metaphors were used to remind our students of the magnitude and weight of the many issues confronting women, while reminding them that they have the ability to finesse a situation to make substantive changes. Following Dr. Elders’ keynote presentation, students attended workshops facilitated by Dr. Ann Webster of the Benson Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital; Dr. Jean Lau Chin, author of Women & Leadership: Transforming Visions and Diverse Voices (Wiley-Blackwell, 2007); Trisha Scudder and Herma Schmitz of the Executive Coaching Group; Dr. Julieta Macias, founder and CEO of Macias Consulting, a human relations and executive life coaching firm in Rockville, MD.; and Marie-Lucie Brutus, MPH, of the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Sciences at CCNY. As students went through the day in workshops and skill building sessions that focused on change and empowerment, they were encouraged to reflect on their own roles and level of activism. Through Dr. Elders’ words, students were able to envision how every little change they make can indeed make a difference, and have real impact on their individual lives as well as the world we live in; how little steps that we take today can lead to greater steps and transformations tomorrow. 7
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