Paul Bennett co-wrote the bylaws for ABJ. He was interviewed in 2016 by Sherry L. Howard.

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“At the time I was a reporter at the Philadelphia Tribune. I was one of the youngest reporters at the Tribune, turned out I was one of the youngest reporters in the industry in Philadelphia at that time. (He was 18 years old in 1973.)

In the early 70s, Acel Moore from the Inquirer, Chuck Stone from the Daily News and subsequently Reggie Bryant who was with Channel 12, we would all get together and talk about stuff. We’d talk about the state of the industry, the lack of presence among African Americans, and one thing led to another and the organization was formed.

We called it … the Association of Black Journalists and then we had to give it some structure. So I wrote the bylaws. (A bylaws committee was formed.) The committee affirmed what I had written. The bylaws were then as they pretty much are now. We had different categories of memberships and we planned for the diversification of the industry.

We set out to be an advocacy organization. We wanted to increase the presence of African Americans at the daily newspapers in particular and also create a brain trust that journalists coming behind us would benefit from.

It really took shape organically. We were just kinda talking about situations (and) it kinda happened organically.

The professional Black journalism community wasn’t that big back then. We all knew each other socially, so it was verbal outreach. I was extremely gung-ho, young, impressionable and up for anything at the time. I was author of the bylaws, but I was part of a committee with Warren Brown.

To be honest, the organization was plagued by egos from day one. People don’t understand sometimes that the organization isn’t the sum of its parts. It’s what the mission is. We had the daily folks versus the weekly folks versus the TV and radio folks when it came to deciding who the ‘real journalists’ were.

(Bennett was as an intern at the Tribune while still a student in high school, and at age 17 he was  taking on the role of a professional journalist.) During the course of the internship, a news story broke out and no one was around to cover it. Since I was there and I had a car and license, they asked me to cover it and I did. I came back and I wrote the story and they were impressed.”

(He was later hired at KYW and stayed for a couple years, started his own newspaper in West Philadelphia called the Philadelphia Spirit in 1979, was editor of the Tribune, founded the Chester Community Spirit newspaper, and in 2014 changed the name to the Spirit covering Delaware County.)