Claude Lewis was the first chairman of the Executive Board of ABJ. This interview was conducted in 2003 by Sherry L. Howard. 

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I was working at the Evening Bulletin. I was associate editor and columnist. As I recall, the very first meeting was held with Acel Moore and Chuck Stone and me. There probably were one or two others. The meeting was brief and we considered it bold back then. An association of BLACK journalists? Wow.

When we met with several others, there was one guy, Tom Johnson, who refused to join. Tom, a good friend of mine, now ill, said he could not join an association with the name “Black” in it because his editors would not like it. Eventually, Tom changed his mind and joined us. He was at the New York Times back then.

We were generally excluded from most journalism organizations and decided to form our own. The organization grew very quickly because there was no such organization of Black journalists in the country. There were some smaller efforts but nothing that became anything significant. 

We were fractured as a group. I’m surprised it survived. It got better over the years. After the initial Philadelphia meetings, we met in D.C. and the organization (the National Association of Black Journalists) grew quickly. I believe there are more than 3,500 members today. 

My first job in journalism was at Newsweek. When I started, I wasn’t a journalist. I became a journalist while at Newsweek for 14 or 15 years. Early 1970s at the Bulletin, came to Philadelphia from New York where I worked at Newsweek. (He was a columnist first at the Bulletin and later at the Inquirer.)

I retired in 1997, lost my sight, lost touch with a lot of people.