Elmer Smith was an early member of ABJ. He was interviewed in 2003 by Sherry L. Howard. 

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“I was working at the Bulletin as a night-side rewrite man full time by May of 1973. I had been a part-time night-side rewrite man for the Bulletin while studying journalism during the day in my senior year at Temple University. That started in January 1973.

Claude Lewis was on the verge of becoming a columnist. Acel (Moore) was a reporter already, and soon, I believe, to become a Pulitzer Prize winner if he hadn’t already done that (Acel won a Pulitzer in 1976). The big gun at the Inky was Art Peters, a fine writer who came to the Inquirer as a columnist after starting his career at the (Philadelphia) Tribune. Oddly, I don’t remember Art as one of the founders (Peters died in April 1973 before ABJ was founded).

We began in a place called the Institute for Black Ministries, a huge converted brownstone mansion on the northwest corner of Broad and Girard (Streets). It had once been owned by one of the brewing barons who were once prominent in this German-influenced town.

The leading antagonists of our movement were Acel, Claude and, mostly, Chuck Stone. Reggie Bryant, who was co-producing with Acel a TV news interview show called “Black Perspective on the News,” was an early and active organizer. Sam Pressley, who followed me to the Bulletin by less than a year, was active within the first year or so. We had several women founders.

Membership requirements were stringent. You had to have a job not just in the industry but doing journalism. We even instituted a rule that said you could not become a full member without a year or two of experience. We were guarding against the tendency for groups like this to become social organizations. 

I met Acel my first month in the business in Jan of 1973.  He was already a respected journalist. He shouldn’t have known me from a can of paint. There was hardly any me to know.               

But he reached out to me. He told me about this organization that he and a small group of Black journalists were already working on at that time and offered me a voice in the formation of what we called the ABJ.”