George Strait was the first treasurer of ABJ. He was interviewed in 2015 by Sherry L. Howard.

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“I came to channel 6 in January 1972. I was the second Black journalist that they hired.

Diana Lewis was there. She was the co-anchor of the noon show. I was the first Black male and of course, the first real reporter. Diana didn’t do news stories; she anchored. Later on in her tenure, she started to do news stories but I was the first reporter and I ended up anchoring weekend sports for a little while until I got into trouble, which is actually pretty funny.

I met Acel (Moore). Acel was very gracious. He was a Philadelphia guy. He’d been here for a number of years. He introduced me around. I met Claude (Lewis) as well who was just as gracious. I met the mentor of all of us, Chuck Stone.

As you sit around and smoke cigarettes and you have a beer or two and you talk about what’s going on and the pressures that we had and our families and our professional careers: The association kind of grew out of those kinds of one on one and one on three … The people most directly involved were really Chuck and Acel and Claude and myself. Sam (Pressley) and Claude were really close at the time, so Sam was part of it.

It sort of grew out of that. We didn’t sit down to create an association, but as we talked we thought we would do that.

You have to understand, this was a scary thing to do. First of all, we didn’t know how our white bosses would react to this.  We’re all – except for Chuck who was pretty stable (at the Daily News) – relatively young in our careers so there was a lot of concern. You can call it fear, if we did this we could be retaliated against.  

The best comparison would be if you wanted to start a union, how management could retaliate against you. But if you start a union there are laws that prevent management from retaliating against you. When you start an association of Black journalists, there are no such protections.

We had to individually and collectively get over that hump. It wasn’t a difficult hump to get over. We said yes we’re going to do this. That was the only way we could address the issues that were in front of us in 1973, in 1993, 2003, 2023.

If we did this thing individually, we would not succeed and our concerns about retaliation would (be) more real because if we did it individually, management … if they wanted to could pick us off one by one, but it would be much more difficult if we were together.

So we got together. Probably the first real manifestation of what we were able to do together was this wonderful “Black Perspective on the News.” It’s clear that Acel and Reggie (Bryant) did all the work on (WHYY) to do it. Since I was the only member of the group who was in TV, they came to me to say, how can we make this more effective and make better television.”

Interviewing former Alabama Gov. George Wallace

“Did you know that that program interviewed George Wallace? 

We went down there, it’s sort of a funny story. First of all, he had already been shot and he was out of public life. He had some physical problems after he was shot. We got him to come on the show. I can remember Reggie and myself and Acel, we spent weeks doing research and preparing for that interview. We were going to get him. All of our anger – I don’t know how journalistically sound it was – we were going to get that old white man.

The night before the interview was scheduled, we met with him (in Alabama) and he invited us into wherever it was, his office or house, and none of us had ever met him physically. When you saw this old man, this invalid, and he was so gracious, so nice, with all that southern charm. He was so broken physically, we melted like warm butter. We folded quicker than a cheap suit. Even Reggie.

The program was good. All this ‘we’re going to get him’ disappeared.” (A few years later, Moore wrote a newspaper article titled “Conquering Dixiephobia” about their visit to Alabama and the South, recounting this first-time experience for the Black northern journalists.)^[1]Moore, Acel. (March 13, 1977). “Conquering Dixiephobia.” Philadelphia Inquirer. via newspapers.com. Retrieved May 22, 2022.

Question: You were a major part of “Black Perspective on the News”?

“Oh yeah. If you take a look at all of them, I think I was on all of the programs. George Wallace was the only one we traveled (to see) because we didn’t have much of a budget. It was like ‘Meet the Press,’ that’s the kind of program it was.”

Question: There were meetings in 1973 before the formal founding in 1974?

“That sounds about right. It organically grew from Black folks getting together and eating chicken and telling stories.

Most of the broadcast people were guys. (As for women, there were) Carol Norris over at ‘HYY and Pam Haynes (at the Philadelphia Tribune). The women in this business back then were almost as rare as African Americans.”

Question: Were the broadcast journalists not as active as the print journalists?

“First of all, there weren’t that many. Malcolm Poindexter was active, as was Jerry Mondesire. Remember when I said from 1972 to ‘74 as far as reporters on the streets in broadcasting, I think there were only two, me and Malcolm. There were a few cameramen.

It’s not the guys in broadcasting weren’t active; it’s just that there weren’t that many of them. What broadcast TV used to do during those days because the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) required a certain amount of what was called community broadcasting and public service work, they would hire African Americans to do that.”

(Strait left Philadelphia in 1976.)

Question: What stands out about the founding?

“I remember two things the most: the incredible brilliance and calm effectiveness of Chuck Stone. Chuck was very much our intellectual spirit. He was a terrific organizer as well. He had a crew cut. He was politically conservative. He was always so welcoming. You put Acel next to him. The two couldn’t be in many ways so different but they couldn’t also be so more the same.

That leads me to my second impression that we were all young. This was sort of our first big job, and we knew the risks we were taking but thought that we couldn’t continue in this profession and couldn’t continue working in this job if we didn’t come together and begin to address the inequities that we were seeing. We were covering news but we also were voices for our community and understood that dual role and understood that our bosses needed to understand it as well, especially in television.

A lot of the reasons that Blacks got hired to be on television was (to cover the riots). So to get beyond that so we could cover other things and also to be in a place where we could sit down with management and say, ‘Look, this is what it means to be a Black journalist. It’s not just covering Frank Rizzo or any of those clowns, idiots, (but) giving voice to a community that has no voice.’

That’s a difficult thing to begin to have a conversation about in 1974. But we knew that we had to have that conversation and the way we could do it was if we were a collective, and the only way the people who were going to come after us were going to be able to be successful is if this conversation (is) started.”

Getting his first broadcast job in Atlanta

“The way I got my job, I was in Atlanta. For my education, I’m a molecular biologist. I was getting my master’s degree at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). I was smart enough to marry this Spelman girl. She was going to school, so I needed to get a job to pay her tuition, which was $800 a year.

So I get a job driving a cab. I was interviewing for positions at various places to use my science degree. Because again this was in the late 60s, if some company was going to hire me they’d have to put me on the management track just because of my education. And a lot of companies were not willing to do that.

I found a job as a disc jockey at the No. 1-rated Top 40 white rock and roll station in Atlanta, WQXI. The way I got that job was there were two buildings. … I met the postman for the two buildings. He immediately got into my business; he said you shouldn’t be driving a cab. They’re looking for an announcer over at the radio station.

(Strait got the job). I was on the air the next night sharing a midnight-to-6 all-night show, two-man all-night show. So that’s how I got into broadcasting.

The company that owned the radio station also owned the television station. The disc jockeys – in a promotional thing – played basketball against the Atlanta football team, the Falcons. After the game when we were in the shower, the news director of the television station (said) he’d just lost his sports guy. I raised my hand and said I can do that. The next weekend I was doing the weekend sports.

I did this for two years: I was on the radio midnight-to-6 and I was on television on weekends. I was basically anchor of the weekend news. One of the disc jockeys from the radio station left and he went to Philadelphia to WFIL. It was in the same building as Channel 6. His name was Alan Smith.

He got to know the news director of Channel 6 who was looking for a Black reporter. Alan said I know this young guy in Atlanta who’s pretty good. He’s on radio, he’s on television.”

Coming to Philadelphia

“So Channel 6 flew me up and I got the job. That’s how I got to Philadelphia. So when I left in ‘76 to go to DC, the news director said well do you know any Black reporters and I said yeah I do. There’s this young guy in Atlanta who took my job when I left Atlanta. I recommended him for the job, and he got it.

So I said I’m leaving this job and I highly recommend him for this job. And that’s how Vernon Odom got to (Philadelphia). I’ve known Vernon since he was in college. (Strait is originally from Boston.)

At that time, all three networks – NBC, CBS, ABC – had offices in Washington. I worked for WCAU out of Washington and the stories I did were what the local congressmen and senators did, and sent it back to WCAU.

WCAU had terrible ratings. The news director there decided what he needed to do to improve his ratings is to get the best reporters in Philadelphia all working for him. I couldn’t go from 6 to 10 because there was a noncompete clause for a year, so (they stashed) me in Washington, DC, for a year (with plans to) bring me back.

But I had no intentions of coming back. I was going to DC so I could eventually get to the networks. That’s exactly what I did. I got a job at ABC network, which is what I wanted to do anyway.

When I left channel 6, I went to Washington DC to work for CBS. My job there was to do stories for WCAU.”

Discuss the ABJ meeting where Chuck was chosen president.

“It was the culmination of a lot of discussions, a lot of soul-searching, a lot of praying. I just couldn’t have been more proud. I couldn’t. We didn’t see it as momentous. We did see it as important; it was a natural evolution of earlier discussions.

Chuck was the right person to lead it. Strategically, he or Acel were the right people to lead it. Especially Chuckie, he had been at the Daily News for a while. He had more standing than anybody else and less risk.”