GREG MORRISON: RECOLLECTIONS ON FOUNDING OF ABJ
Greg Morrison was a co-writer of the constitution and bylaws for ABJ. He was interviewed in 2003 & 2020 by Sherry L. Howard.
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“I’d been a reporter in Philly for a few months. Came there in late ’72, covered the teacher’s strike in ’73, with WCAU radio.
I met a few folks like Jerome Mondesire, Acel Moore and some of the other brothers from the Inquirer and Bulletin, and local TV and radio.
We sort of kicked it around, sat around, had a couple coffee and a drink or two. This brother in West Philly who called himself a community leader (who was) basically a local gangster. Chuck Stone had written some things about how this guy was conducting himself and doing certain things in the community that weren’t too kosher.
So the guy confronted Chuck and took a swing at him. When we heard about it, we were all enraged. For one thing Chuck was a gentleman and secondly, if you don’t like what I write, write a letter to the editor. They’ll publish it and get your side out.
That brought us together. I can’t remember the name of the church, except on Broad Street near Girard (Institute for Black Ministries). We met in the basement of this church. We talked about that and we started talking about all the challenges we face on our jobs and in the industry. We started to realize there was more to it than one or two guys or one or two women complaining.
A spark for founding of ABJ
So that is what brought us together. Chuck was the first president, and Acel (Moore) and Reggie (Bryant) were right there with him making us come together.
I’m a very young radio reporter (he was 23). I’m anxious to do something because I see this is something important.
Chuck turns to me and says we need to get a constitution and bylaws written. Yeah, we do. Says that’s your assignment. He gave me a framework, a constitution and bylaws for the Black social workers group.
So it was myself, Carole Norris, Paul Bennett, Eddie Stinson, he worked at the Tribune. Paul Bennett was chairman of the group, but we all cooperated.
We had a few meetings. We kept the language. I got detailed to type it out because I had a typewriter at my desk at the press room where I worked out of in Camden. So I literally typed it out on carbon sets. I had to retype certain pages because I made a mistake some place or other. The constitution and bylaws were one and the same.
So we presented it with a few modifications folks wanted to make in terms of names, certain terminology, which we as the committee didn’t care one way or the other. We just wanted to get it done. So it was adopted. So I say OK, that’s cool.
I left WCAU radio and ended up a few months later landing at New Jersey Public Radio. Still lived in the Camden-Lindenwold area. I tried to attend meetings as often as possible.
I remember that first year after we finally figured out how to get our act together, we had an awards dinner. We cast about: Should it be a black-tie formal event? Should it be an after-five type thing.”
Most folks voted for black tie. At the time I could not afford a black tie. I was married with two young kids and only making like $165, $170 a week. Renting a tux was just out of the question.
I missed that opportunity, and the speaker that year was Benjamin Hooks, first Black commissioner of the FCC and former head of the NAACP. When we brought Hooks in, Oh my God, all the broadcast stations in town and their corporate bosses in New York said, Yes buy tables, buy tables. We want to curry favor with Benjamin Hooks. (This was the first banquet, in 1976.)
The inquirer bought a couple tables, and I think the Daily News bought one and the Bulletin bought two or three tables, and the folks from the Courier Post just basically came on their own.
Those were the early days. We were worried about simple things like folks getting opportunities to get entry-level jobs, to be considered to be a producer or something. On the print side, don’t just put me on the cops beat. I can write about other things.
Forming of NABJ
When NABJ was formed, Chuck was the first president so he brought the framework from the Philadelphia chapter to that meeting. So they say let’s look at Philly’s constitution and bylaws. So we say yes, we’ll adopt that and obviously they made modifications to make NABJ a much more global entity and not just talk about the Philadelphia market. (He was not a founder of NABJ.)
They literally took the document we created and that became the first NABJ constitution.
Philly was the first association of Black journalists. You had Black media associations and concerned journalists’ groups.
When I was in DC before I came to Philly, we had a group called Blacks in Broadcasting. We’d get together every Friday at a local restaurant or bar, have a couple drinks and just decompress. It was very loosely organized.
Remember this was like ‘72, ‘73. This is four years after the Kerner Commission report came out talking about the media. A lot of us were hitting that first stride, getting those first few years on the job, and when you see someone like Acel Moore or Earl Caldwell who’d been around what seemed like forever, these are the folks everyone looked up to and sorta worshipped, and Chuck Stone.
If Chuck Stone said the sun was going to rise in the west, I’d believe him. I’d look west in the morning. I think the word “avuncular” would best describe him.
There were groups in other cities. In March of ’72, I was still working in Washington, DC, and the radio station I worked for decided that we’re going to cover the national Black political convention in Gary, ID. So I went there to Gary, it was March, a horrible snowstorm. I went there, went to the event and ran into other brothers covering the same event from other cities around the country.
It was like, Wow, we haven’t seen this many Black journalists in one place. To see all these folks in one place and make all these new connections. And we say, Yeah we need to keep in touch and make this work.
Baltimore, New York, Washington and Chicago had something going on. (NABJ) founders were from New York, DC, Philly, Chicago. Most of the contacts were made during the Black political convention in Gary in 1972 where people shared phone numbers, names and business cards.
As events happened, Dec ‘72 I go to Philly. Late ‘73, ’74, we form the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. I have to say the first formal chapter I know of was the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Other groups had different names.
When they took the Philly constitution and adapted it to the national, some of the changes that were made in modifying it was the result of input from other groups, folks from New York or Atlanta or whoever might have been – Chicago – who might have been part of that conversation.
I can’t tell you how many times the NABJ constitution has been modified, changed, revised. I have fewer gray hairs in my head the times that thing has been revised.
(There) was one in Times New Roman font. Sounds like what I typed in the press room in Camden because I didn’t have a typewriter at home. When they probably did the NABJ, someone retyped it and that’s what they worked with.
Structure for ABJ
For the record, being exposed to those brothers like Acel, Chuck, Reggie and the Edie Huggins of the world, Orien Reid, all those brothers and sisters, you have no idea how that lifted me up over the years.
We looked at structure, we looked at officers, we looked at who should be a full member versus who should be a nonmember because is this local journalists or is this PR people, too? There was a rabid discussion also about educators. No, we’re not a teachers group. We’re a group of journalists and back and forth on that.
I remember the argument was made at one of the meetings that photographers and the sound techs and the tape editors should all (be accepted as members) because they all contribute to the product on the broadcast side as much as the still photographers and the photo editors and the copydesk editors do on the print side.
In those days, it was print, radio and television. There was no such thing as the internet. There may have been some magazine folks around but that’s it.
The photographers did phenomenal work and quite often their pictures would draw people into reading the damn story. You have to remember we’re going through a shift in how we consumed the media at that time from traditional print, morning paper, afternoon paper, and maybe radio and/or some television to more visual toward television and visuals and maybe natural sound from radio. It was a radical shift. It’s quite similar to the shift the industry is undergoing right now as we deal with digital.
Missing the founding of NABJ
I was supposed to (go to the meeting when NABJ was formed). I worked at WCAU radio and my shift got changed, so I had to be at work at 3 o’clock in the morning on Sunday morning. It was a weekend meeting and I had gone to management earlier and said I wanted to go to this thing. The cover was that we were going to cover a conference of Black elected officials.
There was some management at WCAU radio at the time who thought I was lying and was just trying to get a weekend free in DC to go hang out. It wasn’t going to cost them anything. I was going to stay with my in-laws. I just wanted to go to this meeting. There might be some good stories for us. Naw, naw. I remember going through a whole lot of hassle with that. I had to get my union rep involved.
Anyway, I couldn’t make it that weekend because I had to work. Had I been able to get to that meeting, yeah, I’d been one of the founders. I missed that but I’ve tried to give something back ever since.
NABJ was a separate organization from the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. The way NABJ works, all of our chapters are separate corporations in each state. They do not come under our national charter. We don’t set policy for them. National does not handle their finances or anything. That’s the way it has always been.
When national was formed, there was concern: Will these guys take over our finances? Do we pay our dues to them and beg (our) money back? There was a lot of back and forth on that. Jerry (Mondesire) did the right thing by filing incorporation papers (for ABJ), something we had not thought of.
We’re journalists. We’re not businessmen. We’re not organizers. One of the things you got to do, you got to file your incorporation papers with the Secretary of State, you got to prepare your tax returns, all of that stuff.
Inside the organizing of ABJ
Serious wrangle was about should we be called the Association of Black Journalists or Association of African American journalists. That was an intense discussion. I remember that vividly.
We were all real young and real green, had no idea what the hell we were doing. We were motivated because basically we were pissed off. We were pissed off and tired of being pissed on. That’s a very crude way of putting it. We were angry.
As we would go through this organizational process, I remember going up to Trenton. I was covering South Jersey for the station. I had to go to Trenton to cover something at the State House. There was a brother there named Roger Witherspoon who worked for the Newark Star Ledger. I told him and he came down from where he lived way up in Bucks County to the meetings for the camaraderie and to be part of the organizational process.
Buying a ticket to the banquet was a real challenge. I think I bought one ticket and donated it. I just couldn’t swing it. I had a family. I could come across the Ben Franklin Bridge for 50 cents in those days. Paid the 50 cents to come over for those meetings
Francine (Cheeks) was a VP after the formation of the group (in 1976). The (original) VP had to step down or moved to another job. The other point was we had this group and it was all male dominated in the leadership. Some folks raised the issue, what about Black women. Why can’t they take leadership roles? Why aren’t they in leadership? This was the same time the feminist movement was picking up steam.
Francine, the thing I’ll always love about her, even in the most testosterone-filled environment, she always maintained her grace and dignity as a lady, even in some of these intense discussions. She’d never go there even though she may have been thinking it. She’s a good soul.
The Inquirer or Bulletin ran editorials saying this is not good, we shouldn’t be separating out like this, this could be dangerous, basically calling us a bunch of crazy radicals. Yes, we were crazy and for the time, we were radical. If not us who, if not then when.
Many of us were threatened. Our jobs were literally threatened. I remember a manager at CAU radio coming to me at one time and saying what are you doing with this group. I say I’m a member and him saying you need to be careful ‘cause it could impact your career. I sorta looked at him like ‘huh?’ I was completely in a fog and I remember sharing that with someone at one of the meetings and whoever it was sat next to me and said look, They run SPJ, Sigma Delta Chi, for all these years without letting us in. Now when we want to form our own thing, they say, No, we can’t? Screw ‘em.
Being part of the formation of PABJ was a turning point in my life and my career. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything in the world.
Early members included Jerome Mondesire, Acel Moore, Reggie Bryant, Claude Lewis, Sam Pressley, Joe Davidson, Trudy Haynes, Edie Huggins, Bob Perkins, Brahin Ahmaddiya, Charles Harmon, Elmer Smith, just to name a few.”
