The Society of Professional Journalists has announced that it will bestow its Award on the late Robert Churchwell, the first African-American to be a staff reporter for a major Southern newspaper.
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After serving in both Europe and the Pacific during the Second World War and graduating from Fisk University, he joined the Nashville Banner in 1950. Editorially, the Banner was staunchly conservative on virtually all matters, including race relations. But it hired Churchwell on the theory that his byline could help boost circulation in the black community.
Churchwell endured cold-shoulder treatment and some outright hostility from his Banner colleagues in his early years as a reporter. According to David Halberstam’s 1998 civil-rights history The Children, some in the African-American community also criticized him for working at a paper that espoused retrograde views.
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