Thomas A. Johnson, pioneering black journalist, dies at 79

By Douglas Martin
The New York Times
(June 5, 2008) Thomas A. Johnson, the first black reporter at Newsday and later, at The New York Times, one of the first black journalists to work as a foreign correspondent for a major daily newspaper, died on Monday in Queens. He was 79.

His daughter Sondi Johnson announced the death, saying no specific cause had been determined. Mr. Johnson lived at the New York State Veterans Home in St. Albans, Queens.

Black reporters and editors were rarities in newsrooms of large American newspapers in the years in which Mr. Johnson's career gained prominence. From the civil rights protests and urban unrest of the 1960s through the rise of the black power movement and beyond, Mr. Johnson often found himself as both a reporter and an interpreter of racial conflict and change.

Mr. Johnson was a founding member of Black Perspective, an early organization of black reporters in New York, and a founder of Black Enterprise magazine.

The journalism course he taught at New York University from 1969 to 1972, "Race and the News Media," was widely imitated.

Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor for The New York Times, wrote in his memoir, "City Room" (2003), that when Mr. Johnson joined the paper in February 1966, he was the only black reporter at The Times.

The next month, Mr. Johnson covered racial unrest and violence in the Watts section of Los Angeles, seven months after the riots there, notably beginning one article with a dramatic quotation from the owner of a shoeshine parlor: "These kids hate white people -- they hate them very strongly."

Mr. Johnson won several awards for his coverage of black servicemen in Vietnam and Europe. He found that many black soldiers resented being sent into danger when civil rights demonstrators were being harassed at home.

Mr. Johnson was frequently called upon to find the views of black people on important issues, including the investigation of a prominent black member of Congress, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., by a House committee in 1967. The next year, he began an early article on a nascent black power organization with a question: "Who are the Black Panthers and what do they want?"

Mr. Johnson also covered many events having nothing to do with race. Mr. Gelb credited him with "stiffening our resolve" to plunge into an investigation of corruption at the Human Resources Administration in 1968.

While working at The Times, Mr. Johnson was based in Lagos, Nigeria, from 1972 to 1975, and earlier held temporary postings in Vietnam, Europe and the Caribbean.

Thomas Aldrige Johnson was born in St. Augustine, Fla., on Oct. 11, 1928, and moved to New York as a boy. He served for three years in the Army in Japan during the Korean War and graduated from Long Island University with a degree in journalism in 1954. He was turned down for a job at The Long Island Press; he worked in public relations, wrote freelance articles and worked for the New York City welfare department until Newsday hired him at $165 a week in 1963.

In an autobiography distributed by the Maynard Institute, Mr. Johnson quoted William McIlwain, then a top editor of Newsday, as telling him that the paper had never had a black reporter and that he needed one to cover civil rights.

At The Times, Mr. Gelb wrote, Mr. Johnson helped recruit more black reporters and teamed up with Richard Reeves in articles reporting that a 17-year-old black youth had been falsely accused of shooting another, who was 11.

Mr. Johnson was an assistant to the metropolitan editor in 1977 and 1978, but asked to return to reporting. He resigned from The Times in 1982 and later ran his own public relations firm.

In addition to his daughter Sondi, of Poughkeepsie, Mr. Johnson is survived by his wife, the former Josephine Holley; a son, Thomas Jr.; another daughter, Jo Holley Johnson; and three grandchildren. Another son, Craig, died before him.

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