“Copy!”
The way newspapering worked in 1951 was, when a reporter got to the end of the page he was pounding out on his Royal manual typewriter, he would zip out the copybook — a thick bundle of newsprint and carbon paper — from under the typewriter platen, remove one beige sheet and yell “Copy!” or “Boy!” Immediately, a copy boy, who by then was sometimes a girl, would run over and rush the page over to the city desk.
Only nobody came running when Fletcher Martin called “copy” at the Chicago Sun-Times newsroom at 211 W. Wacker Dr. in 1951. He sat there, arm out, waving a page over his head. The copy boys ringing the room gazed determinedly into space.
Martin was a former World War II correspondent who had been city editor of the Louisville Defender. He spent a year at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow — the first Black person to hold a Nieman Fellowship, then the first Black reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times.
Hence the problem. Copy boys were the lowest form of life in a newsroom yet felt entitled to simply ignore Martin — until a white assistant city editor saw what was happening, stepped in and read the nearest copy boy the riot act.
“Boy,” he said, according to a reminiscence published years later. “Go over, and get that copy. It’s hot copy, and his is as important as anyone else’s.”
Or more. Martin brought a perspective that would serve the paper well in the 1950s as it tried to pivot into the civil rights era. The Sun-Times sent him to cover the NAACP convention in California in July 1956, and he wrote about two figures who were transforming America. His story began:
“SAN FRANCISCO — Two widely dissimilar men have captured the imagination of the NAACP convention here and may emerge as the new Negro leaders. They are Thurgood Marshall, special counsel of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala.”
Marshall would become the first Black U.S. Supreme Court Justice. And King ... well, he needs no explanation, one hopes.
As the Sun-Times looks back during its 75th year of continual daily publication, race is a key lens through which to understand the newspaper’s history. Race is often referred to as “the third rail” of Chicago politics — in both the “provides animating power” and the “touch it and you die” senses.
A fraught topic. But ignoring it isn’t an option. Race is too huge a subject to tackle thoroughly, too important to be sidestepped.
The Sun-Times played a dual role regarding race. First as a news source reflecting the enormous changes — and lack of change — that have affected the city since the daily paper began in 1948, from the impact of Black vets returning home, their eyes opened to the possibilities of life, to the struggles over housing, redlining, the riots to Latino migration and the rise of the Asian community as an outspoken force. In the early 1950s, thousands of white Chicagoans would rampage in the streets if a Black family moved where they thought they didn’t belong.
And second as an employer of Black, Latino and Asian writers, editors, photographers, columnists, executives. Martin was the first of a string of talented journalists who would distinguish the paper, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers John H. White and John J. Kim.
How has the paper done over three-quarters of a century regarding race?
“It’s a muddled history,” concluded David Stovall, a professor in the departments of Black Studies and Criminology, Law & Justice at the University of Illinois Chicago. “Seventy-five years ago, Chicago newspapers left reporting about issues in the Black community to the Black newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the Chicago Crusader and a couple others.”
For its first three years, the Sun-Times was a totally white-staffed newspaper, though a liberal one. Founder and publisher Marshall Field III would attend conventions of Black newspaper editors, and columnist Irv Kupcinet, despite his Hollywood bent, was attuned to prejudice, being Jewish, and made a point of reporting the racial changes going on nationwide.
“The celebrated Inkspots, currently appearing at the Chicago Theater, have just been signed for ... a Miami night club engagement,” his column began on Nov. 16, 1948. “They thus become the first major Negro act to be invited to entertain in the southern spa. It took an okay from the town’s mayor and chief of police to seal the deal...”
Sun-Times editorials in the late 1940s were republished in the Chicago Defender, and to give an idea what kind of world the paper occupied, consider this one:
“Chicago is not entirely free of racial bias,” the paper editorialized in 1948, delivering perhaps the understatement of all time, noting that, over the past decade, the rate of Black population growth was seven times that of whites while laying out, “some fundamentals that we believe every Chicagoan ought to understand.” They included:
- “The new citizens of Chicago, white or non-white, have a RIGHT to be here...”
- And: “Every resident of Chicago is welcome to live anywhere as long as he respects law and order.”
The paper didn’t shy away from racially charged news, like the Emmett Till killing. The Sun-Times carried the first reports on its front page on Sept. 1, 1955 — “Chicago Boy Found Slain in Dixie” — and reflected the city’s horror in its editorials.
“A revolting crime against humanity has been committed in Mississippi in the name of ‘white supremacy,’” one editorial began.
The paper turned to Martin in 1960 for a three-part series on “The Negro in Chicago,” focusing on the city as the goal of migration up from the South — in 1940, only 27% of Chicago’s 282,000 Black residents had been born in the city. Martin found Chicago a “hell-and-heaven kind of place” for Black residents, marked by a “cold, calculated and in the majority of instances, unbending” system of housing segregation.
“The Negro migrant from Montgomery will find that whites won’t object to sitting beside him on a bus,” Martin wrote. “But having a Negro for a neighbor is a cause for panic in some neighborhoods.”
A three-part series is no substitute for regular coverage, though, and here the paper fell consistently short. Black lives literally did not matter, at least not nearly as much as white lives, a problem that would persist at the paper for decades.
“As a young reporter, you would get a copy of coroners list for that day — that was a tip sheet to check out for people who had died who might make good obituaries,” said Basil Talbott Jr., who came to the paper from the City News Bureau of Chicago in 1962. “You would take a look at the race of the person who died. If it said, ‘John Jones, colored,’ you’d just skip over it. That was the tradition. If you asked why, they’d say, ‘It’s not going to make a story. It’s not interesting.’ It was very racist, of course.”
“One of my enduring memories of the early days on the city desk is some murder came over the police wire,” said Ellis Cose, a University of Illinois student who worked briefly as an editorial assistant in 1969 before being tapped as a weekly columnist at 19. “The first question was, ‘Is it a good address?’ What they were trying to determine is whether someone in the Black ghetto got shot or someone in an upper-class white neighborhood. That was going to determine how much energy went into covering the thing.”
As long as the staff remained overwhelmingly white, that would be slow to change.
“In the early ’60s, all the reporters were white at City News Bureau,” Talbott said. “There were no Blacks in the reportorial system. They just didn’t exist. They weren’t really covering civil rights or anything about race. It was a very touchy subject. I recall, shortly after joining, the debate going on among editors whether to cover sit-ins on the South Shore Beach. They had not covered them because the thinking was, if you covered those controversies, you really accelerated them. If it wasn’t covered, it would go away.”
That was the philosophy that led the Sun-Times editorial page to sniff at Martin Luther King’s historic 1963 March on Washington, comparing it to a parade and a “revival picnic.” “What must foreigners think?” the paper fretted.
The tone-deafness prompted marchers returning from D.C. to go straight from the train station to the newspaper offices at 401 N. Wabash Ave. to picket. At least, the paper managed to put the protest on the front page, with a photo.
The civil rights protests of the early 1960s and the riots of the later 1960s made Sun-Times editors realize they were underreporting on the Black community and prompted them to make a concerted effort to widen the scope of that reporting.
In 1966, the Sun-Times became the home of syndicated columns of Carl T. Rowan, whose goal, he said, was “to inform, to provoke, to prod, to inspire,” and the paper did so for the next 32 years.
The crisis year of 1968 saw the Sun-Times hiring Bob Black, the first Black photographer on its photo staff, coming from the Chicago Defender. Black felt embraced by the paper.
“The editorial perspective was really great, very supportive,” Black remembered. “My first boss, Ralph Frost, was a progressive guy. Very welcoming. Very supportive of me.”
The racism that Black experienced didn’t come from his colleagues. But his subjects ...
“We were covering open housing marches,” he said. “They were in communities that certainly were not very kind to Black folks. They would hassle me, so I learned how to move around it, how to position myself so I wouldn’t be in the line of fire. At first it bothered me, the first time I came face to face with that kind of virulent hate. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. After awhile, I got used to it.”
Also in 1968, the paper hired a 17-year-old Delia Pitts.
“I was born and raised on the great South Side,” Pitts said.
She had attended the University of Chicago Lab School from kindergarten through high school. She won a national high school journalism award that was presented by Sun-Times editor Ralph Otwell.
“My mother said to me, ‘You ought to write to him, see if he has a job,’ ” Pitts said. “Mothers are always right. I wrote him a nice letter, and a day or two later, he wrote a letter back and invited me to be a copy boy. I wouldn’t say I dreamed of it; we subscribed to the Sun-Times, never the Tribune — they didn’t capitalize the word, ‘Negro.’ We knew the Sun-Times, loved the Sun-Times, so it was an easy thing to be thrilled to be asked to be a copy boy, using the term we were called in the summer of 1968.”
Pitts spent six summers at the Sun-Times. One story that stuck with Pitts is a reminder that those basic crime stories that Talbott spoke of ignoring have a purpose beyond informing the public of the facts: They’re also a sign of significance.
“One morning, there was a drive-by shooting on the West Side, and I was sent with a photographer,” Pitts said. “I was to interview the family. I remember just dreading the thought. How would I go to this family that just lost a husband and father? I felt so stricken. But the experience was amazing. The family, a Black family, welcomed me in. I spent all morning and all afternoon with them. They just talked and talked, and the more we talked, the more I realized a fundamental truth: This was respect in their eyes. They felt that the suffering of their family was being given its proper due. Proper account. Proper recognition that they had not expected and they welcomed. They were so open to me, so willing to share the life of this man. I was very moved.”
In late 1969, the Sun-Times exposed the lie behind the raid killing the Black Panthers’ Fred Hampton and an associate in their beds. Acting on a tip, reporters went to the scene and realized that the bullet holes that police had shown off as evidence of a gun battle were in fact unplastered nailheads, leading to the front-page headline “Those ‘bullet holes’ aren’t.”
The 1970s saw a pivot away from civil rights protests and crime to trying to incorporate race into the daily coverage of the paper.
“I don’t think you could have avoided race in those days,” said Gary Houston, who was hired by the Sun-Times in 1969 and worked for the paper until 1977.
That challenge was how those resources were apportioned. Houston, who worked on the features side of the paper, remembers delegations coming in to complain about the “ghettoization” of coverage — that Black people were entertainers, athletes or criminals. He noted that a lot of the coverage was driven not “by conditions in the Black community but from the perspective of the administration of Richard J. Daley.”
Cynthia Dagnal Myron was in her mid-20s and had written for Rolling Stone and Creem when the paper reached out and hired her as a music critic in 1969. She didn’t consider herself a Black music critic, just a music critic.
“I was a features reporter, first and foremost,” she said. “I wanted not to be pigeonholed. Music was my thing. I wasn’t asked to do a lot of writing on race or my neighborhood or that world. It was a strange time.”
Her being Black, she said, was, if anything, a point of pride for the paper.
“They were still struggling with how they wanted to handle these kind of things,” she said. Her joining, she believes, allowed the Sun-Times to say, “‘We have this Black woman being a rock critic. What is that going to be like?’ I really enjoyed it. It let me do something that had been the domain of white guys and still is.”
The publisher was a dynamic newspaperman named James Hoge, who recently died, and he took active steps to do a better job covering communities.
“Hoge was determined to get it right,” Cose said. “For about a year, he even had me serve as the minority task force editor, charged with making sure that the paper did a better job of covering minority communities. We ended up doing a few special series, but I ultimately recommended to Hoge that the task force be abandoned since it was becoming, in my view, an excuse for the rest of the newspaper not to cover such communities.”
Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times in late 1983. The paper’s focus became the Wingo sweepstakes, cheesecake photos and headlines like “ZINC ZAPS COLDS.”
Murdoch owned the paper for only a little more than two years, but it passed to his acolyte Bob Page, then to Canadian felon-in-training David Radler.
For the next several decades, covering the rich racial diversity of Chicago was not a priority. Still, top-notch journalists from across the spectrum were hired, like Frank Sugano, born in the Gila River internment camp in Arizona during World War II, where his American-born parents had been sent because of their Japanese ancestry. “Deadlines didn’t rattle him,” remembered one staffer, of the “erudite, meticulous” editor for over 25 years at the paper.
There was also an insidious racism inspired by a desire to appeal to some mythical white, upscale, suburban reader. I saw it in operation firsthand in the late 1980s. The Sun-Times had run a picture of a child kicking a ball at a picnic for kidney transplant survivors. “How do they transplant those kidneys?” I wondered, and went to look for someone in need of a kidney to write about. When I found my subject, I was surprised to find myself sitting in the features editor’s office.
“Couldn’t you find someone more suburban to write about?” she asked.
He lives in Evanston, I said.
“Or more upscale?” she continued.
Both of his parents are doctors, I replied. Then, the reality of where we were going with this dawned on me.
“Or do you mean ‘more white’?” I said.
That’s exactly what she meant.
In the mid-1990s, stronger voices emerged — beloved city columnist Mary Mitchell joined the staff.
Nykia Wright, the newspaper’s first Black CEO, took control in 2018 and worked to get the paper on a stronger financial footing and joined it with Chicago Public Media, owner of WBEZ, an organization already well-grounded in diversity and community-building.
Under Chicago Public Media, the Sun-Times has been working to better reflect its diverse readership in a variety of ways — offering more opportunities for community members to engage and have input in the paper and making the work more accessible, for instance expanding its La Voz section into a bilingual publication. Weekly series on murals and tattoos are designed to focus on communities that might not otherwise get into the newspaper. The paper regularly reaches out to communities across Chicago to ask how we could do better.
“In a metro area as diverse as Chicago, reflecting the breadth of our communities — in our newsroom, our sources, our partners, the stories we tell and, perhaps most importantly, in the audiences we aim to serve — is absolutely essential to our work and mission,” said executive editor Jennifer Kho. “If we’re not telling the stories that matter to all of our communities, especially those who have historically been left out of the conversation, we are not only missing good stories but missing a major opportunity to provide Chicago-area residents with the information they need to participate in, improve and make the most of our communities.”
