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NEWS & LETTERS, May-June 200525 years as editor of News & LettersOn the 50th anniversary of the first issue of NEWS & LETTERS, we reprint excerpts from the December 1980 "Worker’s Journal," the column by founding editor Charles Denby. by Charles Denby One of the reviews of my [book] INDIGNANT HEART: A BLACK WORKER'S JOURNAL by a history professor at the University of Indiana stated that the difference between Parts I [published in 1952] and II [published in 1978] is understandable if readers keep in mind the terrific changes that came about in race relations and at the work benches in the U.S. between the appearances of the two parts... There have been terrific changes in the past 25 years and that has made me a different person. But to me the chief reason I am a different person is my 25 years as editor of NEWS & LETTERS. My experience throughout those years has taught me more about what journalism really is than any journalism school could teach. It is a question of learning, not just editing. Let me go back to how it all began. What I had been learning then in the movement was that it wasn’t left all to intellectuals to do all the thinking and writing, but that workers could do it too. There didn’t need to be this separation that I had been taught all my life between mental and manual labor, where the educated do all the thinking and the workers do all the legwork. When there had been a break in the state-capitalist tendency and the Marxist-Humanist newspaper NEWS & LETTERS was formed, I was asked to become the editor. At first I was reluctant. The thought kept turning over in my mind that it was all right to have a worker-editor as a policy, but it was something else to put it into practice, especially starting with me. But after I kept hearing the words coming from everyone about myself becoming the editor, I decided to try it out. One of the crucial events that happened during the first year I was editor was the Montgomery Bus Boycott. I went down to Montgomery with some ideas of my own. In particular, one old story I’d heard said no sailor, no matter how long he has been sailing the high seas, can look out one morning across a calm sea and predict when a storm will arise, when the waves and current will come in with such force that it will sweep everything ashore. I know that many Blacks had been put in jail and some had been shot and even killed for doing exactly what Mrs. Rosa Parks had done by not moving to give up her seat to a white person. So I understood about not being able to predict the time and place people will rise up and revolt against their oppressors. You saw it so clearly in Montgomery. Rev. King had recognized it also, saying that he did not organize the boycotters, he joined their movement. Montgomery was only the beginning of the way NEWS & LETTERS followed all the forces of revolution and reported on all the freedom struggles, North and South. We did it in a different way than any other paper, even the Left papers... NEWS & LETTERS is still a paper where everyone involved is learning and thinking, from the editor to the worker who writes about his or her shop... * * * The story of freedom struggles in factories and fields, North and South, by the founding editor of NEWS & LETTERS Indignant Heart: A Black Worker's Journal by Charles Denby $14.95 To order, click here |
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