Those of us committed to informing and empowering the black community have that much more hard work to do now that George E. Curry is gone. The former editor of the NNPA News Service and Emerge magazine died suddenly of heart failure on Saturday, August 20 at the tragically early age of 69. His loss was mourned and his contributions hailed by the civil rights leaders of his generation, whom he counted as friends and colleagues, including Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. and Rev. Al Sharpton. No less a newsmaker than our next U.S. president, Hillary Clinton, remembered Curry as “a pioneering journalist, a tireless crusader for justice and a true agent of change” and said he had influenced her personally to think beyond her own “narrow” experience and expand her understanding.
We are now in a position to reveal George’s direct, personal influence on The St. Louis American. Years before he had left a successful career in mainstream media, before he became a national leader in minority media and the Black Press, near the end of his tenure as a reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, he moonlighted at this newspaper in 1982. The current ownership of the Post could not confirm this, but it was our understanding at the time that George helped us to build the foundation of this newspaper without telling his bosses at the daily paper across town – and at risk of losing his job had his contributions been discovered by Post management.
Rather than leaving a mainstream daily in disgrace for hiding his professional assistance to a black weekly in the same town, George moved up to a larger and more influential newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. After cementing a solid national reputation, which he would never lose, at the Tribune, he returned to black media at Emerge magazine, and would go on to become, as editor of the NNPA News Service, arguably the best national news editor the Black Press has ever known. For years, he also submitted to the nation’s black newspapers a column that always had the enviable power of expressing what sensible people should be thinking and saying about the news of the day, always from a black perspective.
Just consider the last three George Curry headlines to appear in this paper: “Has the U.S. given up on school desegregation?” and “Supreme Court rejects challenge to affirmative action” (in our July 28 Diversity edition) and then, just this week, in our Religion section, “Advocates push black church to minister on AIDS.” Clearly, these are life-or-death issues for our community, and in each case (and countless others) George was there to report the facts fairly and explain what they meant with clear logic leading to forceful conclusions intended to compel change in the reader. Just ask Hillary Clinton, one of many Curry readers whom he compelled to change.
There is, indeed, more hard work to do now that George is not here to help us tell the stories that our community needs to know. Fortunately, he helped to nurture literally thousands of black journalists by helping to found a series of Minority Journalism Workshops, starting with his inaugural effort with the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists in 1977. “He was driven to bring and teach as many young African Americans into journalism as he could,” said our photojournalist Wiley Price, who worked under Curry here in 1982. “George always wanted a powerful African-American publication that could stand on its own in the industry and be a real source of information for its own community.”
When George was working with the NNPA, each time The American was awarded for general excellence, he would place a personal call to our publisher to share the good news. We would like to think he was taking some pride in having done some of the early work that helped to build the foundation of The St. Louis American, which we would like to believe has become “a powerful African-American publication that could stand on its own in the industry and be a real source of information for its own community.” We will miss you, George Curry.
