Gerald Boyd, who became the first black managing editor of The New York Times and was forced to resign amid a reporter’s plagiarism scandal, died Thursday of lung cancer. He was 56.
He had been sick for most of the year and had kept the condition private from most friends and colleagues, his wife, Robin Stone, said.
“Every wife would say she’d want her husband to be known as a great person, wonderful husband, father and good citizen,” she said. “But as I’ve said before, as a journalist, he was my hero; and I know he was a hero to many journalists in the profession.”
He began work as a teenage grocery bagger in St. Louis and rose to become managing editor of The New York Times.Boyd’s career, which took him from the end of the civil rights era to the beginning of the Internet era, was built on competitiveness and a determination to get the story right. As he rose in prominence, he became a beacon of possibility for aspiring black journalists.
Giving a lecture in honor of one of his early editors in St. Louis a few years ago, he told the hometown audience, “Throughout my life I have enjoyed both the blessing and the burden of being the first black this and the first black that, and like many minorities and women who succeed, I’ve often felt alone.”
He was, in fact, the first black journalist to serve in many of the jobs he held at The Times, including metropolitan editor and managing editor. At 28, he was also the youngest journalist chosen for a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard.
“He really did have a drive,” said Tom Morgan, a classmate at the University of Missouri and later a colleague at The New York Times. “Most people spend their college years trying to figure out what to do. Gerald always knew. There was no doubt.”
After covering the first Bush administration for The Times, Boyd was elevated to the editing ranks by Max Frankel, The Times’s executive editor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was given a variety of editing responsibilities before being named metropolitan editor.
Boyd went on to lead coverage that won the newspaper three Pulitzers: for articles about the first World Trade Center bombing, for a series on children of poverty, and for a series on the complexities of race relations in the United States. He also shared the leadership of The Times during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, coverage that earned six Pulitzer prizes.
Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement: “Gerald was a newsman. He knew how to mobilize a reporting team and surround a story so that nothing important was missed. He knew how to motivate and inspire.
“And, tough and demanding as he could be, he had a huge heart. He left the paper under sad circumstances, but despite all of that he left behind a great reservoir of respect and affection.”
George Curry, a colleague of Boyd’s at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the 1970s, said, “When Gerald came out of college he always talked about being the editor of The New York Times. That was his single most important goal. To get the position and have it blow up was extremely disappointing. It was what he always wanted to do.”
Gerald Michael Boyd was born in St. Louis in 1950; his mother, who had sickle cell anemia, died when he was a small child. His father, a delivery truck driver and an alcoholic, moved to New York and played little role in his childhood.
Boyd and his older brother, Gary, were raised by their paternal grandmother, who was also raising their two cousins. Their younger sister, Ruth, was raised by their maternal grandmother in California.
In his unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I learned to survive by learning to rely on no one other than myself. Over time, I would travel further and rise further than I could ever have imagined as a child growing up poor in St. Louis. I would become as familiar with the powerful as I had always been with the powerless.”
Boyd, whose work schedule prevented him from playing sports at Soldan High School, found time to write for the school newspaper and was encouraged by a teacher to apply for a scholarship for aspiring black journalists sponsored by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
“In his senior year he did apply, and to his surprise he won a full ride to the University of Missouri at Columbia, with a guaranteed job to follow at The Post-Dispatch,” Boyd’s brother, Gary Boyd, said.
Not long after he arrived at the university, he met Morgan.
“There weren’t very many black people on campus, period,” Morgan said. The two were friends, then colleagues on Blackout, a newspaper for black students that Boyd founded.
“He always had a drive to run a newspaper,” Morgan said. “That was his love.”
Boyd joined The Post-Dispatch after graduation, in 1973.
Curry, his colleague at The Post-Dispatch, added: “Gerald’s always been very aggressive – breathing, eating and sleeping journalism. He was like that coming out of school.”
He continued: “I don’t think it would cross Gerald’s mind that he would not beat someone competing against him. That’s part of his DNA.”
Together, Curry and Boyd founded the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists in 1977, and one day, sitting in the Original, a soul food restaurant near City Hall, the two men sketched out a program to train black high school students in the basics of the business. Alumni of the program have gone on to organizations like The Wall Street Journal, Curry said.
In the years since his resignation, Boyd worked as a consultant in journalism and kept an office at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Two of his particular interests – the quality of journalism and race as the most fraught issue in America – were twinned in the summation of his speech in St. Louis in 2000.
“To be different in this society, even a little different, means additional pressures and responsibilities and hardships that really don’t change, no matter how high up you climb,” he said. “And no matter how much progress we’ve made where race and gender are concerned, we’re not close to being where we should be.”
He then concluded: “Many of you know I’ve spent my life trying to be a good journalist. But what matters more to me is whether I’ve been a good man and a decent man.”
