Black Voices In Commentary
The Trotter Group [Editorial Team: DeWayne Wickham, Wayne Dawkins, Rochelle Riley, Cheriss May]
August Press, ISBN: 0963572091
128 pp., $15.95

Reviewed by Todd Steven Burroughs

Trotter Group members are neither irreverent nor famous. Although known to other journalists, they are hardly household names. Unless he does a national forum on print media coverage of Black communities, most will never get a call from Tavis Smiley’s booking agents to be on those February C-SPAN rhetoric marathons. That’s because the vast majority of Trotter members are seasoned print journalists who work(ed) hard at major white newspapers every day, far away from the national infotainment spotlight. The privilege to speak their communal Black-but-objective journalistic mind for their respective Metro or Op-Ed pages was a hard-earned one, back in the mass media era that now seems to have peaked. So, for as long as they can, they use their salaried opportunities to document their lives and opinions through their Black perspectives, educating white readers and re-affirming Black ones.

The 23 columnists here—among those who gather every year in the name of William Monroe Trotter, an agitating, early 20th century Black newspaper publisher—meld the past and present by making sure important local, regional and national Black stories got told. Even though most of the columns here range roughly from 2004 through 2006, collectively they weave strands of African-American history from Jim Crow up through “Hustle And Flow.” Pieces of memory, fragments of encounters, reporting of current events—all are here, dispatched from Boston, Detroit, Virginia, and other regions, intersecting in a multi-faceted piece of geography called Black America. This amalgamation allows the brief tale of a 23-year-old voter in Milwaukee to share space with the account a 103-year-old Tulsa, Oklahoma riot survivor preaching a revival in Seattle. The book’s slightly heartbreaking coda, “Memories,” contain the final first-person goodbyes from the Trotter members who are now Ancestors. Asante Sana, Vernon Jarrett, Norman Lockman, Peggy Peterman, Gregory Freeman and Lisa Baird, and other prominent Black journalists who seem to be dying every month.

 

Vernon Jarrett, One Of My Scribe Ancestors 

This collection adds well to Wickham’s own Black columnist anthologies, “Fire At Will,” his 1989 solo effort, and his 1995 edited work, “Thinking Black: Some Of The Nation’s Best Black Columnists Speak Their Mind.” This book, an unnamed sequel to the latter, keeps good company with the small group of first-person books written within the last two decades by Black journalists who have toiled in the journalistic mainstream. Many of these authors and columnists injected African-American perspectives in America’s public sphere while Smiley was still getting coffee for Tom Bradley and Michael Eric Dyson was cooped up in a library researching his master’s thesis.  🙂

But as 2007 approaches, these Black establishment voices seem, well, too traditional (read: old) in the blogging age. The tight newspaper spaces work against, not with, these pieces. The lack of intensity throughout reveals that these writers either do not have, or regularly use, the power to really witness in the ways The Village Voice, The Nation or I.F. Stone’s Weekly, to name three examples, made famous in the middle of the last century. The almost unvarying middle-of-the-road political perspectives read very corporate, restrained; none of the independent, righteous rage of, say, a Mumia Abu-Jamal or an Ann Coulter—or a Trotter, frankly!—is found here.

Many of the journalists included here would, for the most part, consider that last criticism somewhat of a compliment. They have sought broad community attention to educate and illuminate, not to provide fodder for Bill O’Reilly. They are proud of their white mainstream affiliations and the power they have traditionally carried. They are not trying to be cute, popular, or controversial. They would not fit well between Tom Joyner’s old-school jams and “Melvin’s Love Lines.”

But in a new-media world of tens of thousands of amateur journalists using new toys that provide worldwide distribution without having to paint within established white lines, it might be difficult to make future opinionated Black scribes care about this important distinction. Then again, maybe the illusion of white power, coupled with steady green power, would be enough for many of them, after all. Choices abound because of the barrier-busting work of the Trotter Group. It’s just too bad those options don’t include a Black equivalent of Slate or Salon—some professional journalistic forum that would allow these veteran writers to stretch out and loosen up.

If the platform-shoe-d journalistic generation fails to inspire its multi-platformed media successors, however, it can at least pass into eldership knowing it succeeded in telling important African-American stories to, and for, teachers, churchgoers, politicians, bakers, dentists and supermarket cashiers back when the authority of a major metropolitan newspaper still meant something. That temporary glory is more than enough for it.