Tag Archives: Black magazines
#TriceEdneyNewsWire: “Photographer Roy Lewis Honored by #NationalAssociationofBlackJournalists #NABJ at Chicago Confab” By Hamil R. Harris
Every Black community has somebody like Roy Lewis. When I lived in the D.C. area and was at a Black political event, the way I knew I was at the main one of the day was spotting Roy, clicking away.
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| Having taken thousands of photos of people receiving awards and making news, Roy Lewis waited his turn to be honored by the National Association of Black Journalists. PHOTO: Roland Martin/#Roland Martin Unfiltered |
 Roy Lewis, relaxing later with his NABJ Legacy Award. |
 Roy Lewis (center) receives the Legacy Award from NABJ representatives Frank Holland of CNBC and Abby Phillip of CNN. PHOTO: Roland Martin/#Roland Martin Unfiltered September 2, 2024 Photographer Roy Lewis Honored by NABJ at Chicago Confab By Hamil R. Harris (TriceEdneyWire.com) – Roy Lewis has photographed iconic images across Black America for decades and his love for the lens was captured by Jet magazine in 1964 when it published his photograph of pianist Thelonious Monk. Born in 1937, on a plantation below Natchez, Mississippi, Lewis’s resourcefulness is part of his gift. He first fell in love with vocational photography in high school. He later practiced that love on a professional level at the Johnson Publishing Company on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago. He earned the money for a 35-mm camera after he was drafted into the U.S. Army. This summer, Lewis, 87, was back on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago, but not at the John H. Johnson headquarters. He was there to receive “special honors,” at the convention of the National Association of Black Journalists.“I worked for Mr. Johnson from 1956 to 1968 and then to be honored on this Avenue…” Lewis said. “It’s not about the pictures; it’s about the feeling of being honored by your peers and being back in Chicago, where I did some of my top work.” Lewis was bestowed with the Legacy Award during NABJ’s annual convention in August. The Legacy Award recognizes a Black print, broadcast, digital, or photojournalist of “extraordinary accomplishment who has broken barriers and blazed trails.” Legacy Award honorees are those who have “contributed to the understanding or advancement of people and issues in the African Diaspora,” according to NABJ. The NABJ wrote, “Lewis is a renowned photographer and activist whose photography career started in 1964 when Jet magazine published his photograph of musician Thelonious Monk. His work has been celebrated nationwide, including in his ‘Everywhere with Roy Lewis Exhibition,’ beginning in 2008 at the Essence Music Festival.” Lewis, who left Chicago in 1973 and moved to Washington D.C., was nominated for the award by Sam Ford, a founding member of the NABJ who worked for more than 51 years as an award-winning broadcaster for three decades on air at WJLA-TV, Washington, D.C.’s ABC affiliate. “Roy has been part of the Washington press corps for as far as I can remember,” Ford said. “Roy started taking pictures when he was 17 years old. He will be 87 this year…That is more than 70 years connected with the news media except when he was in the army.” Lewis also worked in his hometown paper in Natchez and went back to work for Ebony and Jet after the army. He has a large collection of pictures from his days at Ebony and Jet from the 1960s and he is still a photographer for The Washington Informer newspaper, the Trice Edney News Wire and the NNPA News Service, which serves 200 Black newspapers and their websites. “I thought he needed recognition. When a person is going for 87 years you don’t want to wait too long,” Ford said. According to Lewis’ HistoryMakers biography, he was drafted in 1960, and he developed his photography talent in the army. He purchased his first camera for just $25. In 1968, Lewis left Johnson Publishing and joined the staff at Northeastern University, filming student activities. In 1970, Lewis videotaped an exclusive interview with the late Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Lewis’s work was featured in the film A Nation of Common Sense. In 1974, Lewis traveled to Zaire to film the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman fight. This historic video would later be featured in the documentary on that classic clash, When We Were Kings. In 1975, Lewis worked on River Road on the Mississippi, a pictorial book that focused on African-American people and life along the Mississippi River. Dr. Ben Chavis, NNPA president/CEO, said in an interview, “The National Newspaper Publishers Association salutes Roy Lewis as a phenomenal photojournalist and for his long-standing contribution to freedom, justice, and equality. Roy Lewis is an icon of the Black Press.” Likewise, Hazel Trice Edney, editor-in-chief of the Trice Edney News Wire, said, “Roy Lewis’s name is synonymous with excellence in Black Press photography.” Under her leadership as president of the Capital Press Club in 2014, Lewis was also an award recipient during the CPC’s 70th anniversary celebration. She said, “Roy is deserving, not just because of great and historic photography, but because of his commitment to the cause.” |
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Every Writer Has At Least One Book Or Article That *Forced* Him/Her/They Into The Pain And Madness. I Recently Found A Key One That Made Me Myself.
It was originally published in the premiere issue of this magazine.
See the date, right above the bar code?!? Wow! I was 21 then, just hired at a daily newspaper, a ghetto Jimmy Olsen. Post-reading, I was doomed thereafter to roam the post-modern American wilderness looking for this kind of adventure and glossy chronicling opportunity, wishing to become either scribe, ready at any moment to greedily take either role, either side of the Ziegiest mirror. As I got older (note that I’m not writing “more mature”), that role/goal became my criteria to be involved with pretty much anything. Is this where my lifelong obsession with the lives of Black writers started? Hmmm…..
I’ve been laughing all week at how this article–a remembered and reconstructed momentary snapshot of place, person and circumstance, filled with 20th-century American post-rebel historic residue–has defined pretty much my entire life, while for its author, it was just an interesting part of a journalism career that loooong ago ended (he’s now a family therapist and adjunct professor at Antioch University, where he retired from as a pretty popular, multifaceted guy). He traveled light years from the experience, and I didn’t! Maybe I should call him so he can talk me down from the ledge? 🙂
Too long times ago. Two long times ago.
Be careful reading this. The truth moment, reprinted in the latest issue of The James Baldwin Review, is below.
#JaredBall And I Discuss The Life And Legacy Of Lerone Bennett Jr. w/ Bennett Biographer E. James West
Hands-down, one of my favorite BPM discussions.
Book Mini-Review: The Glossy Raised Fist
Our Kind of Historian: The Work and Activism of Lerone Bennett, Jr.
Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 328 pp., $27.95.
West uses his mastery of the histories of Black Chicago and Ebony/Jet well here, significantly building on and adding to his previous work on the topic. An author explains an author in a wonderful intellectual history that sticks to very exciting facts: Lerone Bennett rises in a rising time, gaining knowledge and experience and pointing them toward what he would call in print the Black Revolution. He transforms himself from journalist to historian, from moderate, Kappa Morehouse Man to Pan-Africanist revolutionary. Absolutely necessary for those who want to understand 20th-century Black press history and, perhaps more importantly, how one “Black-famous” author’s Black history texts–all the outgrowth of one national Black magazine, a 20th-century legend once on every Black American coffee table–were significant weapons in the Black struggle before African-Americans had full access to local and national broadcasting and now international streaming.
New Book On Lerone Bennett Jr. Out Now!
I put my request in tonight, and I can’t wait!!!!
One Of The Books I Am Waiting For In 2020
If God and the Ancestors are willing, I will be reviewing this book for imixwhatilike.org at some point next year. I have been a devotee of Lerone Bennett Jr. for a long time!
Johnson Publications Files For Bankruptcy
Lerone Bennett Jr.: Until That New Biography Comes Out Next Year……
…………I’ll have to be satisfied with this new, and fine, journal article by Christopher M. Tinson.
The biography, coming early next year, will be called “Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett, Jr: Black Popular History in Postwar America” by James West.
West tells me that I need to check out a forthcoming book on Hoyt Fuller by Jonathan Fenderson. It’s now on the list.
My 2006 Phone Chat With Cory Booker For The Crisis Magazine (And a 2014 Root Epilogue)
So Cory Booker is running for president. (Insert .gif here 🙂 )
Below is a .pdf of the actual page in The Crisis magazine that featured my Q+A interview with him, back in 2006. (No copyright infringement intended.) It was after he had just become mayor of Newark. And here’s what I wrote about the aftermath, which was part of this.
TSB Crisis Interview With Booker
And then there was this 2015 coda of sorts.
Drums in the Global Village 