CHICAGO – A day after Donald Trump's contentious interview at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, the organization was back to business as usual.
Thousands of journalists spoke with recruiters or networked at the career fair. Meeting rooms overflowed with attendees listening to panel discussions on career growth and industry changes, including conversations around artificial intelligence and new considerations in criminal justice coverage.
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Many passed by the people at the Dow Jones desk to congratulate them on Wall Street Journal colleague Evan Gershkovich’s release from prison in Russia in a massive prisoner swap deal.
But members of the nation's largest group for Black journalists were still grappling with the tension created by Trump's Wednesday interview, in which he made false claims about Vice President Kamala Harris' race and repeatedly insulted ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott after she asked him a tough question about his past attacks on Black people.
Fred Sweets, a contributing editor at The St. Louis American and a former Associated Press photographer, said Thursday that the Republican ex-president's interview raised an age-old question for the group's membership: “Are we Black first, or are we journalists?”
“He made news, but that works both ways,” said Sweets, 76, who was in the initial meetings to form NABJ a half-century ago. “He sunk his ship as far as I could see. But for his followers, he was a hero.”
Sweets said he would like to have heard questions asking Trump’s interpretation of amendments passed in the aftermath of the Civil War since “he believes ostensibly in the Constitution.”
He also would have asked about the Central Park Five, Black and Latino men wrongly convicted in the beating and rape of a white female jogger. Trump famously took out a newspaper ad in New York City after the 1989 attack calling for their executions. They were later exonerated.
The invitation to Trump was contentious
The appearance by the 2024 Republican presidential nominee roiled NABJ when it was announced, with one high-profile journalist, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, resigning as convention co-chair in protest. In a column in the paper Attiah wrote that her resignation was more than a protest of the invitation, “I objected to the format, which I rightly feared would allow a White politician to make our Black press advocacy organization into an instrument of his agenda.” She, like Sweets, was disappointed that journalists in the audience were not allowed to ask a variety of questions on issues like Black infant mortality and foreign policy in Africa and the Caribbean.
Harris, the first Black woman and person of Asian descent to serve as vice president, did not attend. She is expected to appear in person or virtually at an NABJ event later this year.
Christian De’Vine, a student at the University of Missouri-Columbia and first-time NABJ attendee, said he felt as though Trump wasn’t at the convention for the Black media representatives in the room but for his own public relations.
“Although the interview rubbed some people the wrong way, it doesn’t change what we are here for. We are fostering a community of Black excellence,” De’Vine said, reiterating NABJ's longstanding mission to strengthen ties between Black media professionals, journalists included, and celebrate industry contributions and achievements.
DeWayne Wickham, a retired longtime columnist at USA Today, said Trump had lost the spotlight in the past two weeks “so what better way for him to get it back than to go to the National Association of Black Journalists and stand on the stage before 4,000 assembled Black journalists and insult them and insult Black America?”
“I think Donald Trump came here with no intention to speak to Black America. I think he saw this as an opportunity to gin up his base,” said Wickham, 78, who is a founder of the organization as well as the former founding dean of the School of Global Journalism & Communication at Morgan State University in Baltimore.
Black journalists created the NABJ ‘out of a need for survival’
The NABJ came into existence in 1975, in part, because media outlets began hiring Black journalists after the 1968 Kerner Commission report that spoke about how media neglect of communities of color and the lack of diversity in the field contributed to the unrest of the times, Wickham said.
By 1975, the few Black journalists who had been hired were often isolated at their outlets and decided to band together “out of a need for survival," he said. The result was an organization in which Black journalists could mentor one another, share ideas and talk safely about issues they were facing in their newsrooms, as well as in the subjects they covered.
The association began inviting presidential candidates in 1976, Wickham said. Former Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and George W. Bush have attended the convention as president or as candidates. Nominee Bob Dole and his running mate, Jack Kemp, both attended the 1996 convention.
Marcus Craig, a 16-year-old high school journalist from Washington, D.C., said he was attending his first convention to network.
“Of course we should allow presidential candidates to come and be scrutinized, because not only is it an opportunity for the journalists, but it is also an opportunity for the candidate to explain themselves and why we should vote for or vote against them,” he said.
Craig added that Trump's interview did not alter why the young journalist had attended the Chicago convention. "I don’t think that someone who is not actually in NABJ can influence it being a safe space,” he said.
Other NABJ speakers have also caused controversy
Past conventions have not been without controversial figures or comments. In 1986, then-Chicago Mayor Harold Washington spoke at the NABJ convention in Miami about the lack of diversity and its impact on storytelling that reflected the realities of cities and communities of color.
Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan made more pointed remarks on the subject at the NABJ convention in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1996, when he said journalists did not control the stories at the white-owned media where many of them worked. Farrakhan has been accused by critics of promoting antisemitic tropes, a criticism he has disputed.
Wickham said over the organization's decadeslong history, “the best and the brightest and sometimes the most controversial of Black America have shown up at our doors. They want to come in. They want to talk to us. They want to be heard.”
"Sometimes the crazy uncle from the attic will come down and add to the mix,” he said. “But at the end of the day, there's still family.”