Wallace Terry

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the 19th century baseball player, see
Wallace Terry (baseball)
.
Wallace Terry (right) interviews G.I. in Vietnam 1969

Wallace Houston Terry, II (April 21, 1938 – May 29, 2003) was an

oral historian, best known for his book about black soldiers in Vietnam, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1984), which served as inspiration for the 1995 crime thriller Dead Presidents and the Spike Lee's 2020 war drama Da 5 Bloods.[1]

Though primarily a journalist, he was also an ordained minister in the Church of the Disciples of Christ, and worked as a radio and television commentator, public lecturer, and advertising executive. He taught journalism at

The College of William & Mary
, where he sat on the board of trustees.

Early life

Terry was born in

segregationist governor of Arkansas, and gained national attention when a photograph of him shaking hands with Faubus hit the front page of The New York Times on September 14, 1957. Later, Terry became the newspaper's editor-in-chief, and the first African American to run an Ivy League newspaper. He did graduate studies in theology as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago, and in international relations as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University
.

Career

Terry was hired by

Viet Cong on May 5, 1968, during the Mini-Tet Offensive in Saigon, following directions from ambush survivor Frank Palmos and New Zealand military personnel.[2]

Terry's Time cover story, "The Negro in Vietnam", was written in 1967[4] and the book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans was published in June 1984. The New York Times wrote that "many of the individuals featured in [the book's] pages speak about their experiences with exceptional candor and passion; and in doing so, give the reader a visceral sense of what it was like, as a black man, to serve in Vietnam and what it was like to come back to 'the real world.'"[5]

Terry wrote and narrated the only documentary recording from the Vietnam battlefields, Guess Who's Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam, which was released by

PBS Frontline show, "The Bloods of Nam".[6]

Death and legacy

Wallace and Janice Terry

In 2003, Terry developed a rare vascular disease called granulomatosis with polyangiitis, which strikes about one in a million people. The disease can be treated with drugs, but in his case it was diagnosed too late. He died under treatment at a Fairfax, Virginia, hospital on May 29, 2003.

He is survived by his wife of 40 years, Janice Terry (née Jessup), and by their three children: Tai, Lisa, and David, and two grandchildren: Noah and Sophia.

At the time of his death, Terry was working on Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History. The book was published posthumously in June 2007. Cynthia Tucker called it a "treasure trove of history" in the May/June 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.[7]

Books

  • Terry, Wallace (1984). Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.
    ISBN 978-0-394-53028-4
    )
  • Terry, Wallace (2007). Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History. Basic Books.
    ISBN 978-0-7867-1993-8
    )

References

  1. ^ Brown, Lane (June 9, 2020). "Spike Lee's Forever War: How the Vietnam War epic Da 5 Bloods became one of the most ambitious films of his career". Vulture. Archived from the original on June 9, 2020. Retrieved June 10, 2020.
  2. ^ a b "archives.nypl.org -- Wallace Terry papers". archives.nypl.org. Retrieved 19 February 2024.
  3. ^ "A Letter From the Publisher". Time. September 19, 1969. Archived from the original on December 14, 2008.
  4. ^ Terry, Wallace. "The Negro in Vietnam". Time.
  5. ^ Kakutani, Michiko (August 27, 1984). "Books of the Times". The New York Times.
  6. ^ Terry, Wallace (May 20, 1986). "The Bloods of Nam". Frontline. PBS.
  7. ^ Tucker, Cynthia (May–June 2007). "A Place at the Table: Setting the record straight on early black journalists". Columbia Journalism Review.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wallace Terry.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wallace_Terry&oldid=1208951663"