William Worthy

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William Worthy
Boston, Massachusetts, US
DiedMay 4, 2014 (2014-05-05) (aged 92)
Brewster, Massachusetts, US
EducationBates College
OccupationJournalist

William Worthy, Jr. (July 7, 1921 – May 4, 2014) was an

U.S. State Department
regulations.

Biography

Early life

Worthy was born in

Nieman Fellow at Harvard University
, class of 1957.

During World War II, Worthy was sentenced to one day in prison for dodging a physical examination for military service and failing to register at a conscientious objector's camp. In 1954, he voiced early opposition to American involvement in Vietnam after he visited Indo-China in 1953.

Right to travel controversies

In 1955, Worthy spent six weeks in Moscow, interviewing

United States State Department travel regulations. At the time he entered China, Worthy was the first American reporter to visit and broadcast from there since the country's communist revolution in 1949.[4] While in China Worthy interviewed Samuel David Hawkins, an American soldier who was captured by the Chinese during the Korean War and defected to China in 1953.[5] Worthy's passport was seized upon his return to the U.S. from China and American lawyers Leonard Boudin and William Kunstler
represented Worthy in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking the return of his passport.

Without a passport, Worthy traveled to Cuba in the early days of

Constitution to return home without a passport. Years later, Kunstler wrote in his autobiography, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, that the Worthy passport case was his "first experience arguing an issue about which I felt passionate," was the "first time I had ever invalidated a statute," and that success "confirmed my faith in the justice system."[7]

The Committee for the Freedom of William Worthy was formed in 1962 and was chaired by A. Philip Randolph and Bishop D. Ward Nichols. In a telegram to Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, Randolph, James Farmer and James Forman noted that "white citizens who have come home without passports have never been prosecuted."[6] Folksinger Phil Ochs wrote a song called "The Ballad of William Worthy" about Worthy's trip to Cuba and its consequences.

Worthy continued to travel to North Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and Iran. He only received a passport again in 1968.[2] In 1981, the luggage of Worthy and two other journalists working with him, Terri Taylor and Randy Goodman, containing paperback copies of classified CIA documents, was seized by the FBI on their return from Iran. They subsequently won a suit on Fourth Amendment grounds and were awarded $16,000 in damages.[8]

Civil rights activist

Worthy was a

civil rights activist and member of organisations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the NAACP or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee
, which advocated for a more balanced coverage of Cuba in the US media.

In 1947, he participated in the Journey of Reconciliation together with other prominent civil rights leaders, in which they challenged state segregation laws on public transport. The action inspired the later Freedom Riders.[6]

In the early 1960s he was an outspoken critic of the civil rights movement for not going far enough to achieve civil rights in housing and all areas of American life. William Worthy was one of the most important political allies of

Catholic hospital in New York City
that attempted to tear down Worthy's apartment building and turn it into a parking lot. Worthy later wrote about those experiences in a critically acclaimed book, The Rape of Our Neighborhoods, published in 1976.

Worthy was a reporter for the

Black Panthers in a 1969 column for "gratuitous and indiscriminate" 'Uncle Tom' attacks on virtually all the black bourgeoise" and their exposure to law enforcement due to "sloppy, inefficient, undisciplined organizational follow-through".[9]

Teaching

While Worthy continued to work in the field of journalism; in the 1970s, he was appointed as head of the African American journalism program at

UMass Boston. William Worthy and Michael Lindsey co-taught the first class in Critical Journalism in the country at the College of Public and Community service, a branch of UMass Boston, which Noam Chomsky attended as a guest lecturer. William Worthy also taught at Howard University in the 1980s and 1990s, where he held the Anneberg Chair. During most of the 1990s until 2005, Worthy lived in Washington, D.C., where he served as a special assistant to the dean of the School of Communications at Howard U. and served on the board of directors of the National Whistleblower Center
.

On February 22, 2008, the

Death and legacy

Worthy died in Brewster, Massachusetts on May 4, 2014, at the age of 92, of Alzheimer's disease.[11]

The late psychologist

Kenneth B. Clark
said of Worthy: "The Bill Worthys of our society provide the moral fuel necessary to prevent the flickering conscience of our society from going out."

Works

  • Our Disgrace in Indo-China. 1954.
  • The Silent Slaughter: The Role Of The United States In The Indonesian Massacre. With Eric Norden, Andrew March, and Mark Lane. 1967.
  • The Vanguard: A photographic essay on the
    Black Panthers
    . With Ruth-Marion Baruch and Parkle Jones. 1970.
  • The Rape of Our Neighborhoods: And How Communities Are Resisting Take-Overs by Colleges, Hospitals, Churches, Businesses, and Public Agencies. 1976.
  • Pampered Dictators and Neglected Cities: The Philippine Connection. 1978.

Further reading

  • Robeson Taj Frazier, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

External links

References

  1. ^ Directory, Foreign Area Fellows - Volume 3. Foreign Area Fellowship Program. 1973. p. 14.
  2. ^ a b "A Man Worth Heeding", The Harvard Crimson, April 28, 1977, archived from the original on March 3, 2016, retrieved August 20, 2020
  3. ^ Fox, Margalit (May 17, 2014). "William Worthy, a Reporter Drawn to Forbidden Datelines, Dies at 92". the New York Times. Archived from the original on September 5, 2014. Retrieved August 13, 2020.
  4. ^ "The Press: Ban Broken", Time, January 7, 1957.
  5. Washington Afro-American
    . Retrieved December 31, 2010.
  6. ^ a b c "Cold War Stories: William Worthy, the Right to Travel, and Afro-American Reporting on the Cuban Revolution" (PDF). Retrieved August 13, 2020.
  7. ^ Kunstler, William M., My Life As A Radical Lawyer, pp. 95–97 (Birch Lane Press 1994).
  8. ^ McKibben, William E. (January 20, 1982). "3 Journalists To Sue FBI On Confiscation". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved May 11, 2013.
  9. ^ Worthy, William (March 8, 1969). "Militants being killed, jailed or forced to run". Afro-American (1893-1988). Baltimore, Md. p. 1.
  10. ^ Walker, Adrian (February 22, 2008). "Reclaiming a gallant voice - The Boston Globe". Boston.com. Retrieved May 13, 2014.
  11. ^ Langer, Emily (May 12, 2014). "William Worthy, defiant journalist, dies at 92". The Washington Post. Retrieved May 13, 2014.