The New York Amsterdam News’ staff stands today on the shoulders of giants. Numerous luminaries, Civil Rights icons, and cultural heavyweights remembered across the country this and every Black History Month can be found in the bylines throughout the newspaper’s 116-year history.
Some, like baseball legend Jackie Robinson, Rep. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and former NAACP leader Roy Wilkins, penned featured columns and opinion pieces in the paper. Others found full-fledged careers in the newsroom, both before and after ascending to prominence. But a certain name from Omaha, Nebraska, comes to mind when talking about historical figures writing for the Amsterdam News — even if his column did not last long.
Research shows Malcolm X came to Harlem and into the Amsterdam News’ purview while proselytizing the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) message across the northeast. Johnson X Hinton, a member of his Mosque No. 7, intervened during a police brutality incident on 125th Street back in 1957. The officers subsequently directed their attention — and violence — toward him, fracturing his skull and detaining him at the 28th Precinct.
While mainstream and white-owned news outlets ignored the incident, then-AmNews managing editor James Hicks arrived at the police station to see Malcolm on the scene, calling for the NYPD to free Hinton so he could get medical attention. Behind him stood a small army of NOI members.
Accounts differ on what exactly happened after, but the result was the same: the cops caved and sent Hinton to Harlem Hospital. Dr. Keith Miller, for who the National Humanities Center awarded a fellowship for an upcoming book on Malcolm, believes Hicks’ presence fueled his rise two years before the television documentary “The Hate That Hate Produced” propelled him and the NOI into American living rooms.
“This incident gets reported in the New York Amsterdam News, and then it certainly appears that this is the way that most people in Harlem ever heard of Malcolm X,” said Miller, a professor emeritus of English at Arizona State University. “Before that, most people in Harlem, not to mention everywhere else, did not know about Malcolm X but the New York Amsterdam News covered this…[and around] the next year, they gave Malcolm X a column.”
Malcolm’s “God’s Angry Men” ran for roughly a year before giving way to NOI leader Elijah Muhammad’s “The Islam World.” Miller says Hicks’ call to platform the two remains a bold decision and provided a counterweight to integrationist efforts and Black Christianity. “What somebody else in his position might have done is say, we want to give them minimal attention,” he said.
Unlike his civil rights-era contemporary, Martin Luther King Jr. already enjoyed international celebrity when then-publisher C.B. Powell enlisted him for an Amsterdam News column in 1962, initially alternating week-to-week with Wilkins. The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington sandwiched his arrival, providing an opportunity to boost the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s profile following less successful integrationalist efforts in Albany, Georgia.
Two months before the March on Washington in 1963, King penned a letter to Powell, thanking him for his financial support during the Birmingham campaign.
“With your help, we can continue work in Birmingham and consolidate the gains we have won through an extensive voter registration campaign,” wrote King. “It may interest you to know that we are now getting more than 200 people per day to go to the Court House to seek to become registered voters. Your financial support will also enable us to begin paying the debts we incurred there — extensive bond money, legal fees, the cost of housing, and supporting our field secretaries who organized the community and conducted nonviolent direct action workshops.”
Several correspondences between King and Powell are housed at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University. Research associate Meghan Cook Weaver says the “People in Action” column largely centered around contemporary events and lasted until around 1966. She believes the writings remain presciently as relevant today as back then. At the Amsterdam News, King wrote about the assassinations of both Malcolm X and President John F. Kennedy, and provided a voice for lesser known movements.
“He would profile people from these small towns that he would visit on his people-to-people tours and describe the work that they were doing on the local level,” said Weaver. “These people were completely unknown at the national level and so King would take space in his column to profile these people that otherwise you may not know. I just think that’s really powerful to acknowledge that there were so many people involved in the rights movement that helped to facilitate King. It was through the hundreds of thousands of people putting themselves out there.”
But the paper’s notable contributors span beyond the two most influential civil rights movement leaders. Long-time Amsterdam News voice Herb Boyd pointed to several other notable figures who wrote for the paper.
For example, Langston Hughes’ personal assistant and singer Raoul Abdul served as a music critic. Jazz pioneer Max Roach and his wife, performer Abbey Lincoln, published their displeasure for a white music critic’s Esquire magazine commentary in the paper. But Boyd believes newsroom staff like Hicks and reporter Jimmy Booker also deserve a mention. The list goes on…
Novelist Ann Petry fostered her Harlem roots while covering the neighborhood’s upper crust in her “The Lighter Side” column for the Amsterdam News before joining Rep. Powell Jr.’s The People’s Voice. She later became the first Black woman author to sell more than a million copies through her book “The Street,” which refers to the neighborhood’s 116th Street setting.
Harlem Renaissance composer Nora Holt joined the publication as an editor and music critic during the 1940s and was the first Black person in the Music Critics Circle of New York, one of the most prominent classical music juries at the time. Her reporting tackled racial equity in opera houses and choral ensembles. But Holt also covered religious news across the country.
And while Marvel Cooke famously shattered glass ceilings as the first Black woman journalist to write for a substantial white-owned publication, The Daily Compass, she also broke barriers here as the AmNews’ first woman reporter after starting as a secretary. She held union meetings at her home and participated in a defining 11-week strike to establish a chapter in the Newspaper Guild, the first time in American history Black workers won a labor dispute against Black management.
“The telephone continues to ring. The editor keeps reminding us of the forty galleys we have to put out. I still have five hours to go before I finish my day,” wrote Cooke in an Aug. 1935 edition. “My husband and his pleasure groups. Bah! Yet, it is a fascinating job — one I wouldn’t change. Thus endeth a Wednesday — any Wednesday — as editorial secretary of The Amsterdam News.”