One of the earliest influences on me as an aspiring journalist was Era Bell Thompson. I discovered her on the pages of Ebony magazine while she was roaming the world and introducing readers to cultures both foreign and intriguing. She wrote with such passion and insight that she spurred an unintended consequence—giving me my first notion of anthropology, which, along with history, would be my major in college.
Activities
Find out more: Reading Thompson’s autobiography and her travel book to Africa provide a larger picture of her work and contributions. However, as they were important for me, go online and acquire some of her articles published in Ebony during her time as the international editor.
Discussion: How did Thompson’s personal experiences with racism and discrimination prepare her for the world of journalism? Rather than being discouraged by the rejection, it may have fueled her desire to understand why she was often despised and how to go about changing those conditions.
Place in Context: For a woman, and particularly for a Black woman, traveling as she did in the 1950s must have been quite challenging, but she persevered. Likewise, her coming of age during the Depression might have given her the resolve to face all kinds of difficulties, both socially and economically.
Each month when Ebony hit the stand or somehow arrived at our house, my first search was for her column, which didn’t always come each month because it often took her time to complete her travels and the writing, and then it had to be processed and readied for publication. Even so, it was always worth the wait to find out where she had been, what she had seen and how she would fill my head with the happenings of people miles and miles from my relatively tame existence in the city.
Later, when I learned more about Thompson, I was surprised that she spent her childhood not in some distant land, but in North Dakota, where her family and several others constituted 4 percent of the state’s African-American population. She was born on Aug. 10, 1905, in Des Moines, Iowa, and by the time she was 9 years of age, her family had settled on a farm near Driscoll, N.D. This was the beginning of her lifelong love of travel, and she and her three brothers were eager to explore what they hoped would be towns full of cowboys and Indians. No such luck, but they did have a talkative uncle who stimulated their imaginations about the Wild West he had experienced.
When Thompson started school, she encountered students who were amazed by her color, and as was the case with the great adventurer York who traveled with Lewis and Clark in this region of the country, her classmates wanted to touch her skin to see if the color would rub off. After a while, though, their curiosity gave way to the activities of the young, and Thompson was soon no more than another lively playmate.
It wasn’t an easy time for Thompson’s parents. Her father tried to make a living as a farmer, and things got worse when her mother died suddenly. Soon, the family was on the move again and finally resided in Bismarck, the capital of North Dakota, and where her father got a job as a private messenger for the governor. Meanwhile, Thompson was experiencing another group of teenagers in high school who were not less prepared for her difference than the children in Driscoll.
She found it particularly difficult in the classroom when Africans and pre-historic people were discussed in often demeaning and unflattering ways. All the students would turn and look at her, some snickering, others with puzzled expressions, wondering if she was related to one of the creatures depicted in the textbooks. This may have been the beginning of Thompson’s interest in other people and her determination to know more about her ancestry and about the evolution of human beings.
This Week in Black History
Feb. 3, 1956: Autherine Lucy becomes the first African-American student at the University of Alabama.
Feb. 4, 2006: Warren Moon is the first Black quarterback inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame.
Feb. 6, 1945: Reggae legend Bob Marley is born.
After a spell or so, as in the past, the students became more absorbed in getting good grades and, at the same time, they developed a growing admiration of Thompson’s athletic skills. After graduation from Bismarck High School, she enrolled at the University of North Dakota(UND) at Grand Forks.
Again, she was confronted with indifference but of a meaner variety when she was refused living accommodations at the local YWCA and had to wait for hours as streetcar after streetcar passed her by. Getting a job was equally frustrating until she finally landed one with a Jewish family.
Her college days were splendid and she excelled at track, where she established state records in five events for women and tied two national records. When she wasn’t training for track, she was polishing her skills as a writer, displaying both wit and humor in her articles in the campus paper.
During her second year at the university, she had to return home to Mandan in 1928 to operate the family-owned second-hand furniture store after her father died. A year later, she paid off the debts he owed and was convinced by a local pastor to return to college where she was doing so well. However, she chose to transfer to Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, where she could better achieve her dream of a degree in journalism.
In 1933, she had her degree and embarked for Chicago, where her first job was as a housekeeper before she earned a slot at the famous Black newspaper the Chicago Defender. Here in Chi-town, unlike the prejudice she received in the far West, there was the putdown from Blacks in the city, and this was even more unnerving for her.
The pay at the Defender was hardly sufficient, and the economic picture darkened considerably with the arrival of the Great Depression. There were a number of menial jobs she took just to survive until she was hired to work for the Works Progress Administration. Her life brightened when she was awarded a Newberry Fellowship in 1945, and this allowed her to complete her autobiography, “American Daughter” (1946), and continue a graduate studies program in journalism at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
From these successes, she acquired an editorial position at John Johnson’s first publication, Negro Digest, and subsequently with his magazine Ebony, where she was co-managing editor from 1951 to 1964, and then international editor from 1964 until her retirement.
It was during her tenure as international editor that she devoted herself to covering the globe, and she did this with her typical concern to educate and to entertain, touching down in Australia, India, South America and the South Pacific. In 1953, Thompson visited 18 African nations, and from this material she published her book “Africa, Land of My Fathers” (1954). As she grappled with the complexity of her heritage, she was not blind to the issues of race, class and gender—all of which she addressed in the book with an eye toward improving conditions in Africa. One incident she vividly recalled involved spending a night in a South African jail when she was denied a hotel room because she was Black.
Thompson died on Dec. 30, 1986, at her home in Chicago. Very little has been written about her private life and if she was ever married or had children.
Visitors to UND at Grand Folks can tour a multicultural center named in her honor, and she was inducted into the school’s hall of fame just before her death. Ten years previously, in 1976, she was awarded the state’s Theodore Roosevelt Roughrider Award.