This past Saturday, in the Deese Ballroom on the campus of North Carolina A&T, a historically black college and university located in Greensboro, North Carolina, the newly founded Black Sportswriters Hall of Fame (BSWHoF) inducted its inaugural class.
The event, organized by Black Sportswriters Hall of Fame founder Rob Parker, and supported by the NC A&T’s student chapters of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) and the Associated Press Sports Editors, welcomed longtime journalists Michael Wilbon, Claire Smith and Bill Rhoden as the first three members of BSWHoF.
Wilbon is noted for his career as a beat writer and columnist for the Washington Post, author of several books and currently one of ESPN’s most prominent on-air figures. Smith is the first woman in the writers’ wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame having covered baseball for The Hartford Courant, New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer. Rhoden, a former New York Times columnist and author of the seminal book “Forty Million Dollar Slaves,” is one of the driving forces behind ESPN’s Black-led media platform Andscape.
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In addition to honoring the aforementioned trio of inductees, the ceremony paid posthumous tribute to legendary sports media figures Bryan Burwell, Thom Greer, Sam Lacy, Wendell Smith, Larry Whiteside, and Ralph Wiley, who Parker, a 2023 National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame inductee, coined “The Original Six.”
In consummating the Black Sportswriters Hall of Fame, Parker, a native of Queens, New York and graduate of Martin Van Buren High School, whose resume includes being a former sportswriter for the New York Daily News, the first Black sports columnist for both Newsday and the Detroit Free Press, founder and editor of the baseball website MLBbro, and a current sports talk host for Fox Radio, said to this writer:
“Our history in telling the stories of sports that are also deeply tied to our culture, is a result of many men and women that have paved a path for not just generations of sportswriters, but the athletes they have covered.” As an educator who has taught a baseball masterclass at North Carolina A&T and teaches a baseball writers class at the University of Southern California, Parker envisioned the BSWHoF being housed at an institution of higher learning.
“I was so impressed by the students and the journalism program (at NC A&T), I thought ‘man, this would be a great place to expose students to some of the greats in the business,’” he said in a recent interview with Greenboro’s WFMY News 2.