ONE JOURNALIST'S BEGINNINGS : Faith, family & race

Commonweal, Dec 21, 2001 by Don Wycliff

But there was no such resistance at Holy Family. There was, Mother says, a moment's hesitation and then another mother smiled, walked over to her and introduced herself and her daughter, who was the same age and had the same name as my sister Karen. The ice was broken. "You'll never know what a smile can mean to a person," Mother says as she recalls that day.

My subsequent Catholic education set me on a certain path. I did not plan to be a journalist. I was going to be a teacher--a professor of political science. I had graduated in June 1969 from the University of Notre Dame and been admitted to graduate study at the University of Chicago and given a fellowship to finance it.

It took me only a few weeks to realize that I did not want to be there. The University of Chicago was so thoroughly disconnected from the neighborhood, the city, and the social ferment surrounding it, it might as well have been on the moon. And the lively engagement with people and ideas and social movements that I had enjoyed at Notre Dame was absent in the intense, isolated atmosphere of graduate school at Chicago.

Still, while I didn't want to be doing what I was where I was, I had no idea what else I might want or be able to do--until December 4, 1969.

I awoke just before 7 a.m. in my studio apartment at 47th Street and Drexel Boulevard and flipped on the radio next to my bed. The all-news station crackled with word of a "shootout" overnight between units of the Chicago police assigned to the Cook County State's Attorney's office and members of the Black Panther Party on the city's West Side. Two Panther leaders, Fred Hampton and Marc Clark, had been killed in the exchange.

I had no relationship to the Black Panthers. I knew of Fred Hampton only what I had seen of him during brief television interviews in the weeks preceding his death. But his words and his manner in those TV appearances suggested to me that this was no mere street thug. Indeed, I saw something of myself in Hampton: We were both young black men full of passion to see our people's lot improved. He was trying to do it one way; I was trying another. His got him killed--unjustly, I was convinced.

In the days and weeks following the "shootout," the Panther story consumed me. I would get up in the morning, buy every newspaper I could find and devour the latest news. I watched every TV show I could. And I listened to the radio constantly for news.

Gradually, the Chicago news media unearthed and exposed the truth. There had been no shootout; it had been a shoot-in by the police. Hampton and Clark had been deliberately targeted and slain.

As I watched the Chicago media do their splendid work, I began to feel myself attracted to that work as a socially relevant and useful way to spend a life. It was in every sense of the word a genuine calling, a discovery of a vocation.

It wasn't until the end of the spring quarter at the University of Chicago that I got up the gumption to strike out in a new direction. I packed up my books and my meager other belongings and headed home to Texas, to Houston. I hoped to get into TV news, but had no luck at the stations there.