Fighting for the dream

Jerry Mondesire has integrated big city newsrooms,
walked with Washington elite and reestablished the NAACP
voice. No, he is fighting to save the city's children before
the civil rights dream dies.

First of two parts

by MICHAEL J. MISHAK

Tilting back in his leather chair, Jerome Whyatt Mondesire answers one of more than a dozen phone calls, all flooding in before 9 a.m. His newspaper staffers are still asleep. He pushes speakerphone.

"Sunday Sun."
"Hello. Jerry?" the voice says.
"This is Jerry."
"It's Dwight. Are you going to be at the meeting today?" It's the voice of State Rep. Dwight Evans.
"You know it baby. Alright."
He hangs up.

It's two days before the March to Save the Children, an anti-violence demonstration that will draw more than 8,000 protestors through the streets of North Philadelphia, and Mondesire's phone lines are blowing up.

As cosponsor of the march and president of the local NAACP, he's got his hands full. His schedule, like most days, is intense, but since the fatal shooting of 10-year-old Faheem Thomas-Childs outside T.M. Pierce Elementary School in February, Mondesire's voice has been filled with righteous indignation.

Before becoming the Philadelphia Inquirer's first black editor, Mondesire covered the inner city's urban gang wars as a reporter in the 1970s. He wrote about spiking murder rates and later watched crack cocaine devastate the black community. Determined to stop "another horrible cycle," he's exercising the voice of the NAACP.

But this morning, Mondesire is soft-spoken, his voice barely vaulting over the crackling wood of his office fireplace.

Mondesire is scheduled to attend an afternoon roundtable discussion with key black political leaders to develop strategies for fighting youth violence and schoolyard killings.

Another victim, 17-year-old Kyree Cohen, was added earlier in the week to a growing litany of slain school children. More than two-dozen students have fallen victim to violence this school year alone.
"The indiscriminate shooting of children will literally fill me with a rage and a disgust and a pathos that has to be dealt with," Mondesire says. "You can't have a civil rights crusade if the future generation is being slaughtered. You can't have a civil rights dream if there's nobody here to realize the dream."

And the calls keep coming.
They mark him as newspaper publisher, civil rights leader, talk show host and father. Often wearing all those hats at once, mornings are Jerry time.

Past the presidentially-sized formal portrait bearing his likeness and the wall of fame comprised of laudatory plaques, J. Whyatt Mondesire is getting ready to face another day.

An early riser, Mondesire starts most days in a well-furnished backroom office at the Philadelphia Sunday Sun's Mt. Airy headquarters, four blocks from his home. Before the civilized workforce shakes the sleep from their eyes, he's enjoying a solitary predawn cigar, as CNN plays muted on a small television. Mondesire savors those precious calm hours under the glow of a fireplace and desk lamp in a room that resembles a cozy home study with family photos on the mantel. On the wall hangs a framed collection of buttons from the city's storied political campaigns, including one that reads, "T. Milton Street for Astronaut."

Smothering the stump of his cigar, Mondesire peers into the fire as he recounts a past steeped in activism and envisions a future fueled by liberation.

The roots of change

Jerry Mondesire has always considered himself a change-agent with a penchant for the word "liberation."

Considering his early surroundings, it's hard to imagine him being anything else.
Born and raised in the Harlem of the 1950s and 60s, Mondesire lived in a "vital, vibrant and strong community" where the seeds of activism where sown in the streets. Famous black sports figures like Jackie Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson owned and operated businesses. Black doctors and lawyers were next-door neighbors with black janitors and washing-women. Preeminent black leaders like U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell lived and ate in the neighborhood. Mondesire recalls seeing Malcolm X preach on a ladder outside his house. "It was a different Harlem then," he said.

Though Mondesire wanted to follow his intellectual hero W. E. B. Du Bois at Fisk University, his family couldn't afford to send him to the school. His mother died when he was 11 and his father was retired.

So like many of the city's students of modest means he settled on the City College of New York, where those from working-class families could attend tuition-free.

Known as the "Proletariat Harvard," City College had a predominantly white campus in 1967 where less than 1 percent of its students were black. Minorities were marginalized.

When Mondesire, a journalism and political science major, tried writing for the school's newspapers he discovered that blacks were not welcomed, except as copyboys.

But to the son of a Marcus Garvey follower, the Jamaican immigrant whose concept of black racial pride sparked an international movement, acceptance was out of the question.

Mondesire, along with some fellow black students, took over an existing campus publication and turned it into an Afro-centric newspaper.

"It was the height of the black power movement. I had an Angela Davis bush. And the idea of being a copyboy at one of the college newspapers didn't exactly excite me," Mondesire said.

His father had always wanted him to become a doctor, an urge further aggravated by the loss of a son to tuberculosis. But Mondesire says he was "too full of the emotion of the times and impatient." His heart had been set on journalism since writing for his high school newspaper.

His father died before Mondesire graduated, and the young upstart landed a writing fellowship from the Kiplinger Foundation as part of a journalism-training program for African Americans. Participants were assigned to the various Washington news bureaus.
Mondesire was assigned to the New York Times.

Awesome power, meager pay

Mondesire worked the Times' Washington Bureau for six months starting in the fall of 1971. The young journalist cut his teeth under the supervision of award-winning staffers like R. W. Apple and Fred Graham, the latter serving as Mondesire's mentor.

"The Times treated me with the utmost respect," Mondesire said. "It blew my mind because they put me right next to [Graham], the guy who wrote the story that broke the Pentagon Papers."

The "kind" Times writers who "could be insulting" corrected Mondesire's stories until they bled with red ink.

"You'd suck up your ego and you might wipe a tear when they weren't looking, and when you'd bring it back they'd say, ŒNot bad. Not bad. Pretty good for a kid,'" Mondesire said. "This was the New York Times."

Mondesire personally experienced the power of the nation's newspaper of record when he wrote a story on elevator safety that ran on page A27. The day after the story ran, he was inundated with phone messages, some hailing from other countries.

"They wanted to know what it meant and how they could find more information," Mondesire said. "The power of that paper was awesome."

Mondesire was invited to private parties where he crossed paths with Washington's elite.

"It was a very eye-opening experience, a very heady thing for a kid, especially for a kid who grew up on the streets of Harlem," he said.

When the fellowship ended in 1972, the Times' found Mondesire a job at the Raleigh News Observer where one of their editors had become publisher.

Though living expenses were affordable, Mondesire was dissatisfied making $80 a week and longed to be closer to his native New York.

Stopping the presses

After looking for another newspaper job, he soon landed a spot at the Baltimore Sun where Mondesire says he was the first black reporter to stay longer than four months.

"It was a very racist atmosphere," Mondesire said of Baltimore. "It was an industrial power, but like a sleepy southern town, slow to awaken to changes in the racial climate across the country."

Working the "lobster shift," from 3 p.m. to midnight, Mondesire covered the police beat, dashing back to his native New York to hangout on weekends.

He won awards for his stories on discrimination in the city's housing practices. Mondesire and another Sun reporter separately applied for the same housing. Mondesire was routinely turned down while the other reporter, who was Jewish, was accepted. Their stories prompted the involvement of a U.S. Attorney and a federal investigation.

While the Sun stories helped to establish his name, Mondesire never anticipated it would move beyond the byline. But Mondesire himself became the subject of a story when he beat the entire Baltimore media on a story involving the shooting death of a New York state senator.

A vigilante group calling itself Black October had vowed to kill drug dealers, spray painting its death threats throughout the city. Mondesire started asking questions and soon received a call from a man claiming to be one of the group's members. Several weeks later a rival newspaper broke a story that traced the city's drug supply to the highest levels of city government and suggested a New York City trafficking connection to the state legislature. A subsequent story named a prominent state senator as a key suspect.

On July 13, 1972, Mondesire received a call from the Black October member, whom he had given his personal phone number, while watching the movie "Damn Yankees" with his girlfriend. The vigilante informed him where he could find the suspect senator's bullet-riddled body.

Mondesire got into his Volkswagen and sped to the crime scene. As the only reporter with the story, a 21-year-old Mondesire called the Sun's city editor from a pay phone at 11 p.m. The next morning's paper had already gone to press, and the Sun's staffers were skeptical of the young reporter's story.

"You've got to do something. You've got to get this in the paper," Mondesire told his editor.

"You want me to stop the presses," the editor said.

"I don't have that authority, but you do."

The editor stopped the presses, changed the plates and ran Mondesire's story on the off-lead side for half the newspaper's run.

"The television and radio were dumbfounded that they had been scooped by the printed press," Mondesire said.

Becoming the story

Following an uproar over how the Sun got its story, the newspaper ran a subsequent story on the front page with the war declaration-size headline, "Reporter called after shooting."

"I became the subject of a story," Mondesire said.

Police interviewed him and his phone was tapped.

Then, Mondesire received another Black October phone call. The vigilante was furious over a rival newspaper's story that claimed New York drug dealers who feared identification had killed the state senator.

The vigilante told Mondesire the group intended to kill again, this time selecting a target whose death would not be wrongly attributed.

"It was unnerving," Mondesire said. "I told him I couldn't know who he intended to kill because that would have put me in an impossible legal position."

The group killed a low-level drug dealer a few days later, and other newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, started covering the story. An Inquirer reporter, dispatched to the Black October story, offered Mondesire an interview opportunity.

"I was ready to leave in a heartbeat, in a New York minute," Mondesire said.

Hitting the glass ceiling

With the Sun political beat in sight, Mondesire wanted to cover Annapolis, the state's capitol. But a black reporter had never covered politics for the Sun, and the newspaper denied Mondesire the position.

"They said I wasn't ready after they had made a fortune off me," Mondesire said, referring to the Black October vigilante stories.

In 1974, the Inquirer gave Mondesire a political beat.

Mondesire says he was one of many "young crazy people" hired from various papers throughout the country to help shed the perception that the Inquirer was Mayor Rizzo's "footstool."

After covering the Rizzo administration and breaking stories on political corruption, Mondesire became the Inquirer's first black editor.

After a stint as assistant city editor, he was assigned to the New Jersey bureau.

"I thought about where my career was headed," Mondesire said. "I ran into the glass ceiling again."

According to Mondesire, he and a colleague in Akron, Ohio were the only blacks who held editor positions in the Knight newspaper chain.

"I wasn't going to spend my thirties — my most productive vital years — trying to prove to them that I was as capable as some of the white people," Mondesire said.

Next week: The newsman goes to Washington.