Apartheid. USA 1988

March 1, 1988:

Twenty years after the Kerner Report chastised the press for reporting the news ‘with white men's eyes and a white perspective,’ a panel of black journalists said that newspapers and broadcasters had failed to recruit enough blacks into the nation's news-rooms. After a three-day symposium, the National Association of Black Journalists announced at a news conference that American newspapers should double the number of black journalists by the year

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1991. Blacks are making up 3.5 percent of American newspaper editors and reporters (in 1987), while they represent 12 percent of the general population. The panel likewise urged the broadcast industry to halt the steady decline of the number of blacks working in television news - a drop of 13 percent in 1986 from 15 percent in 1979. It also called on foundations to refuse grants to journalism schools that do not employ a single full-time black professor or not make an effort to recruit and retain black students. Only 2 percent of the 12 226 editors and news directors in America are black, according to a 1986 figure.^225.

‘Like a war veteran's reminder of old battles, Mark Jenkins' left arm aches in cold weather just below the shoulder, where a bullet lodged when it shattered the bone last winter’, wrote Isabel Wilkerson in the Times. ‘Unlike the veteran, Mark Jenkins is 15 years old. And his war goes on.’

In the Cabrini-Green housing project on Chicago's Near North Side where Mark lives, families wake up and go to sleep to the sounds of sirens and gun-fire. A year ago he was caught in the cross-fire between rival gangs fighting outside his apartment building. Mark is the youngest son of an unemployed file clerk and a man, who Mark says, has not worked for years. His parents were not married and two of his other siblings, a 17-year-old brother and an 18-year-old sister have different fathers as well. Mark met his father three years ago. He was walking past an apartment building when a woman he had never seen before called him from a window. The woman was his grandmother. She wanted to know if he wanted to meet his father, who lives at the housing project too.

Mark's life in an all-black neighborhood project recalls the warning 20 years ago by the Kerner Commission that the nation was moving ‘toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal’. Like thousands of other black youths isolated in the inner city, Mark lives a life filled with

225. The New York Times, the source was not indicated

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violence and frustration. He knows few working people, home-owners or professionals to give him inspiration or hope. He has little access to the world of most Americans. He lives in a 12th floor apartment with his mother and two of his three siblings in a building that looks like a prison... His world is an urban war zone ruled by three competing gangs. ‘I don't hang around with them that much. I don't want to end up dead. They're already shooting at me now...’^226.

226. The New York Times, from a report by Isabel Wilkerson