“Was I right to kill the column?” I asked him.
“I read it in the Green. You were right,” he said.
I called Lacey and told him to meet me in Hoge’s office. Hoge said he had had no business spouting off about his supervisor for public consumption. Lacey said the Lord had shown him the way, and under Guild guidelines he could do it.
I told Lacey nothing I had done was racially motivated. I also told him that his column was suspended. I also said I wasn’t pleased with his coverage of the Bulls, either, and that I would be working closely with him to try to show him exactly what it was I wanted from him.
Needless to say, he didn’t take any of what I said very well. He said he still felt he was a victim of racism.
I told him he had no other choice than to accept my dicta. He got up and said he would pray about it and get back to us.
That was fourteen years ago. I’ve often thought about Lacey and our problems and just how they came about in the first place. In retrospect:
The first mistake was made by handing over a major-league beat and a once-a-week column to a person with very little experience and expertise in the first place. But the Sun-Times had wanted to send a message to its black readers that it believed in affirmative action. Giving Lacey that big of a stick gave him the false message that he was an accomplished journalist and that he was above any sort of internship or heavy editing. He actually believed his writing was superior when, in my estimation as head of the department, it was terrible.
The paper had done Lacey J. Banks an injustice by throwing him into the deep water. Had he been brought along much more slowly, he might have become an excellent writer.
But then we get into 1975. The idea was that, because of the wrongs done to blacks previously, in order to give a black man his due, perhaps he shouldn’t have to live up to the standards set for white people by other white people.
Meanwhile, I was a twenty-eight-year-old kid just off the turnip truck from Atlanta who had never had to supervise a full-time black staffer, who had never had to deal with a staff that was organized, and who was rather bullheaded himself about what was good and what wasn’t.
Lacey continued to sulk about the column. He asked me over and over, “When am I going to get it back?”
The truth was, I didn’t think he would ever get the column back, because I didn’t think he felt he needed any of the guidance I could give him. Again, in retrospect, I made up my mind early that Lacey was a hopeless case.
The explosion came one morning when I was working on the Green. The big story of the day was a possible merger between the National Basketball Association and the new American Basketball Association. There were meetings going on in Louisville, and the AP had picked up a story by a Courier-Journal writer giving in-depth details of what was transpiring. I figured if anybody knew what was going on in basketball, it had to be somebody from Kentucky.
Lacey came in and wrote his own story about the possible merger. It was one page. It basically was a rewrite from what the morning Tribune had carried.
I ignored it. The wire piece was far superior, so I put the wire story in the paper. When I came back from the composing room, I did my normal cleanup job. I forearmed all the waste on the rim into the wastebasket.
Lacey saw the first edition.
“Why didn’t you use my story?” he asked indignantly.
“The wire piece was better,” I said.
“Where is my story?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I want my copy back.”
“It’s in the wastebasket,” I told him.
The glue pot hit the fan.
Lacey went back to the black-owned newspaper and made charges of racism against me, the Sun-Times, and anybody else he could think of.
Hoge called Lacey into his office again. I was present. Hoge did the talking. In my mind, he gave Lacey every chance.
“Were you misquoted in the article?” Hoge asked Lacey.
“No,” he answered.
“Are you willing to rescind any of the charges?”
“No.”
Hoge didn’t hesitate.
“Then I have no choice,” he said to Lacey. “Clean out your desk.”
There should have been a way to get around what eventually happened. I kept thinking to myself during the entire episode, Certainly, nobody would think I would ride in here from Atlanta and immediately tangle with Lacey Banks just because he was black.
If Lacey had been brought along slower. If maybe I had, in fact, worked with him a little more. If Lacey hadn’t been so quick to charge racism, if he had shown me a willingness to learn. My only excuse is he certainly wasn’t the only problem at the Sun-Times sports department. I was up to my butt in alligators almost every day.
The Chicago Newspaper Guild filed suit against the paper, charging that Lacey had been dismissed unfairly. The issue would go before a federal labor arbitrator. Before it did, however, I found out what I had expected all along—that racist feelings knew few geographical bounds.
I got unsigned memos from members of the news staff saying ridiculous and horrible things like, “I’m glad somebody finally got rid of that nigger.”
It was an old and unpleasant story. Some felt Lacey J. Banks had been promoted to the lofty heights as pro-basketball writer and columnist simply because he was black, not because he had any special talents for the job. But that was irrelevant to me. I came to make the layout look better and put some zing into the words we wrote. That was all I cared about.
Before the hearings began, I hired a replacement for Lacey, Thorn Greer from the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He was black. Nobody said to me, “You must hire a black replacement,” but I knew the message I would send if I didn’t—he got rid of the nigger so he could hire a white guy.
In this case, however, I must insist that Thorn Greer, had he been plaid, was eminently qualified to take over the basketball beat. He was an excellent writer and reporter. He was a man of great dignity and humor. He was also a terrible poker player—we had a weekly game at my apartment that included him and an occasional other member of the staff who didn’t hate me—as was I.
The Lacey Banks thing got big. Then bigger.
Another Chicago weekly did something. A man on a radio station who did commentaries on Chicago media doings defended me. Said I was “guilty by geography.”
One cold morning, I stepped off the Clark Street bus and there were black people demonstrating in Lacey’s behalf in front of the Sun-Times.
“WHITE RACIST GO BACK TO ATLANTA,” said one of their signs.
The thought occurred to me there: I could turn right around, grab a cab, go back home and pack, catch a plane (yes, a plane), and be back in Atlanta and at Harrison’s by eight in the evening.
I went on in, however. Luckily, none of the demonstrators had any idea what the White Racist from Atlanta looked like, so I managed to pass by them without notice.
I went through weeks of discussions and practice-testifying with the paper’s attorneys. Both the Daily News and the Sun-Times were owned by the Marshall Field Company, of department-store fame.
As we were entering the room for the first of the hearings in front of the federal arbitrator, I asked one of the Field lawyers, “Do we have a chance to win?”
He said, “Let me put it this way—we have a white sports editor from Atlanta and the wealthy Marshall Field Company against a black man in front of a federal arbitrator. No, we don’t have a chance. We just have to do it for show.”
So Lacey Banks and his lawyers and representatives of the Chicago Newspaper Guild were on one side of the room, and newspaper management, me, and our lawyers were on the other. To tell the truth, I felt very lonely in there. I had very little in common with either side, as a matter of fact, and the only other experience I had had in a courtroom as a witness was during the Bill Clark thing back in Atlanta. There, I was a small player. Here, I was The Villain.
They put me on the s
tand for cross-examination. I still recall some of it:
“Mr. Grizzard,” began the Guild lawyer. “Did you not tell Mr. Banks religion had no place on the sports pages of the Sun-Times?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Grizzard, is it not true that you once worked for Sports Illustrated?”
“I was their Atlanta correspondent.”
“In your opinion, as a professional journalist, what is your feeling about the quality of Sports Illustrated? Do you think the magazine exhibits standards that are of a high quality?”
“I think it may be one of the best-edited publications in the world.”
“You do. Well, then, Mr. Grizzard, are you aware that Sports Illustrated recently did a series of articles on religion in sports, written by Mr. Frank Deford?”
I knew where he was going by now, of course. I had said SI was a great magazine, and SI had done articles on religion in sports written by the brilliant Frank Deford.
What the lawyer would say to me next was, “If a publication of such high quality—and you have testified you agree with that assessment of the publication—sees a relationship between sports and religion, why then would you say to Mr. Banks when he wrote about religion that it had no place on your sports pages?”
This is where the truth sort of got lost in a courtroom. Okay, so Sports Illustrated had written about religion in sports. But Frank Deford writing about the religious philosophies of professional athletes in Sports Illustrated was a far cry from Lacey J. Banks doing a give-Jesus-Christ-the-football sort of thing in his sophomoric once-a-week column. The link between the two was so frail, it didn’t apply. Not in the real world. But in court, before the ears of the federal arbitrator who didn’t know one thing about Sports Illustrated or newspaper sports sections, the damage had been done.
I did stop the proceedings one day under direct examination by our lawyers. He asked what my reaction was when Mr. Banks had first charged me with being racist.
I said, “I was bumfuzzled.”
The Guild attorney said, “Excuse me. What did the witness say?”
The arbitrator said, “Please repeat your answer.”
“I said, ‘I was bumfuzzled.’ “
“I don’t think I am familiar with this term, bumfuzzled,” said the Guild attorney.
“Nor am I,” said the arbitrator.
I’m sure my attorney wasn’t either, but he wisely didn’t say anything.
My mother used to say “bumfuzzled” a lot when I was growing up, as in, “It completely bumfuzzles me how you can mess up one bathroom in such a short time,” or, “I’m bumfuzzled that you won’t eat pickled okra.”
The court recorder chimed in, “I’m not certain how to spell the word.”
I said, “Like it sounds. B-u-m, ‘bum,’ f-u-z-z-1-e-d, ‘fuzzled.’ Bumfuzzled. It means confused or surprised.”
Again, I felt terribly out-of-place. I’m in Chicago-by-God-Illinois getting raked over the coals by a bunch of northerners who don’t even understand a perfectly good word like “bumfuzzled.”
The hearings continued. Lacey testified about the story he turned in concerning the NBA-ABA merger, the one I had rejected for a wire story I thought was more complete.
“How long did you work on this manuscript?” the Guild lawyer asked him.
“Until midnight,” Lacey answered.
“And when you saw the first edition and realized your manuscript had been replaced by another off the wire, what did you do?”
“I asked Mr. Grizzard why he hadn’t used my story.”
“And what did he say?”
“He said he thought the one he had received on the wire was better.”
“That’s all he said?”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t sit down with you and explain why the wire manuscript was better than your own?”
“No.”
“What did you do then?”
“I asked him where the piece was.”
“You wanted to know what had happened to the manuscript you had submitted, am I correct?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you want this manuscript returned to you?”
“I had worked hard on it. I wanted to compare it to the article Mr. Grizzard had chosen.”
“The one he chose to run in the newspaper rather than the one you had delivered him.”
“Yes.”
“Did Mr. Grizzard return the manuscript to you?”
“No, he did not.”
“Why didn’t he?”
“He didn’t have it anymore.”
“What did he say he had done with it?”
“He said he had tossed it in the wastebasket.”
“The wastebasket?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let me see if I have this straight, Mr. Banks. You worked until nearly midnight on your manuscript. You submitted it to Mr. Grizzard for the following day’s first edition. And he not only cast yours aside for a story off the wire—a nonexclusive story, when yours was exclusive—but he also never gave you any sort of detailed excuse for why he didn’t run your manuscript.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And then when you asked him for your manuscript back, he said that he had discarded it into the waste can?”
“Yes.”
I tried to explain when my lawyer questioned me about the incident. I said that Lacey’s article was not exclusive, it was basically a rewrite of the morning Tribune. I also said that if he had stayed up until midnight working on it, he must not have started until eleven forty-five. But that is making an assumption, which they won’t listen to in court.
I also pointed out that I always threw all leftover materials on the rim into the wastebasket to clear it for work on the next edition, and that’s the way I had learned to do it when I first started in the business, because if you didn’t get all that paper off the rim by the time the night was over, the entire sports department would disappear under tons of it.
I could tell the arbitrator was not impressed, and I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking about Abe Lincoln. Remember how Abe Lincoln used to sit up late at night and read from the dim light of a candle? He could see Lacey doing this, staring down at his typewriter as the flicks of candlelight danced across the blank page before him. He probably saw a log cabin where this was taking place, too. And here was this black man, struggling over each word of his manuscript. And what happened the next morning? The cruel Simon Legree took this precious manuscript and callously dumped it into a cauldron of waste.
It was the word “manuscript” that helped Banks’s case, too. “Manuscript” as in “book”—as in 1,696 typed pages. “Manuscript” is not an operable word in the newspaper business. It’s “story,” “article,” “piece,” or, in this case, “one-page, eight-paragraph rewrite of the rival paper’s piece.”
Then they nailed me again. We had a special Saturday section. People were milling around in the hearing room, waiting to begin. I noticed another black man in the room I had not seen at previous sessions. And he looked familiar to me.
I kept watching him. I’d seen that face before. Then it hit me upside the head like a slashing foul ball into the seats.
It was Alfred Johnson, who had been Minter’s stringer for Atlanta University sports teams at the Journal. I had forgotten about Alfred Johnson. I had forgotten the circumstances involved the last time I had seen him.
I nudged my lawyer.
“We’ve got big trouble,” I said.
“What’s the matter?”
“Just wait. You’re going to kill me.”
The three Atlanta University schools—Clark, Brown, and Morehouse—were in an all-black conference that was holding its annual conference tournament in Montgomery. It was the first time the tournament had come around when I was executive sports editor of the Journal.
Hudspeth was covering pro football at the time, but it was March, and he was available for another assignment, so I had dispatched him to Montgomer
y, where the Southeastern Conference Indoor Track Meet was taking place. I had mentioned to him that if any of the Atlanta University teams made a move in the basketball tournament, I needed him to be available to cover a game or two.
Alfred came into the office of the old 10 Forsyth Street sports department and walked over to my desk. He said he wanted to get some expense money so he could go to Montgomery and cover the basketball tournament. The budget was so tight in those days that when I dispatched a reporter to cover a night basketball game at Auburn University, a two-lane, 110 mile drive, the paper wouldn’t pop for an eighteen-dollar hotel room. You had to drive back that night.
“Have you ever covered the tournament out of town before?” I asked Alfred.
He said he hadn’t.
“Have you ever received advance expenses from the paper to cover an out-of-town event before?” I asked him further.
He said he hadn’t.
I tried to explain to Alfred he was not an employee of the paper. He was a “stringer.” We had stringers all over. They never got advance expenses for anything.
And then Alfred said it. He said, “If I were white, you’d give me the money.”
I’m twenty-three years old.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said to Alfred.
“No, it’s not ridiculous, either,” he said to me.
“Alfred,” I went on, “I don’t have time to argue with you about this. Hudspeth’s in Montgomery, and if we need somebody to cover the tournament, he’s already over there. The paper’s not going to let me send anybody else.”
Alfred then launched into an attack on me and the newspaper as racists. He got ugly about it. He cursed me. He said, “You better watch yourself when you go out of this building.”
“Are you threatening me, Alfred?” I asked.
He cussed me again.
I said, “You’ll have to leave the building.”
He said, “I’m not going anywhere.”
I said, “Alfred, I can’t have this. You will have to leave the building, and leave your building pass with security.”
“You’re firing me?” he asked.
“I am,” I said.
He started cursing me again. I went and got Durwood McAllister, the managing editor. He called security. Security escorted Alfred out of the building. It took me about a day to find another Atlanta University stringer, also black, who turned out to be much more conscientious and capable than Alfred.
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