Newsman with a Cause   

Charles Jackson worked tirelessly to get people of color onto the staffs of America¹s newsrooms.

I T'S A GREAT CHARLES Jackson story: In 1969, he walks in off the street to ask for a job at his hometown paper, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The personnel clerk looks at him. "I'm sorry," she says, "we do not have any porter jobs available." Replies Charles: "No! No! No! You misunderstood. I said RE-porter! RE-porter!"
By 1980, he was running the newsroom.
That was Charles Jackson. Nothing could stop him from getting a story or living a life, not bigotry, not even cancer. Like the mythic Phoenix, he had a song that could pull the sun god away from his morning chariot ride. That song was the newspapers Charles could make, papers that helped entire communities better understand themselves.
Charles was a sharp editor, a gentle mentor, a champion of newsroom diversity at big papers in Washington, Dallas and Cincinnati, finally shining brightest as editor of the Oakland Tribune. But his greatest feat was to coax and cajole hundreds of people of color into journalism. From the day in 1966 when he saw that he was the only black reporter at the Wichita Eagle-Beacon, he became a one-man newsroom equality machine.
Charles made young staff members feel they were as good as anyone, and as long as they believed him, they were. "Mr. Jackson treated everyone, no matter what age, race, gender or status, as a personal friend," says Daschell Phillips, a Tribune intern last year. Charles called such apprentices "my children," rolling his eyes. "He would give you shit while boosting you up at the same time. When he was here, the newsroom was that much more alive," says Martin Reynolds, intern five years ago, now the Trib's assistant city editor. "He took the time to nurture us," says Haki Crisden, intern almost a decade ago, now an assistant news editor at Cleveland's Plain Dealer. "He made every one of us better journalists. His kindness should inspire us to be better people."
On deadline, the Tribune Tower rang with Charlesisms. The newsroom was "the craziness." Reporters were "bastards." Interns were "the little shits." Anyone late with a story would hear: "Quit painting and turn the damn thing in!" Charles sat in the middle of it all, popping wintergreen Altoids, drawing people out with this dramatic genius. A white colleague who showed signs of racial understanding would find he had become a "wegro." A newsroom that talked to its town became "an open newspaper." Jackson led the Tribune to stories of its neighborhoods, of racial profiling by police, of the inner workings of gangs. We called it "total community coverage."
It was the yin and yang, mentor-softie and city-room hard-ass, the bendable personality with the unbreakable principles, that made Charles a great newspaper editor. Many in news today have brains; a few have heart; what Charles passed on to his friends and hundreds of newsroom children was courage, the kind most of us have to pray for.
At the Oakland Tribune, his courage saved us in 1992, a painful year. His heroes, Bob and Nancy Maynard, sold the newspaper to William Dean Singleton's MediaNews Group. Charles was the senior newsman from the "old Tribune" to go to the "new Tribune." Soon after, when Bob Maynard died, Charles worked through the night helping write the family's official obituary, then went in to the newsroom the next morning at Singleton's Tribune to report the story.
The doctors said Charles would be dead by March 2. But his friends were coming, so he lived through the weekend. At the hospice on Friday, his kidneys and liver no longer working, Charles said, "I don't know how I'm going to manage this." By Saturday, after dozens of grateful "children" had stopped by, he let on that he was "ready to move on to the next level." By Sunday, he announced, "What a great weekend, reconnecting with all my old friends." He died on Thursday, March 8.
Once more, Charles Jackson starts fresh, rises to the occasion. His wife, Deidra Keels, asked him what to say when he's gone. "Newsman is dead," he said. A friend whispered: "I don't know where you're going, but wherever it is, would you save a spot for me?" Charles smiled. His voice boomed as if he were at center stage: "I certainly will!"
Bob Maynard said this country "will never be all it can be until all its people have front-door access to the truth." We still don't have that right, Charles. As you put it, "we've come a long way, but we still have a long, long way to go." Yet even when things looked bad, you never stopped trying in all your 55 years. So neither will we.