Pulitzer Prize-winning alumnus recalls segregated Alabama childhood, influence of Baker

photo by: Elvyn Jones

Harold Jackson, editorial page editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pulitzer Prize winner, addresses Baker University’s convocation Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2016, at the school’s Baldwin City campus. Jackson graduated from Baker in 1975.

Baldwin City — A Pulitzer Prize-winning Baker University alumnus told the school’s students Tuesday that his days on the Baldwin City campus provided a foundation for his later career.

Harold Jackson, a 1975 Baker University graduate in journalism and political science, was the featured speaker Tuesday at the convocation marking the beginning of the 2016-2017 school year. Now the editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jackson related to the Rice Auditorium audience of Baker students, faculty and staff the story of his childhood in a segregated Birmingham, Ala., his later career as a journalist and his days at Baker, which provided the bridge between those two experiences.

Jackson’s story fit well with the day’s theme of “Baker Builds Achievers,” Baker President Lynne Murray said at the start of the convocation. The freshmen in attendance were at the start of their own “transformative process,” which would be shaped by the faculty members whom they would soon get to know very well, she said.

Jackson said he grew up in the projects of Birmingham, one of four sons of a truck driver and a housewife. Although the racism of the city of his youth required African Americans to step off sidewalks to allow whites to pass and forbade his mother from entering downtown bathrooms to change her sons’ diapers, he was largely unaware of segregation because it had him attending all-black schools and churches and living in a black neighborhood.

It was into that environment that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in 1963, intent on organizing peaceful demonstrations that he knew would provoke an overreaction from white authorities, Jackson said. Although his parents wouldn’t let him or his brothers attend the demonstrations, one of his fellow elementary school students was the youngest person arrested in the demonstrations and another schoolmate was one of the four girls murdered in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of September 1963, he said.

The grip of official segregation started to loosen when he was in high school. He was able to attend a journalism camp at the same Alabama University where a few years earlier Gov. George Wallace tried to block the admission of a black student. Birmingham high schools were desegregated before his senior year, which increased his awareness of segregation’s consequences, Jackson said. He learned white schools were given more and better physical and academic resources, and the white students were more academically advanced because of those advantages.

After graduating with two scholarships, he chose to attend Baker because he wanted to experience another part of the country and because he liked the school’s marketing.

“I liked how Baker students in the brochures were having so much fun,” he said. “They were always smiling.”

He arrived at Baker just as the school was becoming more racially diverse. A few years earlier there had only been one or two African Americans on campus. His freshman year, there were 50, Jackson said.

Thinking himself a good writer, he was surprised when his first English composition paper was returned heavily marked up in red. After his instructor worked with him, he improved to the point that he started tutoring other students, Jackson said. He cited a handful of other demanding instructors who guided him in journalism and political science. Among his Baker influences was Jesse Milan, the school’s first African-American professor. One of Milan’s legacies was the founding of the school’s cultural diversity organization, Mungano, the year before Jackson arrived on campus.

“People said it was a separatist group, but Mungano was involved in every aspect of student life,” he said. “In those days very few blacks joined fraternities or sororities. Mungano was a source of support when we felt alienated.”?

Jackson became the editor of the Baker Orange and met his wife, Denise, at the school. He returned to his hometown after graduation, winning with two other staff members of the Birmingham News the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 for a series of editorials on the inequities of the state’s tax system.

In his departing words, Jackson commented on the challenges facing print journalism in the internet age.

“People still want the news,” he said. “They don’t want to pay for what they can get for free, but good journalism costs money. Someone has to be there to report the story and take the photographs. Otherwise what you read might not be something someone heard but just a rumor.”