Ted Poston

the long version

Ted Poston: Pioneer American Journalist is the life story of the first African American reporter to spend his career at a mainstream daily. Ted Poston (1906-1974) found his calling in Journalism, first as a columnist for the black weekly Pittsburgh Courier and later as city editor of Harlem's premier black newspaper, the Amsterdam News. In 1932 he traveled to Russia with Langston Hughes to make a film on American racism, and in 1935 he helped Heywood Broun create the American Newspaper Guild and was fired for unionizing the Amsterdam. The same year, wielding only words and a typewriter, he finally broke the color barrier in journalism by integrating the New York Post. During World War II Poston became a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Black Cabinet" when he headed the Negro News Desk of the Office of War Information in Washington. After the war, he returned to the Post, and in its heyday under editor James Wechsler and publisher Dorothy Schiff, he provided an insider's viewpoint on segregation and the civil rights movement. His incisive, usually upbeat, sometimes acerbic reports on everyday racism were eye-openers for the paper's mostly white readership, but often he leavened the bitterness of his stories with humor.