The following videos are part of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education Oral History Collection hosted by the African American Museum & Library at Oakland:
Description: Interview with journalist Nancy Hicks Maynard. In 1967, she started at the Washington Post and was the only black woman covering news. She moved to on to work at the New York Times where she was the first black woman reporter and covered many civil rights stories at universities. In 1983, she and her husband, Bob Maynard, purchased the Oakland Tribune, becoming the first Black owners of a major metropolitan newspaper in the US. They also co-founded the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education in 1977 in Oakland, California.
Description: Interview with investigative journalist Earl Caldwell. Earl Caldwell worked his way up from small newspaper to midsize and finally to the New York Times and New York Daily News. While covering the Black Panthers for the New York Times, he stood against the FBI and the Nixon Administration refusing to disclose confidential information about his sources in the Panthers. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court and resulted in the enactment of individual states’ shield laws protecting reporters’ sources. He was the only reporter present when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. He served as director and oral historian of the Maynard Institute’s oral history project.
Description: Interview with longtime activist and professor, Robert L. Allen, senior editor of The Black Scholar and co-editor of Brotherman, the odyssey of Black men in America.