Fight for the High Ground
NABJ even had a rule that associate members couldn’t be the top officers of its local affiliates. CABJ bent that rule. “I stood up at many a meeting and explained the situation to them,” says Anderson, “but it was not a fight I wanted to have. These people had put in sweat equity to make the convention the most successful one to date.”
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When Cachet’s photo editor, Louis Byrd III, was nominated early this year to succeed Harkless as president, Jarrett decided the old guard needed to saddle up again and rescue CABJ. A slate of familiar names was put together–Jarrett at the top, Channel Five’s Art Norman for vice president–to lead the charge. But instead of cutting and running, the parvenus dusted off a CABJ bylaw requiring all candidates for office to have been dues-paying members for a year before the election. Jarrett and his running mates were told they weren’t eligible to run.
Bullock was already on record calling it a “travesty” that Jarrett hadn’t been allowed to run in the first place. Even less impartial was deputy regional director Marsha Eaglin; a producer for Network News Service in Chicago, she’d run for secretary on Jarrett’s ticket. The NABJ board had chosen familiar names with years of service to the cause over people they barely knew with sketchier ties to the media.
Not everyone. “July 18, 1948,” said Vernon Jarrett when I called him this week. “I was just entering journalism.” Jarrett knew by heart the day Thurmond abandoned Harry Truman and the Democratic Party to found the Dixiecrat Party and run for president on a platform of segregation now and forever.
A Modest Proposal
