Too Many Presidents
Jarrett and Angela Harkless were CABJ board members together in 1998, she a comer in the organization and he an eminence whose enthusiasm was ebbing. “He came to the first two board meetings and never came back,” she recalls. “He’s made his opinion known about me as a journalist. I gather he does not approve of me.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Harkless was elected president in 1999 and just stepped down. She’s 37, and unlike Jarrett, who faxed me a six-page “bio-sketch” of his accomplishments and honors, she has little in the way of triumphs to point to. After studying journalism at Loyola University she spent a couple of years as an editorial assistant at the Tribune and another as a production assistant for CBS in New York. Then she entered law school to prepare herself for a career in media management and in 1998 created Cachet magazine, a black society journal that published a couple of issues and continues today on-line. To Jarrett, Harkless is a poseur, and when he heard that Cachet’s photo editor, Louis Byrd III, was being put up to succeed her in this year’s CABJ elections, Jarrett decided the organization needed rescuing and he would have to step in.
CABJ meets monthly in the Tribune Tower. The April meeting was supposed to be a candidates’ forum. Instead, the Jarrett group–Norman and Smikle doing most of the shouting–turned the bylaws against the incumbents. Under them, an “official nomination form” was to have been mailed out to the members in February. The insurgents said it hadn’t been; the incumbents said it had and that anyone who didn’t get the form wasn’t a member in good standing. (A couple of members in good standing claimed they didn’t get the form either, but Byrd says they were lying.) The members who were present voted to start the nominating process over again and postpone the election from May to June.
Jarrett’s group has the big names, but Byrd’s controls the money. Since CABJ is both an independent organization and an affiliate of NABJ, the national organization can’t tell CABJ what to do, but it can either embrace or disavow it.
Which doesn’t mean Bullock is impartial. She says CABJ was decertified in June because Harkless had failed to provide her with information she’d requested for a routine “audit.” She says she couldn’t get through to Harkless by phone and a letter wasn’t answered. “Finally I did get a call from her on my voice mail. I wasn’t in and it left no return number. I called again and there was no response–and that was that.”
What next? “The solution during the board meeting in Milwaukee,” says Bullock, “was that we got both parties to agree that they would merge the membership lists and have another election under our watchful eye. Condace Pressley [president of NABJ] has agreed to come to Chicago and oversee that election.”
