Sara Fitzgerald, UCC Media Justice Board Treasurer, prepared this blog post. Sara is retired following a journalism and public policy career that included 15 years as an editor and new media developer at The Washington Post. A longtime member of Rock Spring Congregational United Church of Christ in Arlington, VA, she served as president of the board of directors of the United Church of Christ’s Central Atlantic Conference from 2007-09.
The UCC Media Justice Ministry lost a longtime friend earlier this spring when W. Irwin Smallwood, a legendary North Carolina newspaper editor, died March 9 at the age of 98. Smallwood was a lifelong member of the United Church of Christ and served for a time as a board member of our organization when it was known as the Office of Communication, Inc., or OC Inc.
As I reflected on Irwin’s long, productive career, it reminded me of why the mission of the UCC Media Justice Ministry remains important today, many decades after Irwin worked with our founder, the late Rev. Everett Parker, on communications issues. In a nutshell, if an injustice is taking place—and no one takes notice of it—will it ever be remedied?
In his obituaries, Irwin was remembered for his four decades of work for the Greensboro (N.C) Daily News (later the News and Record.) He began as a sportswriter, and some obituaries that were published after his death focused on that part of his career. In May 1953, Irwin was the only reporter to stick around long enough to break the story that seven southeastern colleges had decided to leave the Southern Conference and come together to form the Atlantic Coast Conference.
It was not surprising that at the 1984 Master’s Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, Irwin spoke out at the meeting of the Golf Writers Association of America, arguing that Augusta National’s policy of barring women from its dining room and locker room unfairly disadvantaged the women reporters who were trying to cover the tournament. The policy was changed the next year. (It took the club nearly thirty more years before it admitted women as members.) In recognition of his career covering sports, Irwin was inducted into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the Carolina Golf Hall of Fame and the North Carolina Journalism Hall of Fame.
But it’s easy for the work of modest heroes to be forgotten over the years. I first learned about Irwin in 2013, after then-North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue issued a full pardon to nine black men and one white woman who became known as “the Wilmington 10” after they were unjustly charged with arson and conspiracy after a grocery store burned down during racial unrest in Wilmington, N.C., in 1971. The 10 included civil rights activist Ben Chavis, who had been sentenced to 34 years in prison.
As managing editor of the News and Record, Irwin assigned reporter Stan Swofford to dig more deeply into the episode, and published the stories Swofford uncovered, detailing what had really happened during the episode and the trial. Swofford’s reporting made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. The convictions were appealed and subsequently overturned by a federal court, citing misconduct and errors by the prosecutor and trial judge, but not before all of the defendants had served jail time.
Perdue’s pardon, which finally cleared the records of the Wilmington 10 more than 40 years after they were first arrested, provided a “news hook” to recall their story again. (I appreciate that another former OC Inc. Board member, the late Rev. John Deckenback, celebrated the pardons at an annual meeting of the UCC’s Central Atlantic Conference that I attended around that time.) Learning that Irwin had served on the OC Inc. board earlier in our history, I reached out to him, hoping he might be able to attend our annual Everett Parker Lecture. We had a delightful phone conversation about our organization’s ongoing work. He was still with us in spirit, but did not feel he could make the trip—unlike Everett Parker who continued to attend our annual event until he was close to 100!
The story of the Wilmington 10 recalls Martin Luther King’s well-known quote: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Still, at a time when newspaper staffs are being decimated, when local radio and television stations are cutting back on locally generated news, when “real news” battles with social media for the time and interest of the average reader and viewer, we need to lift up the stories of people like Irwin Smallwood and Everett Parker. Without their courage and determination, stories of injustice might have gone uncovered, and innocent people might have spent their most productive years in jail.