saturn7
Politics is an EXCHANGE!!!
By Kara Thompson,
Special to the AFRO
When the Freedom Riders risked their lives in 1961 to protest the segregated bus system in the American south, Moses Newson was there. When the University of Mississippi, a segregated college, admitted its first male Black student in 1962, Moses Newson was there. And when Martin Luther King Jr. was in the midst of planning the Poor People’s March in 1968, Newson again was present to conduct one of the last interviews King would ever live to complete.
Throughout his 95 years of life, Moses J. Newson used the power of words to move the needle on civil and human rights. From his time as a journalist to his later career with the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Newson used his writing to convey images and details to anyone who read his work.
Born February 5, 1927 in Fruitland Park, Fla., Newson started to read weekly newspapers from a young age. After graduating high school, he enlisted in the US Navy, where he served from 1945 until 1947. This time spent in the Navy afforded him an opportunity to go to college through the G.I. Bill.
Newson attended Lincoln University in Missouri, where he received his bachelor’s degree in journalism. Following graduation, he got a job at the Tri-State Defender, where he and fellow Lincoln graduate, L. Alex Wilson, were the only two full-time staff members at the paper. While Newson started off there as a reporter, he would later become city editor.
“By observing and reading and watching what other people in the field were doing and accomplishing…that helped me decide that [journalism] was a good area in which I might be able to make a contribution,” said Newson.
In 1955, Newson covered the murder of Emmett Till and the trial of his killers. He relayed what was happening in Mississippi and in racist strongholds across the country with brutal detail.
“When he shares with us, you can get a sense of how deeply that story affected my father as a parent, as a journalist, [and] as a black man who grew up in the South, well-aware of how easily these things can happen to anyone,” said Shawn Newson, the reporter’s youngest daughter. “He would describe the funeral and the pain that so many people felt. I know it must have been painful for my dad too.”
In 1957 Newson left the Defender to join the AFRO. There he would take on the role of reporter and later, city editor. Eventually, Newson became executive editor for the AFRO, a position he would hold for a decade.
For his first assignment, Newson was sent to Little Rock to cover the battle between the Arkansas governor and President Eisenhower over the desegregation of Central High School. During this experience, Newson was kicked out of the courtroom and at point, attacked by a racist crowd along with other Black journalists.
“A number of us– four or five of us Black guys who were covering that situation–were set upon by people who seem to want to do us a great deal of harm,” he said. “That was one of the more dangerous situations, I think. We just had to run, you know?”
Four years later, Newson joined the Freedom Riders who rode from the Baltimore area to New Orleans, a bold act in a land tightly wrapped in Jim Crow’s grip. The trip lasted two weeks. While in Anniston, Ala., Newson and his group were attacked by a mob, and their bus was set on fire. His first-hand account of the experience, first published in May 1961, details how frightening the encounter was for Newson.
“One of the most challenging stories would have been the bus burning story down in Anniston,” he said. “People were attacking the bus. They threw a [firebomb] behind the seats where I was sitting, set the bus on fire, and everybody had to scramble a bit to get out of that situation.”
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Moses Newson: Black journalist extraordinaire and AFRO all star speaks at 95