May 19, 2014

William Worthy, Trailblazing Journalist, Dies at 92

William Worthy, Trail-blazing Journalist, Dies at 92

William Worthy Jr., left, courageously ignored government restrictions on American journalists to go behind the Iron Curtain to gather news during the Cold War.

The trailblazing reporter traveled to China, Cuba, Russia and even North Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s to interview leaders and report on conditions in the communist regimes. Nearly 20 years later, he bravely accepted the assignment to travel to Iran after Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the U.S.government-backed ruler, called the shah. The only American reporter in the country at the time, he brought back documents challenging the official story of American involvement in that country.

Worthy not only made history with his reporting, but he also played a key role in smashing U.S. government regulations aimed at barring journalists from traveling to countries regarded as hostile. “He wanted people to know what was happening in the world,” said his close friend, Raymond H. Boone, editor/publisher of the Richmond Free Press.

Worthy’s pioneering efforts to break down government barriers to the free flow of information and provide fresh perspectives to the American people are being given renewed attention following his death Sunday, May 4, 2014, at a nursing home in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.

“He had a commitment to the First Amendment on a global level,” said Boone who worked with Worthy when both were at the Baltimore Afro- American, at Howard University where both taught and at the Free Press for which Worthy wrote for several years.

“And that was reflected in our conversation. When I would call him at a nursing home in Boston during the last five years, I would ask him, ‘Bill, how are you doing?’He would say, ‘Ray, how is the world doing?’”

In 2008, Worthy was awarded the Neiman Foundation for Journalism’s Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity. Boone was the main speaker at the award presentation at Harvard University.The Boston-born journalist grew up in a family that was active in civil rights and progressive causes and encouraged him to have independent views.

Worthy’s challenge to the government began when he slipped into China with two others in 1956 on behalf of CBS News. He was then the first U.S. reporter to broadcast from thecountry after the communist takeover seven years earlier.

The U.S. government tried to hobble him by seizing his passport when he returned, a move he fought unsuccessfully all the way to the Supreme Court. Undeterred, Worthy traveled to Cuba in 1961 without a valid passport to interview then President Fidel Castro and provide insightful reports on the island nation.

On his return, he was arrested for entering the United States without a passport. “I became the first person ever to be indicted for coming home,” Worthy told an interviewer at the time.

His federal conviction was overturned when his attorney, William Kuntzler, successfully argued the law was unconstitutional. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed that government had no authority to imprison American citizens for returning from foreign travel without a passport — forcing the State Department to overhaul its regulations and enabling American reporters to go to risky places without government approval.

The case inspired folk singer Phil Ochs to write and recordthe “The Ballad of William Worthy” in 1964 to protest the journalist’s treatment.

“William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door,” the song goes. “Went down to Cuba, he’s not American anymore. But somehow it’s stranger to hear the State Department say: ‘You’re living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.’”

A graduate of Bates College in Maine, Worthy would describe himself as “anti-colonialist, anti-militarist and anti-imperialist.”

Those who knew him considered him a bulldog on moral issueswho was unrelentingly persistent in pursuit of the truth.During nearly 60 years as a reporter, writer, educator andauthor, he covered a wide range of issues. He earned attention for his perceptive reports on civil rights, black militants andanti-Vietnam War protests for the Afro-American.

During the Civil Rights era, he repeatedly interviewed Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. But he was never afraid to be critical of civil rights leaders for not going far enough to achieve equality in American life. He also wrote critical columns on the Black Panthers fortheir indiscriminate “Uncle Tom” criticism of the black middleclass and their undisciplined organization that made them aneasy target for law enforcement.

In the late 1960s, Worthy organized a rent strike against a Catholic hospital in New York City that attempted to tear down the apartment building where he lived to turn it into a parking lot. He wrote about those experiences in 1976 in a critically acclaimed book, “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods.”

Early in his career, he worked as a public relations aide to civil rights activist and union leader A. Philip Randolph. Worthy’s journalism career flowered after he joined the Afro-American in 1953. He would spend 27 years off and on at thenewspaper as a reporter and columnist.

He was most noted for his overseas trips. He reported from the Soviet Union in the 1950s when few Western reporters were permitted there. During his visit, he was allowed to use the Radio Moscow facilities to broadcast to the United States. He also filed reports from North Vietnam and Cambodia. Worthy would later recount that he traveled to Vietnam “for the first time in the spring of 1953” while the French were fighting to maintain control, “and I found the situation to be drastically different from the New York Times’ accounts.

The French were completely hopeless and I could see America getting slowly sucked into the tragedy.” He also challenged the government with his reportingfrom Iran. Boone, who was the editor and vice president of the Afro-American, sent Worthy to Iran. During his trip to that country’s capital, Tehran, in 1980, he obtained documents that Iranian activists had taken from the U.S. Embassy while employees were being held hostage.

The government seized one copy of the documents, but he managed to get another copy to the Washington Post, which resulted in a series of critical articles on American policy toward Iran.

“Americans have a right to know what is going on in the world in their name,” he said in explaining why he pushed to get the information out. He taught journalism at the University of Massachusetts and Boston University and later at Howard, from which he retired in 2005 as a special assistant to the dean of the HU School of Communications. He also served on the board of the National Whistleblower Center. He was the author of “Our Disgrace in Indo-China,” and “Pampered Dictators and Neglected Cities,” and co-authored“The Silent Slaughter: The Role of the United States in theIndonesian Massacre.”

Survivors include his sister, Ruth Worthy of Washington.