Maynard, Robert Clyve

Impact on the world

A high school dropout who began his career as a teenage freelancer for the Black-owned New York Age, Maynard became the Washington Post's first Black national correspondent in 1967 after a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, then was hired by Gannett in 1979 to turn around the struggling Oakland Tribune — where he integrated the newsroom by hiring the paper's first Asian American and first openly gay columnists — before engineering the first management-leveraged buyout of an American newspaper in 1983, purchasing the Tribune outright and becoming the first African American to own a major metropolitan daily. Under his decade of ownership the paper won hundreds of editorial awards and a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake, and he co-founded the Institute for Journalism Education in 1977 (renamed the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education after his death), which has trained more journalists of color than any organization in the country and whose leadership passed to his daughter, Dori J. Maynard.

Life & background

Born June 17, 1937, in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of six children of Barbadian immigrants Samuel C. Maynard, a part-time lay preacher and small trucking-firm owner, and Robertine Isola Greaves, Maynard dropped out of Boys' High School at 16 to write for the New York Age, becoming friends with James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. He worked for the Baltimore Afro-American and Pennsylvania's York Gazette and Daily before his 1965 Nieman Fellowship at Harvard led to his 1967 hire at the Washington Post; he married New York Times reporter Nancy Hicks in 1975, and the couple had three children, including Dori, who succeeded him at the Maynard Institute. Diagnosed with prostate cancer in the late 1980s, he sold the Tribune in 1992 amid a cancer recurrence but remained active with the Institute and continued writing until his death at his Oakland home on August 17, 1993, at age 56; he was posthumously inducted into the American Society of News Editors Hall of Fame and the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Encyclopedia.com; Christian Science Monitor