Stone, Charles Sumner “Chuck” Jr.

Impact on the world

A Tuskegee Airman navigator during World War II, Stone edited three influential Black newspapers — the New York Age, the Washington Afro-American, and the Chicago Defender — and served as chief aide and speechwriter to Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. before becoming, in 1972, the Philadelphia Daily News’s first Black columnist, where his relentless coverage of police brutality and political corruption made him, by some accounts, the city’s most influential journalist. His reputation for integrity was such that more than 75 criminal suspects turned themselves in to Stone rather than to police over two decades, and in 1981 he personally negotiated the release of hostages during a five-day riot at Pennsylvania’s Graterford Prison. As founding president of the National Association of Black Journalists from 1975 to 1977, Stone is widely credited as the organization’s driving force; in 2025, more than a decade after his death, the Pulitzer Prize board awarded him a special citation for his groundbreaking civil-rights-era journalism and his role founding NABJ.

Life & background

Born July 21, 1924, in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in Hartford, Connecticut, Stone served as a Tuskegee Airman navigator during World War II, graduated from Wesleyan University, and earned a master’s in sociology from the University of Chicago. He worked at Black newspapers and for Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. through the 1960s before joining the Philadelphia Daily News as a columnist and editor from 1972 to 1991, later taught journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill until his 2005 retirement, and died in Philadelphia on April 6, 2014, at age 89.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Poynter; NABJ Black News & Views