Terry, Wallace Houston II

Impact on the world

Hired by the Washington Post at 19 as its youngest reporter before moving to Time, Terry deployed to Saigon in 1967 as the magazine’s deputy bureau chief, flying combat missions with American and South Vietnamese pilots and joining assault troops on Hamburger Hill and in the A Shau Valley while reporting on the racial integration of U.S. forces for his cover story “The Negro in Vietnam.” After leaving Time in 1971 in frustration over the magazine’s editorial stance on the war, Terry spent thirteen years and more than 120 rejected book proposals compiling the oral testimonies of twenty Black Vietnam veterans into Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans, published in 1984 to bestseller success and a Pulitzer Prize nomination; the book remains a foundational text correcting the historical record’s near-erasure of Black soldiers’ wartime experience, and its influence extends to the films Dead Presidents (1995) and Da 5 Bloods (2020).

Life & background

Born April 21, 1938, in New York City and raised in Indianapolis, Terry was the first Black editor of his high school’s daily newspaper and reported for Brown University’s Daily Herald before joining the Washington Post in 1958 and Time in 1961. He covered Vietnam for Time from 1967 to 1969, published Bloods in 1984 after leaving the magazine, later taught journalism at Howard University and the College of William & Mary, and died on May 29, 2003, at age 65, leaving a second oral history of Black journalists, Missing Pages, published posthumously in 2007.

Sources

1. The Ringer; University of New Mexico Press; NYPL Archives