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Updated: Monday, December 13, 2004 Published: Friday, November 19, 2004

Founding NABJ President

Stone was born 1924 in a segregated hospital in St. Louis. He grew up in Hartforld, Conn. Stone went to Wesleyan University. He was the only black person in his class. Stone was the commencement speaker. His address was on America's broken promises to blacks.

In World War II, Stone was an Army Air Corps navigator. He was a CARE worker in India and the Gaza strip.

"Journalism chose me. It was fortuitous circumstances. Like the Broadway play, 'A Funny Thing Happened to me on the Way to the Forum,' a funny thing happened to me on the way to the train station in 1958.

"I had returned from India and Egypt, where I was working for CARE and was in New York getting ready to work for the Foreign Policy Association as an associate director. I was living with my sister.

"I was taking our mother to the train station on 125th Street and we ran into this old friend of mine, Al Duckett. This was very fortuitous. We stopped and talked. He had been the editor of the Hartford Chronicle (the black newspaper in Stone's hometown).

"He asked me what was I going to do. I told him I was going to work for the Foreign Policy Association. He said 'don't go work for those white people. Come work for me.' He was editor of the New York Age at the time.

"I said 'I can't write.' He said 'yes you can. I used to read your letters to the editor to The Hartford Courant and Hartford Times. You're a terrific writer. I can train you to be a reporter. Come work for me and I'll let you cover Adam Clayton Powell exclusively.' He knew I like politics. I said, "Let me think about it."

"My mother was horrified. She didn't want me to work for a black, or segregated, newspaper.

"She always wanted us to be mainstream. Second, she didn't have high regard for journalists. So, when we got to the train station she said, 'Promise me you won't do that.' I said, 'I promise.'

"Then I went back and got hired. That was August, 1958. By October, I was writing a column. In February, Duckett resigned after a dispute with the publisher. The publisher jumped me over nine people and made me the editor. I was very fast, too fast.

"I didn't stay a reporter long enough to get the training and discipline to be a good reporter. That is not a good career path."

Stone became editor of other black-owned newspapers, the Afro-American in Washington, D.C. and The Chicago Defender. At The Defender, Stone was fired for "authorizing stories that made Mayor (Richard) Daley look bad."

He was press secretary for New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Stone was author of several books, including Black Political Power in America and King Strut, a novel based on Powell's career.

When Stone was elected the first president of NABJ, he was a columnist with the Philadelphia Daily News. In July 1991, Stone left the Philadelphia Daily News to become a distinguished professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina.