Becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist was nowhere on Harold Jackson’s mind when he was growing up in a Birmingham, Alabama, housing project during the 1950s and ’60s. In Jackson’s words, it wasn’t that such a lofty goal seemed impossible for a Black boy in the segregated South (the teachers at his schools never talked about race being an obstacle), but the idea of a writing career seemed impractical to someone whose family sometimes struggled to make ends meet, especially after his father died.
Jackson’s memoir, Under the Sun: A Black Journalist’s Journey, is an account of how he achieved this remarkable feat, spanning from his early upbringing all the way to his life in recent years. His career began in high school, when he was introduced to journalism by his freshman English teacher, who recruited him for the student newspaper staff and later successfully nominated him to become the first Black student in the University of Alabama’s summer journalism workshop for high schoolers. During this time, Jackson recalls the moment he realized that being a writer didn’t necessarily mean trying to become the next Langston Hughes or James Baldwin but a writer who possessed his own unique voice.
This occurred in 1968, just five years after George Wallace symbolically stood in the schoolhouse door in a vain attempt to keep the university and all public schools in Alabama segregated. What Jackson learned during that week on the Alabama campus led to his incredible 45-year career as a newspaper writer and editor. However, Jackson also emphasizes that these events allowed him to not just see white people when he passed them on a sidewalk but actually talk to them, work with them, and at least believe that some of them could become his friends.
But, unfortunately, that never happened for him at the University of Alabama. As Jackson emphasizes, “it was too early” for things like that to take place in the segregated South. It would take years for Jackson to learn how to maneuver past racial prejudice and other biases that prevent friendships and hinder a person’s career. As he describes it, being a newspaper reporter taught him ways to get people to see past his Blackness when he needed them to answer interview questions.
Over the years, these skills and insights brought him great success while at the Birmingham Post-Herald, United Press International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Birmingham News, and the Baltimore Sun. These situations also helped him better understand what W.E.B. DuBois meant when he said 150 years ago that Black people live double lives, behaving one way among themselves and another way among white people; they do so to be accepted, to be successful, to be loved, to be heard by the rest of society. And Jackson says that that’s one of the things he loved most about being a journalist—being able to speak to “just plain folks” who wanted somebody—anybody—to listen to what they had to say.
