A newsman who helped change Boston
WHENEVER SOMEONE utters the phrase ''the new Boston," they should remember Norman Lockman. Lockman helped chronicle the old Boston in the hope for change. He died this week at 66 of Lou Gehrig's disease after a journalism career that ended as a columnist for the News Journal in Wilmington, Del., and the Gannett News Service.
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In 1983, he was part of the Globe's Pulitzer-prize winning reporting team for its series on ''The Race Factor" in Boston. The headline on his contribution was: ''On Beacon Hill, preferential hiring keeps blacks out of jobs."
''Nowhere does the clash between white patronage and minority affirmative action show up more clearly than in the Massachusetts Legislature -- where hiring practices are not covered by the state's affirmative action executive order," Lockman wrote. ''Out of approximately 1,025 employees of the House and Senate, fewer than 30 are from racial minorities. Of that number, most work either for one of the six black state legislators or for the Legislative Black Caucus."
Even in state agencies where affirmative action was supposed to be in effect, hiring was low and at low rungs. Lockman quoted the general counsel of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, as saying, ''The Legislature has never put up a dime to implement affirmative action."
Lockman's reporting would allow him to further write, ''If the state affirmative action officers have felt pinched, many of the individual agency officers have felt squashed."
The Pulitzer jury said ''The Race Factor" was ''a notable exercise in public service that turned a searching gaze on some of the city's most honored institutions." Lockman would have been heartened by the fact that he would have to write a different story today. While white patronage has hardly crumbled in Boston or Massachusetts, and while Boston is still a tough town to become a black executive -- just 2.9 percent and 1.8 percent of executives in Greater Boston are black or Latino, according to federal data -- black people of color are no longer being squashed into political crumbs.
A coalition of voting rights groups took on now-former House Speaker Thomas Finneran and defeated his obvious attempts to gerrymander his district racially. The ultimate result was the election of a black woman to Finneran's seat. This was after other recent elections where a black women was elected to be Suffolk County sheriff and a Latino man joined the City Council.
This was after voices of color rose up to stop Governor Romney from stripping the words ''affirmative action" from state hiring policies. Deval Patrick, an African-American veteran of the Clinton White House, has thrown himself into the governor's race, on the optimism that Massachusetts has matured enough to accept a person of color for the governor's office.
Meanwhile, Lockman wrote a personal history of progress. In 1965, despite having worked at journalism since he was 16, he was turned down for a job at the News Journal. He became a social worker until 1969, when the News Journal finally hired him in the wake of America's riots. Lockman went from general assignment reporter to Washington bureau chief in three years.
He came to the Globe and stayed until 1984. He endured the indifference of local police to a cross-burning on his lawn in the Boston suburbs and fought in the courts until the perpetrators were convicted of a state felony. Shortly after sharing in the Pulitzer, he was hired back to the News Journal in 1984 as managing editor. The newsroom in Wilmington was still almost all white.
''One of the first things I did upon returning was to declare that for two years every other reporter hired would be a qualified minority," Lockman wrote two years ago, in explaining to readers the need to continue affirmative action. ''Eyebrows rose until the
''Gannett's argument, then as now, was that ignoring race while trying to remedy blatant discrimination that had for years kept minorities out of the business altogether, was not only impractical but unprofessional. Gannett recognized the goal was not merely diversity, desirable as that is, but redress for years of barring minorities solely because of their race. To do that, we needed to play catch-up . . . It may be a heavy price to pay but it's a necessary price -- and it works."
Lockman's searching gaze helped Boston and Wilmington begin the game of catch-up. As resistant as many people remain to facing the heavy price, he was a reason we can hope the United States will still pay it.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.
