Missing Pages

Wallace Terry got the idea to do a book on black journalists while teaching at Howard University. He explains in his Author’s Note why he took on the project: “I picked up an acclaimed book on the history of war correspondents. At first glance, it seemed a perfect selection for a course I was teaching on the role of the foreign correspondent. I was hardly surprised to see that no black correspondents were mentioned, although they had covered World War II, the Korean Conflict, and the Vietnam War. Black journalists were usually missing from historical accounts of war.”

“What stunned me, however, was the story of a British correspondent who claimed that he had rescued the bodies of four white journalists murdered by Viet Cong sappers in the Vietnam War. I knew this story was a lie because I was there, and he wasn’t. In reality, the rescue was made by me and another American correspondent. Why, I asked, was I left unmentioned? Was it because I was black? That’s when I made up my mind to research and write a book about black journalists, beginning with World War II and taking them through the civil rights movement in America and the Vietnam War. This work would help fill the missing pages in the history of modern American journalism.”