Gerald Boyd

I've just begun reading his memoir -- actually a combination of a memoir and a tribute by people who helped flesh out his story because he died in 2006 before finishing the book.

Boyd rose to the top ranks of the New York Times: managing editor, the No. 2 man, with a good chance of becoming No. 1, the executive editor. But along came that jerk Jayson Blair. Gerald -- and the executive editor -- lost their jobs. As they should have for a number of reasons. But they were ultimately the scapegoats. A whole lot of corporate folks at the Times should have fallen on their swords, including the publisher.

"Second only to my family, the Times defined me; I was addicted to the paper and all it represented, cloaking myself in its power and prestige," Boyd wrote. But after Jayson Blair, a black guy, a youngster really, was revealed as a fraud, a plagiarist and a drug addict who kissed ass to make himself fit in with the old boys' club that made success possible at the Times, Boyd, a black guy, was blamed. This is what he wrote about the bosses he had cozied up to all those years: "With its fundamental principles in jeopardy in the wake of the Blair Affair, the Times did what its leaders thought was best for the franchise. Their message to me, however, was that I had intentionally jeopardized the franchise, something I would have found akin to drowning my own child."

Only after he was ousted did he recognize -- or at least acknowledge -- something I knew when I left the paper in 1993, "a potent dose of racial animosity, which was there all along, of course, but far more sinister than I allowed myself to believe." He'd come a long way from being what his former wife and his colleague at the Times describes as "the black militant on the University of Missouri's Columbia campus" in the 1970s.

Ask book stores for the book. It's My Times in Black and White and it is not published by one of the major houses. So ask for it.