Phyl Garland

For those of you who knew Phyllis (Phyl) Garland – friend to many of us, mentor to many of us, comforter to many of us – a letter begging for money to endow a scholarship in her name at the Columbia University School of Journalism should be an embarrassing reminder of how we have not done what needed to have been done years ago.

We need a minimum of $100,000. But, as you know from the jazz record hoarder and gourmand that she was, Phyl was no minimalist. While the $25 check written at an NABJ gathering here and there is very much appreciated, that level of giving won’t get us to even a minimum anytime soon. The current recipients of the Black Alumni Network Phyllis T. Garland Scholarship are honoring her memory but actually being subsidized to the tune of $5,000 each by the J School, not from the endowed fund that we owe Phyl. Since 1998, we have raised only $78,228. What does that say about us, about our commitment to the future of people of color in journalism, about our love for Phyl?

Earning a master’s at the J School these days costs $60,000 (tuition, room, board). Journalists often brag about not being mathematicians, but even a math-challenged person can see that we have work to do.

In a news industry that we know is in turmoil in 2010 as it tries to figure out its future, Asian Americans and Latinos are doing far better than Blacks. News outlets in whichever medium need people like Phyl who could cover any type of story. In her days at Ebony that spanned from the dangerous days of the civil rights movement to the discovery of Wynton Marsalis.

The first five Garland Scholars are just the beginning of what we should be supporting.

Dani McClain [2005-06]: After graduation McClain was a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. She is now a writer with the Color of Change in Oakland, Calif.

Sabrina Ford [2006-07] of California is a reporter with the New York Post.

Lylah Holmes [2007-08] produced a documentary on the 2008 presidential campaign and she talked about her work on “Charlie Rose” [PBS] with leading political reporters.

Jessica Hopper [2008-09] produced the award-winning documentary “Behind Closed Doors” with classmate Pracheta Sharma on exploitation of women domestic workers and labor trafficking in New York City.

Micki Steele [2009-10] left an advertising agency in order to go to graduate school. She is now reporting at the Detroit News.

Let's do Phyl proud, not with contributions -- which we can do in our communities and our networks in so many ways -- but in recompense. Send money, $$$$, to Columbia University GSJ for the Phyllis T. Garland Fund, 2950 Broadway, 704-C Journalism, New York, NY 10027. If you have questions after all this, contact Sharon Meiri Fox at 212-854-5263.

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.