This spring, I had the pleasure of watching the young women of Baltimore’s Morgan State University wobble across an Astroturf football field in their rarely worn heels—chips of black and green plastic collecting on the toes of fancy sandals, heels poking through the treacherous surface to be yanked out with every step—and was amused and impressed by their dignity; they simply refused to be deterred, or even glance down, as they made their way toward that stage where they would accept their diplomas.
It was a scene being repeated all across the country.
Meanwhile, those of us on the faculty of the School of Global Journalism and Communication (SGJC) at Morgan State University, this historically black school, spent those last few weeks responding to a flurry of requests for recommendation letters, for inclusion on resumes as references, for contacts that may help them score a job. As the realities of the work-a-day world approached, students fluctuated between being terrified and absurdly optimistic about their prospects.
The questions pressed in around their euphoria over graduating: Can I get a job at all? Can I get a job in my field? Can I do something meaningful, make an impact? Will I make a living wage—even with my college diploma in hand?
Their fears are justified. While the unemployment rate among white women over 20 today is 4.2, it is more double that for black women, 8.8, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For black men, the statistics are even more dire: 4.2 percent of white men over 20 are unemployed but 10.2 percent of black men are jobless. And my students, aspiring journalists, step into a field that has seen calamitous layoffs in the last decade.
They are right to be terrified—and yet, I can’t help being optimistic on their behalf.
When they entered our school as freshmen they all just wanted to be Oprah—“talent” on a talk show of their own. That was the “journalism” they aspired to and they assumed they would magically alight on that TV set as easily as a dragonfly on a lily pad. The mostly-new faculty in our Department of Multimedia Journalism wrung our hands for a year—students’ basic writing skills were low, knowledge of history and politics was scant, critical thinking skills were marginal, curiosity was lacking—and then we got busy rethinking our approach to teaching journalism.
We prodded, cajoled, chastised and encouraged them to think beyond Oprah by supplementing their classroom instruction with a myriad of real-world, experiential learning opportunities that we hoped would spark their curiosity and hone their skills. We borrowed from the sciences and required students to put in lab hours in our newly-created Digital Newsroom. We redesigned our senior capstone class so that students immersed themselves in a single, meaningful topic (sexual assault on campus, for example), reporting all semester to create a multimedia package published in the local press and on the web. We added an internship requirement and scrambled to get our students a foot in the door of local media. We deployed the entire school to cover the November elections via an all-hands-on-deck, 400-student-strong army of reporters who filed advance stories on referendums and profiles of candidates over several weeks and culminated in a 24-hour election day marathon populated by about 100 students divided between the newsroom and the field (fueling them from our beleaguered Digital Newsroom with standard-issue reporterly junk food). The students struggled, made lots of mistakes and complained mightily but they learned from these projects; to our delight, many of them were seduced by the exciting thrill of real, meaningful reporting.
It is difficult to alter the culture of an institution, to make students who are bored, disengaged and ill-prepared for the work-a-day world of journalism into lively, curious, intrepid reporters. And while my friends and colleagues regularly accuse me of seeing a half-empty glass as half-full, I’m convinced that we are seeing signs of change here.
My first sign came when protests erupted in Baltimore—and across the nation—over the grand jury’s failure to indict in the Ferguson case. I had been out of town and didn’t get to campus until almost noon. As I walked into the Digital Newsroom prepared to coach the editors of the school newspaper regarding coverage (I’m the advisor for the MSUSpokesman, the student-run publication), the editor-in-chief cornered me before I could get a word out. She ran down the list of reporters, photographers, editors and videographers who were already in the field. She mapped out the march route. She whipped out her phone to show me photos of Morgan students who were then staging a sit-down in the middle of the road on the edge of campus. She told me to wait—she is very bossy—because she’d be back soon; she had to run out to get a quote from the university’s president.
Their coverage wasn’t amazing—video footage was shaky, someone forgot to get the name of a student organizer they hoped to quote, one student got so swept up in the moment she completely forgot her objective role and joined protesters in the sit-down—but they were learning-by-doing and they were hyped, excited to be covering real news alongside the national media and genuinely awed to watch history unfolding before them. The lessons they learned covering the Ferguson protests would prove indispensable a few months later as Baltimore erupted in riots, looting and protests on the heels of Freddie Gray’s death.
The second sign of a culture-shift among our students came in April, when I spent a week with six of my urban, mostly-black Morgan journalism students and six rural mostly-white journalism students from West Virginia University on a reporting project in Selma, Alabama. Our mission: To go to Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge exactly one month after all the commemorative activities for the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday ended and check in with residents to see whether race relations and the quality of life has significantly improved on the heels of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Two weeks prior to this rather last-minute trip, I emailed the six students whom the faculty had selected announcing that they had been chosen to participate. They were thrilled—and it did not even dawn on them that on the basis of all their hard work reporting, we were “rewarding” them with even more reporting, that indeed this would likely be the most difficult reporting assignment they had gotten thus far.
One of my students had never been on a plane before. Another had never been in a cab. Few had traveled to the Deep South. None had done immersive, multimedia reporting on the scale we demanded of them. We crammed the students into hotel rooms—two from WVU, two from Morgan per room—paired them on reporting teams and shoved them out the door to see what they would find as they fanned out in Selma.
They profiled aging Bloody Sunday marchers, small business owners, country club members at the all-white club, Civil War reenactors who were in town that weekend celebrating a confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, shopkeepers, schoolchildren, funeral parlor directors and the mayor (who reached out to us after word got out that our journalism students had flooded the town). They tweeted, Instagram-ed and stayed up to the wee hours every night in our hotel “situation room” fueled on bad coffee, Gatorade and donuts to build an impressive multimedia package of stories we called, Bridging Selma.
All this, during the same week that Baltimore devolved into chaos.
“While my home erupts in anger, Selma quietly struggles,” one of them penned in a journal I brought along for them to record their reflections. “If only our work will positively impact the world, and end superficial hatred and fear.”
The most moving part of the journey occurred the moment we pulled the van up to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on that first day. These jaded students, steeped in civil rights history and often yawning as their parents and grandparents and teachers recited turning points in the fight, literally ran as they whipped out their cell phones to take selfies on the bridge as if to say: “I am here, I am a part of history, I am the struggle for change.”
“I probably would have never seen, heard or done any of the things I have over the course of our trip, had I not come along on this journey,” one of them later wrote in the journal. “I had the opportunity to meet, interview and be photographed with the youngest Freedom Fighter [an 8-year-old who marched across the bridge in 1965]. I hosted (basically) a community radio talk show and I made some lifelong friends from WVU and MSU. We were on the field reporting like we were seasoned journalists. This experience has confirmed what I already knew, this is what I want to do for life.”
This was in my mind as I watched some of those same students stroll up to collect their diplomas in May, yanking their heels impatiently from the grip of that thwarting Astroturf and marching proudly from cocoon of college to the harsh world of work. They are the struggle for change.
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