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"Stand up for freedom."
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Profile in Leadership: John Seigenthaler
2006 Missouri Honor Medal Recipient |
By Alexandra Rampy
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain
a little security will deserve neither and lose both."
-Benjamin Franklin
John Seigenthaler taught a master class for Missouri Journalism students on Nov. 1, the same day that he received the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism.
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Front: Karen Brown Dunlap, president of The Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.; Bill Kovach, founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists; Zubeida Jaffer, an acclaimed South African journalist; and Dean Mills, dean of the School. Back: Elson Floyd, president of the University of Missouri; Clifford Christians, an award-winning media ethics scholar; John Seigenthaler, founder of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center; Reza, photojournalist; Tom Rosenstiel, vice chairman of CCJ; Chuck Curtis, chairman of Valentine Radford/Square One Advertising, Kansas City; and Brady Deaton, chancellor of MU Columbia campus.
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On the eve of his 80th birthday, John Seigenthaler Sr. reflected on a life and career motivated by one passion: fighting threats to the freedoms expressed in the First Amendment. From his first job, reporting for The Tennessean in Nashville, to the founding of the First Amendment Center, Seigenthaler has never wavered from that commitment.
"I believe in doing the best I can for as long as I can, and the rest will take care of itself," Seigenthaler said. "I'm not going to waste any time. One thing I'm very proud of, however, is that at 80, I'm still learning. I know more about freedom of expression now than I ever knew last year or 10 years ago."
Seigenthaler founded the First Amendment Center at Nashville's Vanderbilt University in 1991 to preserve the five freedoms - speech, press, religion, assembly and petition - protected by the amendment. In recognition of his efforts to inform and educate the public about the First Amendment, the Missouri School of Journalism recently honored Seigenthaler with the Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the School's highest recognition.
Standing Up
From his youth, Seigenthaler felt called to the profession of journalism. Following four years in the U.S. Air Force, Seigenthaler began his journalism career reporting for The Tennessean in 1949. He started at the bottom, writing obituaries and covering beats such as police and the courts, and eventually worked his way up to city hall, the state legislature and, finally, to Washington, D.C.
Nashville was segregated when Seigenthaler started his career, with separate buses, schools and restrooms for blacks and whites. He recalls the racial taunts and slurs and wonders how the hearts of people, himself included, could have been blind to the cruel and discriminatory system.
"You can't put your finger on it," Seigenthaler said. "You can't remember when the scales were pushed back from your eyes. You can only try to change it."
In 1954, Seigenthaler covered his first race-relations story for The Tennessean and found himself uncovering the injustices of segregation. A white cab driver killed a black sawmill worker after a dispute about an $8 fare, but the case was dropped. Working from a tip, Seigenthaler discovered that the murderer's father-in-law was on the city's grand jury. His report led to the cab driver's conviction.
"The civil rights movement showed us how we could make a difference in aggressively covering the news and aggressively editorializing the news," Seigenthaler said. "That story really galvanized my own understanding of how bad things can be if you are on the other side of the line."
This experience taught Seigenthaler that defending freedom comes with a price. Although he earned a National Headliner Award from the Press Club of Atlantic City for a story in which he discovered a man who had been missing for 22 years and who had been declared dead, he also received frequent profane telephone calls and numerous death threats. For his family's protection, police cars regularly patrolled Seigenthaler's neighborhood, and armed officers often would stand guard at his home.
"My poor wife, there's been some difficult times, times that were hell for her," Seigenthaler said. "She's a strong woman, and she took an awful lot of those phone calls. But, I have to keep my name in the phone book. I can't have an unlisted number. People have the right to call and tell me what's on their mind."
A Stand in a New Direction
When new management at The Tennessean pulled the paper away from its civil rights platform, Seigenthaler and many other rising journalists left the paper to continue the fight. Many of them, including Seigenthaler, pursued government service. While on sabbatical from The Tennessean in 1958-1959 as a Harvard Neiman Fellow, Seigenthaler had met Robert Kennedy. The two eventually spent six months together working on Kennedy's book, The Enemy Within. When Robert Kennedy became U.S. Attorney General in 1961, he recruited Seigenthaler to join President John F. Kennedy's administration.
There, Seigenthaler served as chief negotiator between the Kennedy administration and the governor of Alabama during the Freedom Rides of 1961. Interracial groups boarded buses in Washington, D.C., and headed for the South, where, at rest stops, whites would go into black restrooms and vice versa. A mob in Birmingham, Ala., ended the first ride. Black student Diane Nash and a group of Nashville students were determined to continue the rides, however. Seigenthaler contacted Nash and encouraged her to cancel their trip. She strongly refused, a moment Seigenthaler never will forget.
"She was being a tree by the water," Seigenthaler said. "She paused and said, 'Sir, we all signed our wills last night. We know we could die, but we aren't going to let violence overcome non-violence.' So they went, and I went, and got bloodied. The courage those kids showed in the face of death, you don't forget that."
Seigenthaler tried to negotiate protection for the riders, but that failed in Montgomery, Ala. A mob there attacked the riders and those who helped them. Seigenthaler was beaten unconscious before state troopers and federal marshals descended on the city.
Seigenthaler had risked his life serving the civil rights movement. His government service would be short-lived, however, because of another threat to First Amendment rights.
Standing Out
Following a Washington Post story about confidential information leaked from the Department of Defense, President Kennedy ordered FBI agents to interrogate journalists to discover the source. Reading about this infringement on press freedom, Seigenthaler realized it was time to return to journalism.
"I knew at that moment that government was not going to be my career," Seigenthaler said. "I hadn't spent a decade as a journalist to see journalists interviewed by the FBI. I didn't walk out. I didn't protest, but I knew I had to find my way back into journalism."
After 18 months in the Kennedy administration, Seigenthaler returned to The Tennessean in 1962 as editor. He worked with the new management to focus the paper's coverage on investigating and writing about important social issues, as it had been earlier in his career.
Seigenthaler took a sabbatical from the paper in 1968 to work on Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign but returned after Kennedy's assassination in June of that year. He became The Tennessean's publisher in 1973 and chairman in 1982.
In 1982, Seigenthaler became the founding editorial director of USA Today. He retired from both The Tennessean and USA Today in 1991.
An influx of tabloid news, both on television and in print, and the public's lack of First Amendment knowledge motivated his retirement, Seigenthaler said. Inspired by Alexander Hamilton's belief that only strong public opinion can protect free expression, Seigenthaler decided to devote his work fully to First Amendment issues.
"Negatives existed all along the way, but I was primarily thinking about creating a way to raise the level of dialogue so the public could at least take the issues and discuss them," Seigenthaler said.
As a result, Seigenthaler founded the First Amendment Center in 1991, with offices at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., and in Arlington, Va.
Standing Firm
The First Amendment Center brings professionals across industries together to discuss threats to civil liberties. The greatest threat, he said, is fear. According to Seigenthaler, the passing of the USA PATRIOT Act after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, unease over the growing World Wide Web and other fears intensify the Center's importance.
"When we are afraid, our liberties are more at risk," Seigenthaler said. "Freedom and fear coexist in conflict of one another. Every day, I read the news and go online, and every day, there's a lawsuit, legislation or a controversy threatening our freedoms for speech, assembly, religion, press or petition. When there's trouble, or when the country is afraid, the government reacts in the same way, and we react in the same way."
A Standing Legacy
The First Amendment Center is a culmination of Seigenthaler's life-long work in protecting the freedoms citizens often take for granted.
"I love to say that freedom of expression is never safe, never secure," he said. "It is always in the process of being made secure. The changes in journalism make that truer today than the first time I said it 25 years ago."
The impact of John Seigenthaler Sr. in civil liberties and journalism is unmistakable, as shown by his achievements with The Tennessean, the Freedom Rides, the USA Today and the First Amendment Center. But he claims no legacy. He simply stood up for his belief in freedom, he said.
"When you are in journalism, you do it because you really understand that more than anything else, the Bill of Rights is what makes this country different than any other country," Seigenthaler said. "And, every time you lose some of the freedoms guaranteed in the bill, you lose some of your national identity. So, if you care anything about what your life has been or what your career has been about, you don't want that identity to change. And that has been my life."
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Alexandra Rampy, a senior from Overland Park, Kan., is an advertising major and business minor. She has interned at Muller + Company, a full-service advertising agency in Kansas City, Mo., and been involved in Rockin' Against Multiple Sclerosis, the MU Student Foundation, Adelante! and Alpha Phi Fraternity. Rampy plans to study strategic communication in graduate school and one day would like to found a non-profit advertising agency.
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