| | Gerald Boyd was a classic specimen of the self-made man. Born poor, he worked and studied his way up out of poverty under the guidance of his widowed grandmother. Childhood was work and study, study and work, and though they do not always guarantee success, for Gerald Boyd they did just what movies, books, and professional moralizers said they would do, probably because his widowed grandmother contributed a lot of wisdom, love, and iron to the self-making; and in his early fifties Gerald Boyd became managing editor of The New York Times. This was the second most important job in the newsroom of one of the world's better newspapers. He was the first black ever to reach such a dazzling position in the Times hierarchy, and the gaudiest job of all—the executive editorship—seemed within his reach almost until the very moment he was fired.
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It is mildly surprising, to be sure, to find that the Times, so famous as a bulwark of liberalism, was still bogged down with backwater racial passions. These made Boyd a central figure in the uprising since one cause of the newsroom's epic discontent was the muted displeasure some white employees felt toward the paper's "diversity" program. As a black giving orders in the newsroom, Boyd was the human manifestation of "diversity," hence a vulnerable figure once rebellion required a few executions.
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Boyd was recruited for a management position in the 1980s by Max Frankel, then executive editor. By that time, Boyd had already established himself as a top-of-the-line reporter during an exemplary career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Times's Washington bureau. Frankel told him that the Times "severely lacked minorities to promote to management," that it was hard to find "suitable candidates," that increased "diversity" was not just one of his own priorities but one of Sulzberger's too, and that Boyd's "help toward the effort would mean a lot."
The message did not require a decoder: thanks to the paper's "diversity" policy, Boyd was being offered a chance to climb the executive ladder. He did not need much persuasion to abandon the reporter's life and join the executive chase for glory. He acknowledges that his race gave him an advantage in the incessant bureaucratic struggles for advancement that afflict the Times newsroom, but declines to display any bogus humility about it. He is obviously aware that a generation earlier his race would have made it hard to get any Times job more elegant than slicing salami in the cafeteria.
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The newsroom Boyd inherited was, he judged, a fair sample of white upper-middle-class America, mostly liberal on social issues and quick to endorse racial equality in principle. In practice, however, he found many slow to abandon the uptown white's view that affirmative action was an unjust imposition on the innocent progeny of an older generation's oppressing classes. Though the newsroom discreetly supported the publisher's "diversity" program, he was quickly made to realize that many privately detested it. They seemed angry because it "not only opened a door for me but also gave me an unfair edge over the competition in climbing higher," and he adds, "Perhaps they had a point."
Moving to the New York office as a junior executive after eight years of reporting in Washington, Boyd was startled to discover a "blatant racial tension" in the newsroom. He sensed a hostility expressed in the form of passive aggression. "No one ever challenged my authority outright, but I had to repeat my orders frequently and then double back to make sure they were followed."
He found "ignorance, indifference, and arrogance, which played out on every level." There was an atmosphere that left blacks feeling they had to demonstrate that they were good enough to work there. There seemed to be an abiding conviction that whatever a black did could always be done even better by a white. High in the management Boyd found a white executive astonished that a black could write competently. On the day the Times hired him, the newsroom's administrative officer greeted him with praise for samples he had submitted of his work at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
| | "I really enjoyed your clips—they're so well written," he said as I sat there smiling, pleased with myself. Then he added: "Did you write them yourself, or did someone write them for you?"...It was my first exposure to the racial culture of the paper, the ugly underside of life at the Times. | |
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