By Richard Prince

When Les Payne retired in 2006 as associate editor of the Long Island newspaper Newsday, Editor John Mancini said Payne had “produced a weekly column that was so strong, so provocative and generated so much hate mail that Newsday editors got to know the names of all the Suffolk County Police Department’s bomb-sniffing dogs.”

That column ended quietly at the close of the year. It was a last act unworthy of the stature that Payne had achieved among his fellow journalists, African American and otherwise.

Payne was a mentor, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and a co-founder of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), as well as its fourth president. He had been Newsday’s top-ranking black journalist, rising to deputy managing editor for national and international news, responsible for the paper’s former New York City edition.  His news staffs won every major award in journalism, including three Pulitzer Prizes.

It was Payne who in 1987 broke the story that solved the mystery of what happened to Tawana Brawley, a young woman who said she had been kidnapped and sexually abused by a group of white men, including a county prosecutor, then left lying in a garbage bag. Payne’s story concluded she “had spun a web of lies and — under the glare of media and the law — got caught up in them,” as his colleague Peter Eisner recalled.

There is no doubt that some found intimidating the combination of Payne’s physical qualities – dark-skinned, hooded eyes, with an eyebrow that often seemed to be raised – with his journalistic ones, acerbic prose and an uncompromising black point of view. He often said, “A columnist is basically a critic, and the job of the critic is to ride down from the hills and shoot the wounded.”

He studied the experts, both black and white. At the inaugural meeting in 1992 of the William Monroe Trotter Group, a collection of African American columnists that he co-founded, Payne told colleagues:

“We can learn technique and approaches from white artists, but authenticity in this racist society demands that we develop our own perspective and wage our campaign ourselves. Since our forebears crossed the Atlantic in slave ships, we as black columnists should not write as if they crossed on the Mayflower. That’s one reason we’ve organized this retreat. The adaptive problem of black columnists is similar to how black parents must protect their children from European-dominated public elementary school. They can teach our children how to read, we must teach them what to read.”

When Payne assumed the presidency of the National Association of Black Journalists, he later recalled, his philosophy was, “If members persisted in such administrative minutiae as getting their membership cards on time, I told them to vote for my opponent. The vanguard group was foundering and I felt it needed at least one more tough-minded, overachieving president with stature in the industry and, as Garvey put it, ‘A man of big ideas.’”

Payne believed that both the organization and its members must work with a passion on a dual track to become great journalists without neglecting group interests.

One reason black journalists could relate well to Payne was because of their shared experiences as striving African Americans. In an essay called “The Night I Stopped Being a Negro,” Payne, who is 67, recalled that his resistance to the Jim Crow mindset of 1950s Tuscaloosa, Ala., was so great that his parents moved the family to Hartford, Conn. He quoted his mother as saying, “I know I didn’t have the kind of boys that could make it down there.”

Like many in his generation, Payne encountered guidance counselors who dismissed his hopes for a professional career. It wasn’t until hearing a 1963 talk by Malcolm X that, he wrote, he was shown “how Negroes like myself could throw off the damnable curse that blocks our potential and keeps us from taking our place among men.” Today, Payne plans to complete a biography of Malcolm.

Payne, too, was a beneficiary of affirmative action. The Kerner Commission report of 1968 recommended that the news media hire more black journalists, and it caught the attention of Bill Moyers, former press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson who, from 1967 to 1970, was publisher of Newsday. Moyers set aside six reporter jobs for black staffers, and Payne was one of the original trainees. He came to Newsday in 1969 after a stint in Vietnam on Gen. William Westmoreland’s information staff.

Payne’s influence on Newsday — and on the newspaper business — has been profound. “Les was once described as the best and most influential African-American editor and columnist in the United States,”  Eisner, a white former colleague, wrote of Payne in January. “True enough, but the statement unduly confines the scope of his influence. Les continues to set an example by speaking out against racism and injustice everywhere, and above all he stands for the highest goals, values and aspirations of American journalism.

“Les taught all of us, and continues to teach in all venues he appears, that the truth is always the best of all possible worlds. I still operate under the simple mantra that was emblazoned prominently in his office — one that guided his approach to column-writing as well: ‘don’t pull your punches, tell the truth and duck.’”

Richard Prince, a member of the Trotter Group of African American columnists, writes “Richard Prince’s Journal-isms,” an online column on diversity issues in the news media, for the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.