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April 22, 2008
Rubén Salazar Stamp Unveiled, Mexican American Honored With Other Great Journalists
Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Postal Service unveiled a stamp to honor trailblazing Mexican American journalist Rubén Salazar Tuesday, and he was in excellent company.
Salazar, war correspondents Martha Gellhorn, John Hersey, and George Polk and foreign correspondent Eric Sevareid all had varied backgrounds but shared one thing in common: they reported on some of the most important stories of the 20th century – often at great personal sacrifice.
To recognize their contributions, the “American Journalists” stamps series was unveiled at a special ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington.
“To each of these great Americans, the nation says thank you,’’ said Postmaster General John “Jack” E. Potter during the ceremony.
To help tell the stories of the trailblazing reporters whose faces now appear on 42-cent postage stamps, the Postal Service assembled an impressive group: Newsweek Contributing Editor Eleanor Clift; CBS News' Bob Schieffer; Daniel Zwerding, Peabody Award recipient for NPR; Jeff Price, foreign correspondent and cousin of George Polk, and Frank Sotomayor, Pulitzer Prize winner and associate director of USC’s Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism.
The event also drew relatives and friends of those honored. Now that the public can buy a Rubén Salazar stamp, NAHJ founding member Charlie Erickson said that can help keep Salazar's story alive for the next generation.
“Too many young journalists don’t know who the heck he was,’’ Erickson said.
Salazar, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and a news director for the Spanish-language TV station KMEX, was the first Mexican American journalist to have a major voice in the mainstream news media. On August 29, 1970, Salazar was killed when a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy fired a tear-gas projectile into The Silver Dollar Bar.
Eyewitnesses say Salazar went into the bar because he thought he was being followed. He had been covering an anti-Vietnam war rally.
Sotomayor, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning member of NAHJ’s Hall of Fame, started working at the Los Angeles Times about a month after Salazar was killed. He was inspired by Salazar’s columns while serving in the U.S. Army in Japan and made him want to become a journalist. Sotomayor said that Salazar was killed on the same day he completed his military service and that at 42 cents, the stamp bears Salazar’s age when he was killed.
“I realized that there were very few Latino journalism role models. Salazar became an inspiration to me, my colleague Frank del Olmo and a generation of other Latinos,’’ Sotomayor said.
“While Salazar will always remembered as an advocate for Mexican Americans, I see his work in a broader context, as advocating for the best values of American democracy: fairness, justice, equality.’’
Salazar was remembered in special ceremonies in Los Angeles to commemorate the pioneering journalist’s life. To mark the occasion, the Los Angeles City Council declared April 22 Rubén Salazar Day.
Salazar earned his bachelor’s degree in Journalism in 1954 from Texas Western College, now called UTEP, University of Texas at El Paso. According to the University of Texas at El Paso, Salazar was the first Mexican American journalist to work for the El Paso Herald Post; to cross over into mainstream English-language journalism; and to become a foreign correspondent, having reported from the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Vietnam.
A Los Angeles Times article that ran two days after his death described him this way: Salazar "sometimes…was an angry man, and properly so, as he observed the inequities around him, yet he spoke out with a calm vigor that made his words all the more impressive - and influential."
Since his death, parks, libraries, university buildings, scholarships, and housing projects have also been named after him in part because he gave a voice to the large Mexican American community, which was deemed powerless at the time. For journalists of color, Salazar is a symbol of the need to fight for diversity in the nation’s newsrooms.
The California Chicano News Media Association, the nation’s oldest association for journalists of color, was formed as a way to create something meaningful after Salazar’s death.
“Our goal was to encourage young Latinos to enter the media and to improve news coverage,” Sotomayor said. “CCNMA presents the Salazar journalism awards each year.”
In 1986, NAHJ created the Ruben Salazar Scholarship Fund which has awarded $1.4 million to 525 promising journalism students over the past two decades.
Like the others in the American Journalists series remembered Tuesday, Salazar wasn’t out for public recognition. He and the four other journalists honored cherished the ideals of a free press and informed citizenry. Following are their biographies*:
Martha Gellhorn broke new ground for women in journalism. She covered the Spanish Civil War, World II and Vietnam War, during times when women did not assume the roles of war correspondents. During World War II, she reported on the Allied landing on D-Day and later the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. Clift told the audience at the National Press Club that Gellhorn was an opinionated, free spirit who was dedicated to exposing the truth about war and about conflict and had the distinction of being the only wife of famed writer Ernest Hemingway who dumped him.
John Hersey wrote Hiroshima, a non-fiction account of what happened when the United States dropped an atomic bomb on that Japanese city during World War II. This article, his most famous work, filled the entire issue of The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, quickly selling out and contributing to the national dialogue about the effects of the bomb. In February 1999, Hiroshima was voted the top work of journalism of the 20th century by members of the journalism faculty at New York University.
George Polk was a CBS radio correspondent who filed hard-hitting reports from Greece describing the civil strife that erupted there in the aftermath of World War II. He was on the trail of a story about corruption involving U.S. aid to Greece when he disappeared on May 8, 1948. His body was found a week later floating in a bay with his hands bound and two bullet holes in the back of his head. The prestigious Polk Awards, recognizing journalistic excellence, are named in his honor.
Eric Sevareid is particularly remembered for his reporting on World War II, the Vietnam War, and for his commentary on American politics in the 1960’s and 1970’s. In his radio commentary for CBS, Sevareid reported on the approach of the Germans to Paris, the exodus from the city, and life in London during World War II. Back in the United States, he was an early critic of the anticommunist witch-hunting tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy. In 1963, Sevareid joined Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News as a regular commentator.
*Source: U.S. Postal Service.
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