Earl Moses would have written a better headline

 

Earl Moses

     A reporter is supposed to cover the story. Not be the story. And one local newspaper typically doesn't report on the entry-level staff hires of another.
     But Earl Moses Jr. getting a job was news.
     "News Breaks Ice, Employs Negro Reporter," a headline proclaimed in the Indianapolis Recorder, a Black weekly, on Jan. 26, 1956.     
     The article begins, breathlessly:
"The Indianapolis News has employed a young Negro as a full-time member of its reportorial staff giving him the distinction of being the first Negro full fledged reporter to hold such a position on an Indianapolis daily newspaper." 

      The nimble and rigorous city editor that Moses became at the Chicago Sun-Times would have leaped to red pencil that sentence, purging unnecessary verbiage, fixing that passive voice and adding a time element, ending up with: "The Indianapolis News hired the first full time Negro reporter on an Indianapolis daily newspaper earlier this month." All the news in half the words.
     Moses, a respected Chicago newspaperman, died May 24 at his home in Torrance, California. He was 94.
     He was deeply proud of those who struggled before him, writing a brief family history in 2021.
     "In conjunction with Juneteenth," he began. "June 19, 1865, when word of the Confederate defeat finally reached Texas, this seems like a propitious time to revisit the origin of the Moses family roots."His great-grandfather on his mother's side was Henry Sheppard, born in 1838 on the Sheppard Plantation in Georgia — given his last name because he was plantation property. But when he was released from bondage after the Civil War, his great-grandfather chose a name worthy of a free man.
     "He decided to shed his slave name and pick a name that bespoke of honor, strength and dignity," Earl Moses wrote. "He chose Moses."
     Moses was born in Chicago. His, father, Earl Richard Moses Sr., was a college professor. His mother, Marjorie Banks, a teacher. 
     The family moved to Baltimore. Moses graduated from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
     He joined the Army in 1953, serving as a radio operator and posted in Alaska. He went to Indiana University for law school at night, while working for the Indianapolis News.
     "His father insisted: 'You always have a backup plan,'" said Matthew Moses, his only child, who himself wanted to be a writer but became a librarian.
Moses joined the Sun-Times in 1962, rising from reporter to night city editor, then city editor, assistant managing editor, assistant to the personnel director and assistant to the editor before taking early retirement in 1988 after suffering a stroke.

     "My dad was a true newsman. The Sun-Times was his life," said Matthew Moses, who remembers his father interacting with colleagues. "Roger Flaherty, Leon Pitt, I remember their confidence. They saw through all the bs going on in the city. It was fun watching them hang out, hearing them swap stories. That made him a superhero in my eyes."

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