My Father’s Voice
DURING THE dark days of 2020, casting about for a way to cope with the George Floyd murder, I decided to seek my father’s counsel. Although he died in 1997, I knew that in the 1950s, when he was the editor of the Chicago Defender, Chicago’s black newspaper, he wrote a column, “Dope and Data,” about current events. I had never read the columns, because I was too young when they were published and he did not save them. A friend told me that the New York Public Library had a digital archive of the paper. I wanted to see what my father had written after the death of Emmett Till, the Chicago boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955. The library was technically closed, but my friend helped me gain access to the archive online.
I remember my father, Louis E. Martin, mainly as a politician, not a journalist. He was forty-eight and I was nine when we moved to Washington, D.C., in 1961, for his new job on the Democratic National Committee. Since he served as an advisor to Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter, that work overshadows his journalist career in the public record as well. I don’t believe he thought of himself as a “writer”—in the second half of his life, he did not write for publication at all. Despite my mother’s urging, there was no memoir.
Even in Chicago, I don’t remember seeing Louis writing. There was no study at home piled with work in progress. He often worked late at the office “putting the paper to bed,” which made sense to me because he arrived home about my bedtime. After he ate the plate of dinner my mother reheated over boiling water, my parents spread out the newspapers in the living room—they subscribed to the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Wall Street Journal—and analyzed what “angle” each paper was taking. They wrapped up with the television news at ten. From my earliest days, I knew that there was more than one way to tell a story, and that part of my father’s job was checking what the other guys were writing about black folk.
When I started looking at the columns last year, I turned
