From Token to the Top

The announcement was treated routinely on an inside page of the Oregonian, Portland's prospering (circ. 245,000) morning daily. City Editor Paul E. Laartz was retiring, and William Arthur Hilliard would replace him. But the appointment of Bill Hilliard marked a belated milestone of sorts in U.S. journalism: he is the first black to rise so high in the editorial hierarchy of a major U.S. daily newspaper.

Black faces are still rare in city rooms, despite an intense search for qualified black journalists that began roughly after the Watts riots in 1965. A recent Government survey showed that only 1.5% of all newsmen on 573 dailies in 1969 were black. In recent years, many papers hired one or two "house blacks" to cover the ghetto and perhaps soothe a social conscience. Others, wanting to do more, found a lack of talented blacks: long excluded from the newsroom, many were finding better jobs elsewhere. Now both black and white newsmen are confronted by tightened editorial budgets that mean fewer available jobs.

The Oregonian's Hilliard, 43, is no latecomer and—though he was originally hired as one—no token. A Pacific University graduate who once worked as a redcap despite a journalism degree, he was taken on as a copy boy in 1952. "We deliberately hired him because he was a Negro," admits Managing Editor J. Richard Nokes. "We felt it was an oversight on a paper our size not to have Negro representation on the staff." Milliard served as sports reporter, church editor, general assignment reporter and picture editor before becoming an assistant city editor nine years ago.

The Best Man. After Watts, Hilliard got job offers from the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times and "lots of suggestions from staffers on other papers that I apply with their outfits." But he decided to stick with the Oregonian because his superiors assured him that "there was nothing to stop me from having a good future here." Two years later he did a workmanlike and scrupulously fair job of directing coverage of racial disturbances in Portland, where blacks constitute only 2% of the population.

Hilliard's appointment is popular with his all-white editorial staff of 133. His colleagues are convinced that competence, not color, won him the job, in which he is unchallenged boss of the newsroom. "We simply appointed a city editor," says an Oregonian staffer. "Not a black city editor. Just the best man."