The Firing of Amsterdam News Editor Provokes Protest

Thursday, October 20 [1983] was a cold and windy day. But despite the weather 25 to 30 demonstrators, under the watchful eyes of a handful of uniformed cops, came out to carry picket signs and shout anti-Koch and anti-Amsterdam News slogans in front of the black weekly paper's offices in Harlem to protest the firing of  executive editor John F. Davis.

The firing took place on Friday, October 14 and is believed by many, including Davis himself, to be the result of an editorial response Davis wrote to an op-ed article by Mayor Koch in the same issue of the Amsterdam News. Koch, obviously attempting to pacify the black community, listed his administration's achievements and wrote off his poor relations with the black community to personal style. "...[C]omments and ideas," wrote Koch, "will make me a better mayor." Davis, taking the mayor up on his offer, wrote in an editorial: "The Koch problem is not one of style. Mr. Koch's problem is his abiding contempt for Black people and Black life. There are no words that can erase the memories of his gross insensitivity. We need deeds, we need to see changes in behavior and attitudes."

Wilbert Tatum, the paper's board chairman who owns 30 percent of the Amsterdam (co-owners John Procope owns 35 percent and John Edmonds, a friend of Davis's, as well as the one who hired him two years ago, owns 35 percent) in a letter to Davis stated that it became necessary "to terminate your employment with the New York Amsterdam News due to the severe economic pressures we are presently undergoing."

Davis, in a written statement, pooh-poohs Tatum's economic explanation as "nonsense." He goes on to say: "The Amsterdam has had severe cash flow problems ever since my association with it. The simple truth is that Mr. Tatum wants to silence the anti-Koch voice of the Amsterdam News for personal reasons. He has in every way possible interfered in editorial matters. His attempt to provide Koch with a forum in the black community was and is an outrage to me. I do not dispute the right of Tatum and Procope to determine the editorial policy of their paper. I do, however, challenge their right to represent their actions as in the best interest of black people. Ed Koch is one of the most anti-black political figures on the political landscape in America today. It is a measure of their own contempt for black New York."

Even though Tatum in a signed editorial claimed that "management wholeheartedly supports the views expressed in the Davis editorial" and that "[o]n numerous occasions during the last year Mr. Koch's administration has been justifiably criticized," Jack Newfield of the Village Voice, one of the picketers, believes "Tatum is trying to bring the Amsterdam into the Koch office." In fact, Village Voice writer Joe Conason reported that "Tatum...denied that his outside business interests had influenced his decision" to get rid of Davis. But then in the next line Conason mentions those "outside business interests" and creates the question of whether Tatum has a conflict of interest in the termination of Davis's tenure as editor: "He is the second largest shareholder in Inner City Broadcasting, whose cable TV subsidiary holds part of a franchise to wire Queens; he is a senior vice-president of HIP, which has health insurance contracts covering city workers; and he is developing a parcel of real estate on the Lower East Side, plans for which require Board of Estimate approval." It should be pointed out that the mayor sits on the board.

Co-owner John  Procope, writes Conason, "also has a reason to placate the mayor." Despite the fact that his insurance company's contracts with the city "have been terminated because of abuses alleged by the Department of Investigation, his agency wasn't permanently barred from doing business with the city." And Procope, Conason continues, "still sits as a mayoral appointee on the Industrial and Commercial Incentives Board."

According to Jitu Weusi of the National Black United Front, one of the organizers of the protest, the circulation of the paper had increased under Davis's editorship by 58,000 copies. However, Davis does not believe "there is any real way of determining that. One of the problems of the Amsterdam News is they don't know what their circulation is. The union drivers who distribute the paper oftentimes don't return the copies that are not sold. They fill in an affidavit to indicate they got it [the paper] back from dealers. The Amsterdam News doesn't have anybody going around to spot check those affidavits to find out if those returns are accurate. They don't really know what their circulation is other than what they estimate from the drivers. But I would say that there probably was an increase up to the period of the strike."

The strike earlier this year lasted six months and was called because management wanted the employees--Newspaper Guild members--to take a cut in pay and agree to personnel layoffs. The workers felt management should also make some sacrifices. The New Alliance, a progressive newspaper, in a recent story on the Davis firing described the hiring of Davis with his "militancy and progressive outlook on domestic and international affairs" as a good arrangement "until August 1982, when Tatum, backed by a third partner, John Procope, took over the running of the [Amsterdam] News and started to wreck the carefully nurtured plans of Edmonds and Davis to make the [Amsterdam] News a successful political and financial venture."

However, the New Alliance's praise of Davis was non-existent during the strike when, says Davis, "they wrote vicious columns against me. Totally without a shred of fact as though somehow I was the owner of the paper, [as if] I was doing the negotiations. I didn't have a thing to do with the negotiations. I crossed the picket line and went to work because I have a job. For me to go on strike meant for me to resign my job."

Davis, who is 43 years old and a graduate of the New School for Social Research and Rutgers Law, calls Tatum's "plea of poverty...[a] plea of mismanagement." For example, says Davis, "They voted John Procope's $25,000 severance pay. Whoever heard of paying an owner $25,000 in severance pay?" (There was a chuckle in his voice.)

The Voice's Newfield called Davis's editorial writing "the most eloquent and inspiring and insightful writing in the city" which, in the words of Jitu Weusi, "gave a sense of pride and direction to the Amsterdam News" despite the fact that as executive editor he earned an annual salary of $25,000, a tiny sum compared to what other editors in the city earn.

According to one source, whose statement was later confirmed by Davis , he does not intend to return to the Amsterdam News even if the boycott and petitioning are successful in getting him reinstated. He does not wish to continue in journalism and is considering job offers outside of the field.

"A newspaper," writes Earl Caldwell, in the New York Daily News, "when at its best, is a powerful vehicle. When it is independent and with leadership that is not afraid, it can lead people." John Davis was providing that leadership in his editorials. Unfortunately for the paper and the black community his forum was snatched away from him because, says black labor leader John Butler, president of the Hospital Workers Union, Local 420, "he don't bow to Mayor Koch, he don't dance with Mayor Koch, he tell it the way it is."

This article was originally published in the Guardian newspaper (New York) in 1983.

Note: John Davis, a black gay man, wrote an editorial in the Amsterdam News supporting the passage of a gay rights bill by the City Council.