Paul Delaney - First black reporter at The Times’s Washington bureau and a founder of the National Association of Black Journalists

Mr. Delaney was born in Montgomery, Ala., in 1933. His first exposure to the news business came early — as a teenage paperboy, he handed out copies of The Alabama Journal, and he later started the first news publication at his high school. Mr. Delaney began an English degree at Alabama State University in the ’50s and was drafted after a year and a half. In the United States Army, he became a radio operator; while stationed in France, he communicated news — including the results of Brown v. Board of Education — between different bases.

When Mr. Delaney ultimately graduated from Ohio State University’s journalism school in 1958, he was the only black student out of 15. His first job was at The Atlanta Daily World. Fifty other daily newspapers rejected him.

“At that time, in the late 1950s, I knew things were changing and that I would eventually land a job on a daily somewhere,” he said over email. “I firmly believed that.”

Eventually Mr. Delaney moved to The Washington Star, where he covered local government. In 1969, he was poached by Max Frankel, the head of The Times’s Washington bureau who later became the executive editor, to cover national urban news — from people moving out of inner cities to the oil industry in Houston.

“Bureau chief Max Frankel hired me to be part of four-man ‘urban cluster,’ responsible for covering the rapidly changing American urban landscape,” Mr. Delaney said.

Attribution: Amanda Svachula - nytimes.com
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