"If you want to give a voice to the voiceless, you have got to venture outside of your comfort zone, you have to," Paula Williams Madison said. To places where you are the racial, ethnic or religious minority.
KENT, Ohio - Paula Williams Madison, the trailblazing news media executive, told aspiring journalists at Kent State University that she never set out to be a journalist. After graduating from Vassar College, she was getting ready to enter Columbia University's Teacher College when one of her friends said, "Paula, you write so well, you should consider journalism school."
"In 1973, there were way fewer blacks on the air," she said, and the ones on TV were almost always shown with their heads down and their hands cuffed behind their backs, being led away by police. She didn't see many who looked like the hardworking black families in her neighborhood, working to make a living and feed their children. "Who are these people that I'd see on the air?" she wondered.
There were so few minority journalists working in television then that white station owners were pulling African American employees from the mailroom and among the secretaries to go cover the news, inadvertently giving many of them their first break in the news business.
So Madison switched tracks and entered Syracuse University, eventually blazing new trails in television journalism and becoming the first African-American female general manager of a Top 5 network-owned station. She eventually becoming chairman and CEO of Madison Media Management LLC, a Los Angeles-based media consulting company.
"If you want to give a voice to the voiceless, you have got to venture outside of your comfort zone, you have to," Madison told the students at Kent State. Go to places where you are the racial, ethnic or religious minority. "That's how to become a person who's on the path to being a global citizen -- even if you never leave this country."
Madison was in town to deliver the Robert G. McGruder Distinguished Guest Lecture and Award at Kent State University on Thursday.
"So much of what I'm seeing is untrue, is only part of the story, or is even a lie," Madison said. Even though journalism has never needed diversity and inclusion as much as it does now, fewer people than ever are committed to it, she said.
She doesn't believe that the journalism industry that once aspired to employ people of color and women in its newsrooms in the same percentages as in the nation's population will ever achieve those goals. "I don't think that people are bringing a true commitment to diversity," she said.
Robert "Bob" McGruder, the first black editor of the Daily Kent Stater, went on to become the first black reporter at The Plain Dealer in 1963, and the first black executive editor of the Detroit Free Press in 1996. He died in 2002, but his wife, Annette, continues to support the scholarships and diversity awards that bear her husband's name.
Plain Dealer columnist Phillip Morris received the 2016 Diversity in Media Distinguished Leadership Award from Kent State on Thursday. Phillip Morris, a metro columnist at The Plain Dealer and a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary, received the Diversity in Media Distinguished Leadership Award.
Madison was named one of the "75 most powerful African Americans in Corporate America" by Black Enterprise magazine, one of The Hollywood Reporter's "Power 100," and one of the "Outstanding 50 Asian-Americans in Business."
Madison opened her presentation with a four-minute clip about what she called "the biggest journalistic undertaking that I've ever worked on," the global search for her Chinese maternal grandfather, Samuel Lowe. She turned the journey into a book and a documentary, "Finding Samuel Lowe: from Harlem to China."
Madison, the daughter of Jamaican immigrants of black and Chinese ancestry, grew up in Harlem. She and her mixed-race siblings "lived on the block that became known as the most crime-ridden block in the city," she said.
Not quite embraced by either the black or Asian communities, she felt deeply that important pages of her life story were missing. "What I didn't know was where I was from," she said. "For me, the whole notion of journalism is a history book. It's part of a lifelong history book. In my own family, there were pages and pages and pages missing.
"I was raised by a warrior woman," Madison told the audience at Kent State. "I come from a people who, on my Mom's side, in 1882 saw a series of laws being passed called the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forbid Chinese Americans from owning land, marrying, voting, or going to public schools."
Her mother's Hakka ethnic group "was the only one in China that never bound their [daughters'] feet," Madison said. "Foot-binding was an indication of wealth," because dainty women who couldn't walk had to be carried everywhere. But Hakka women were too busy working to bother with their feet, and when their husbands went to war, they fought alongside them.
When she and her mother used to watch televised images of Civil Rights protests, as black people were being sprayed with fire hoses and attacked by dogs, her mother told her: "I don't believe in that 'Turn the other cheek' thing. If anybody tries that with you, kill them," she said. "You have a voice; you will always have a voice. So don't let anybody shut you up."
"On the other side, I come from African people," she said. "Some came willingly, and some did not... I am not defined by slavery. It was a moment in time of a very, very, very long legacy of African-ness."
Madison was an assistant news director when the Central Park jogger was killed, and five black and Hispanic young men were convicted and imprisoned in her death. Not long after, three black men whose car had broken down in the ethnic Italian neighborhood of Howard Beach were chased away by a bat-wielding mob, killing one man who ran away into the highway.
After both stories aired, she asked the journalists who had reported them why they had called the Central Park five "perps," and out-of-control "animals," while the Howard Beach attackers were simply labeled "a gang of youth." She asked them to consider the power of their words, and the impact they had on viewers.
As vice president and news director at the NBC station in New York, Madison took the subway and bus to work, so she wouldn't see the world only from the backseat of a chauffeur-driven car.
"If you don't get out among the people, how do you reflect what's going on in the community?" she asked. "Until you eavesdrop on what people are talking about, you will not be able to have the perspective of the people who need our help for the truth-telling. Who else is going to speak for them?"
When she was president and general manager of the station in Los Angeles, she refused to follow the other TV stations that were airing the high-speed chopper chases that viewers loved.
"Paula made the decision not to air them -- at the risk of losing viewers who sought the instant thrill -- because every three, five or 10 minutes spent airing a high-speed chase down a Los Angeles highway was three, five, or 10 minutes lost from airing that day's news about people making a difference and issues affecting the community," said Thor Wasbotten, director of Kent's School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Instead, she required that every afternoon, everyone at the station have a conversation about race, for at least 10 minutes. "Why? Because we're professional communicators, and if the only time we talk about race is when there's a crisis, we're going to say the wrong thing."