Vernon Jarrett Videotape Collection

Biographical Note

Vernon Jarrett, 1918-2004
Vernon Jarrett, journalist and activist, was born June 19, 1918 in Saulsbury, Tenn., and raised in Paris, Tenn. He was the second child of William Robert Jarrett and Annie Sybil Jarrett—both of whom were educators and children of ex-slaves. Collectively, William and Annie Jarrett spent 95 years teaching in small-town classrooms. From their parents, Jarrett and older brother Thomas Dunbar Jarrett (who served as the seventh president of Atlanta University from 1968 to 1977 and was a visiting professor of literature at Oxford University) developed a deep appreciation for education.

Jarrett earned a bachelor of arts degree in history from Knoxville College in 1941. Upon graduating, he joined and served in the United States Navy until his discharge in 1946. In subsequent years, Jarrett did postgraduate work in journalism at Northwestern University and the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In the 1950s, he studied urban sociology at the University of Chicago.

In 1946 Jarrett came to Chicago to work at the Chicago Defender . Jarrett recalled that, “I came to Chicago specifically to apply for a job at the Chicago Defender , which I did in March of 1946. I think it’s important to understand that when I came to Chicago, specifically to work on a black newspaper, and even more specifically to be a writer with the Chicago Defender , I just didn’t come as people might do today to enter a field of journalism. I came here to help change the world.” Some of Jarrett’s early assignments included covering the Airport Homes Riot in December 1946 and the story of a white man from Milwaukee passing as black in Chicago in 1947. He covered both of these stories with photographer Wayne F. Miller. Jarrett remained at the Chicago Defender until 1948.

He then went to work at the Associated Negro Press (ANP). In the early 1950s, Jarrett left ANP to start the Chicago Globe , a radical black newspaper, with Metz “Doc” Lochard. The Chicago Globe found limited success and closed after only a few years. Upon the paper’s closing, Jarrett returned to ANP, where he worked through the late 1960s. In 1970, Jarrett became the first African American syndicated columnist at the Chicago Tribune. In 1972 he received the first of seven Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing. He remained at the Tribune for 13 years. In 1983 he began writing for the Chicago Sun-Times , where he wrote nearly 4,000 commentaries and served on the paper’s editorial board. Jarrett retired from the Sun-Times in 1994. In his “retirement,” Jarrett launched a radio commentary, Jarrett Journal , on WVON-AM and began writing columns for the New York Times. In 2000, he returned to his roots, writing regular columns for the Chicago Defender . He continued writing for the Defender until the last month of his life.

During his career, Jarrett also achieved much success in radio and television. From 1948 to 1951, Jarrett collaborated with actor and musician Oscar Brown, Jr. to produce Negro Newsfront , the nation’s first black daily radio newscast. This radio program was broadcast on WJJD-AM. In the 1960s and 1970s, he hosted another radio show, the Jarrett Report , on WJPC-AM. In 1968, Jarrett began his 30-year career in television, producing and hosting African American public affairs programming. His first show was Black on Black , later renamed For Blacks Only , for WLS-TV (an ABC affiliate). He produced and hosted this program with Warner Saunders and Holmes “Daddy-O” Daylie. Jarrett later produced and hosted Face to Face and Sunday in Chicago , also on WLS-TV.

In addition to his achievements in journalism, Jarrett devoted his energies to many organizations, especially those concerned with African American civil rights, education and history. In 1951, Vivian G. Harsh appointed Jarrett to serve on the Book Review and Lecture Forum committee for the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library. He served on the Citizens Schools Committee, an organization that pushed for integration and quality in the Chicago Public Schools. In 1975, he was one of the founders of the National Association of Black Journalists and, two years later, became its second national president. According to Jarrett, “The idea of these organizations was not for us to segregate ourselves from mainstream journalism...but to give us a better community foundation from which we could become involved in the mainstream more effectively.”

He was a senior fellow for the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Great Cities Institute, served on the board of directors for the DuSable Museum of African American History and Knoxville College’s Board of Trustees. Jarrett was a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Jarrett also was a member of the advisory board of Fisk University’s Race Relations Institute and served on the editorial board of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine.

In 1977, Jarrett partnered with the NAACP to found the Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics (ACT-SO). ACT-SO is a youth program “designed to recruit, stimulate, improve and encourage high academic and cultural achievement among African American high school students.” In 1994, he started the Vernon Jarrett Oratorical Society for Kids. Four years later, hoping to encourage respect for reading, he created a joint self-education program for children and their parents called “The Freedom Readers,” which took its name from the civil rights movement’s “Freedom Riders.” He also was the curator of oral history for the Rosa Parks Pathways to Freedom Program for Youths.

Over the course of his career, Jarrett received more than 100 awards and special recognitions. These awards include the American Civil Liberties Union James P. McGuire Award in 1988, the NABJ Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990, the National Association of Black School Educators President’s Award in 1993, the NABJ President’s Award in 1997 and the Silver Circle Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Chicago/Midwest Chapter in 2001. Jarrett also was the first recipient of the NAACP’s James Weldon Johnson Achievement Award. He was recognized as one of the nation’s top five communicators in a national poll of black leaders conducted by Ebony magazineand was inducted into the National Literary Hall of Fame at Chicago State University’s Gwendolyn Brooks Center. Posthumously, he was honored with the Legacy Award from NABJ in August 2004.

Jarrett married Fernetta Hobbs, a teacher, in 1949. He and his wife were dedicated members of St. Edmund’s Episcopal Church in Chicago. They had two sons, William Robert Jarrett and Thomas S. Jarrett. Following in his father’s footsteps, Thomas is a photojournalist for ABC-TV Chicago. William became a physician and an advocate for medical care for the poor; he preceded his father in death in 1993.

Vernon Jarrett died of esophageal cancer on May 23, 2004.

Bibliography

• Brown, C. Stone. “Vernon Jarrett: Distinguished Journalist, Community Activist, Eminent Scholar and Mentor to the Young.” The New Crisis , v. 107, n. 3 (May/June 2000): 14-19.
• Dawkins, Wayne. Black Journalists: The NABJ Story . August Press, 1997.
• Henderson, Ashyia N. and Ralph G. Zerbonia, eds. Contemporary Black Biography: Profiles from the International Black Community . Thomson Gale, 2004.
• McDonald, Trevy A. “Vernon Jarrett,” in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, eds., African American National Biography, Vol. 4 . Oxford University Press, 2008.

Scope and Content Note

The Vernon Jarrett Videotape Collection contains 150 DVD recordings (migrated from original videotapes) of the television programs Face to Face and Sunday in Chicago , from 1991 to 1998 . This collection has been arranged chronologically. The recordings in the Vernon Jarrett Collection represent only a small portion of the nearly 2,000 broadcasts hosted and produced by Jarrett from 1968 to 1999. Face to Face and Sunday in Chicago (as well as Black on Black , which was later renamed For Blacks Only , for which no known recordings exist) were African American service programs broadcast on Sunday mornings on WLS-TV. Jarrett interviewed local and nationally renowned guests about topics related to the history and experience of African Americans. Topics included discrimination, politics, law, health and medicine, the arts, education, and upcoming celebrations and events. Some of his guests were Timuel Black, Charles Branham, Carol Moseley Braun, Margaret Burroughs, Cardiss Collins, Leon Finney, Danny Glover, Hermann Hartmann, Aldon Morris, Steve Neal, Hedy Ratner, Chinta Strausberg, Jackie Taylor, Paul Vallas and Addie Wyatt. Jarrett frequently invited Chicago students to co-host the shows with him.

Related Collections

At the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection of Afro-American History and Literature:

• Robert S. Abbott-John H. Sengstacke Family Papers
• Barbara E. Allen Papers
• Timuel D. Black Papers
• Alice Browning Papers
• Chicago Public Library, George Cleveland Hall Branch Library Archives
• Chicago SNCC History Project Archives
• Coalition to Save the ‘Met’ Archives
• Chester Commodore Papers
• Richard Durham Papers
• Marion Perkins/Perkins Family Papers
• Leonard Wash Papers
• Rev. Addie and Rev. Claude Wyatt Papers

Container List