Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,959
By This is the grave of Vernon Jarrett.
Born in 1917 or 1918 in Salisbury, Tennessee (accounts differ, you’d be surprised how many dates on graves are incorrect; in fact, there are other publications that have him born in 1921, but are probably wrong), Jarrett grew up in what passed for the middle class in that part of the Black rural South. His parents both taught schools. Jarrett was a good football player and won a scholarship to play at Knoxville College, a HBCU in east Tennessee that is barely hanging on today. He played there and graduated in 1941. He moved to Chicago in 1946 and got a job on the Chicago Defender, one of the biggest Black newspapers in the country. He became a leading figure in Black journalism by the late 40s, known for his work reporting on race riots and working with Oscar Brown to create the first daily news radio show specifically geared for Black Americans, called “Negro Newsfront.”
Jarrett briefly became a history professor at Northwestern in the late 60s, when Black students occupied the administration building to demand Black Studies courses. Of course Northwestern had no one around teaching the subject and there weren’t any PhDs around either evidently, so part of the deal with the students was to bring Jarrett in as a visiting professor of History.
In 1970, Jarrett got hired as a syndicated columnist by the Chicago Tribune while also working for WLS in Chicago on the news. In 1983, he switched to the Sun-Times and became a columnist there until his retirement in 1995. He was also heavily involved in inner-city work in Chicago, establishing a youth program called ACT-SO in 1974 (full name is Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics) with the NAACP to build academic programming for Black kids. It expanded to 400 cities and took a broad view of culture as well, so culinary arts is something it promotes, for instance. This might be the most important part of Jarrett’s legacy. The whole idea really was his and he pitched it to Benjamin Hooks, who was then NAACP president.
If Jarrett is known for anything else today, it’s that his son William, who became a doctor, married Valerie Bowman, who became Valerie Jarrett, who became one of Barack Obama’s top advisors. Sadly Vernon Jarrett had to deal with his son dying of heart attack at the age of 40, in 1993.
Jarrett died of cancer in 2004. He was 85 years old.
Vernon Jarrett is buried in Oak Woods Cemetery, Chicago, Illinois.
If you would like this series to visit other Black journalists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Acel Moore is in Philadelphia and Dori Maynard is in Washington, D.C. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.