How Milwaukee Black Journalist Richard G. Carter Overcame the Odds

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Dick Carter with Martin Luther King

Dick Carter (on left) with Dr. Martin Luther King in 1964.

Milwaukee native Richard G. (Dick) Carter is a pioneer among Black journalists. At 84, he calls himself a professional communicator because his writings have appeared in a vast variety of print news media, and he’s appeared on numerous national television and radio talk shows. We spoke not long ago about his long career in journalism and his take on current controversial issues. I found him to be articulate and outspoken, his many opinions formed from years of experience as a Black influencer who has lived through three generations of civil rights history. 

You’ve had a fascinating career as a journalist and as an activist Black journalist. Can you fill me in on your background starting with family? Your Milwaukee neighborhood and your schooling. 

I now live in White Plains, New York, but was raised in Milwaukee. Born in 1937. My mother’s people were Creole from New Orleans. My father was from Texas. He worked 30 years for the Milwaukee Post Office and also ran the Black Milwaukee Globe weekly newspaper. 

Your boyhood neighborhood. Was it integrated?

I was born in my grandmother’s house at 117 W. Vine St. because the Catholic St. Michael Hospital refused to take my Creole mother because of my dark-skinned Black father. But it was mostly a white neighborhood. Then, we moved to a house between West Walnut and Vine on North Fifth Street, and that area became all Black.

Walnut Street was thriving with stores and entertainment, almost like Harlem in New York. We called it “The Scene.” I loved it there. Later, we moved to West Lloyd Street, also a Black neighborhood. Finally, we moved to North First near Vine, more of a white neighborhood. Al Jarreau, the great jazz singer, was a close friend. His family were our neighbors on North Fifth, before they moved to North Fourth and West Reservoir. We both went to Lincoln High School, and I graduated as the valedictorian in 1954.

Was Lincoln High fairly integrated back in the early 1950s? Both whites and Black students?

The school was wonderfully integrated. In fact, my mentor, Tom Cheeks, was the first Black principal. Unfortunately, it no longer exists as a high school.

After you graduated from Lincoln High in 1954, what happened to you next?

Mr. Cheeks arranged for me to get an academic scholarship to all Black Hampton Institute in Virginia. I stayed there for only a year. I always wanted to be a journalist because I had a knack for writing. Hampton didn’t have a journalism program, so I transferred to Marquette and enrolled in journalism, where, in 1958, I was the first Black J-School graduate in Marquette history.

But then things went bad for me. The Milwaukee Journal turned me down for a reporter job. They didn’t say why, but I’m sure it was because I was Black. Five or six white guys in my class got good newspaper jobs right away and several became well-known. I tell you I became embittered because nobody would hire me because of my skin color.

Had to be really hard on you. What did you end up doing for work?

I went to work in the Post Office where my father worked. But I finally did part time reporting at the Milwaukee Recorder, a Black weekly. My first published piece came out in 1958, a story on my aunt Vel Phillips, Milwaukee’s first Black alderwoman, in Sepia magazine which was competing with Ebony magazine.

But I couldn’t earn a living as a journalist, and as I’d been in ROTC. In 1959, I went into the Army for two years. I became a First Lieutenant and a public information officer. Got out in 1961 and eventually got a job at the Milwaukee Star, the leading Black weekly in Wisconsin. First two years, I worked part time at the Star and nights at the Post Office. I had a wife and two kids. I needed the work. Finally, I was hired full-time at the Star, and did two years there.  

When did you start working as a reporter for the Milwaukee Sentinel?

1964, as their only Black journalist, I was assigned to city desk rewrite, editing reporters’ stories. I also interviewed Chuck Berry, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Fats Domino and Muhammad Ali. I was there until 1966 when hired by the Columbus, Ohio Dispatch. Great place. Old time newspaper building, big windows. I loved it there. This was when the Civil Rights Movement was in full bloom. Now everyone wanted to hire Black journalists and professionals.

In 1967, Ohio Bell Telephone hired me in public relations for twice the salary. I was the only Black person in that department. But I missed reporting. It was in my blood. So I took a job as an industry reporter at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and interviewed well known business people. I stayed at the Plain Dealer until 1969, but again the newspaper salary wasn’t that good. 

I think you went back into the business world, right? Working for IBM?

Yes, in Cleveland. I was with IBM for four years including a promotion to the IBM News Bureau in White Plains, New York, where I live now. I liked IBM, but in 1973 went back to Ohio Bell in Cleveland as district manager for media relations for the whole state. I stayed with that job until 1980. But I missed New York.

Then Con Edison called me with an offer to be Director of Public Affairs for Manhattan. In New York, where I was sometimes interviewed on TV as Con Edison spokesman. Westinghouse Electric had a 39-state cable TV operation called Group W Cable. In 1982, they hired me as vice president-public affairs. I had a big corner office on the 39th floor across from Carnegie Hall, at $100,000 a year. Kept that job until 1985 when Group W was sold, and we all lost our jobs. I got a huge severance payout. 

Is that when you got back in the newspaper business, your first love?

Yes. I was hired by Gannett Westchester Newspapers in White Plains, New York to be on their editorial board as an associate editor and columnist. I loved that job. My big national break came when I did a freelance story for USA Today in 1985 on Rosa Parks and the 30th anniversary of her historic bus ride in Montgomery, Alabama. I interviewed her in Detroit and my story went coast-to-coast. A year later, I was awarded the Marquette Byline Award, the first Black recipient. It was a big deal, highly prestigious.    

[The Marquette Byline Award honors an alumnus who has attained distinction in journalism and related communication fields.]

After I accepted the award at the Wisconsin Club in downtown Milwaukee, I dropped by the Milwaukee Journal to visit friends and found they wanted to hire me because I’d won the Byline Award. Hell, I was still angry because they would not hire me 28 years earlier after college because of racism. They made me an editorial writer and columnist. So I moved back to Milwaukee with my second wife, and was on the Journal editorial board and wrote a controversial weekly column called Carter’s Corner. About a year later, the New York Daily News, with the largest circulation in the country, offered me a job to write column for $80,000—almost twice my salary at the Journal. I took it. 

What did you write about in your column at the New York Daily News?

I was an editorial writer and did a weekly op-ed column where I interviewed countless famous people, such as Donald Trump, Rev. Al Sharpton, Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The highlight of my journalism career was that column, which I wrote for four years until 1991.

Then, British news magnate, Robert Maxwell, bought the Daily News, and fired almost everyone on staff. They did give me a nice buyout. But that summer, I had the best time of my life in Gary, Indiana, interviewing for my authorized biography of a pioneering doo-wop vocal group, Goodnight Sweetheart, Goodnight: The Story of the Spaniels. Published in 1995 by Black-owned August Press, it resulted in many book-signings and radio and TV appearances.

So you’re out of a great job you love. Tough break. What did you do after that?

I freelanced for a while, and then came back to Milwaukee where I was hired by WNOV-AM Radio to co-host a morning talk show with controversial Black alderman, Michael McGee. “The Carter-McGee Report” was strongly pro-Black, and we became the leading radio talk show in the city, great ratings.

But this all ended when I married my third wife, Susan Orr, a beautiful blonde white woman who was host of  “Jazz in the Afternoon” on WYMS-FM radio. I was married to a Black woman for 20 years and a white female journalist for 15 years. But because I again married a white woman, WNOV dropped me. That reverse racism story made Jet magazine, Milwaukee Journal, New York Daily News and Chicago Tribune. I later did commentaries and co-hosted “Eye on Milwaukee”—a Sunday morning TV news talk show—on CBS-58.  

Then you left Milwaukee and moved back to New York where you liked living.

I returned to New York in 1997, ran media relations for NYU’s Stern School of Business and United Way of New York City, and was a media studies adjunct professor at NYU and the New School for Social Research, until 2012. During those 15 years, I also wrote a weekly column for the New York Amsterdam News, the nation’s largest Black newspaper. For the last nine years, I’ve been doing some freelancing. 

From the time you got out of college until you worked at WNOV, you were primarily working with white people and working for them. What was that like for you as an intelligent accomplished Black man in a white power structure?  

Other than my early college experience with the Milwaukee papers, I never really experienced racism in the business world. Whites kind of bent over backward to be polite. I didn’t feel out of place because I knew I was a good writer and could hold my own. Of course, after Civil Rights exploded, because I was a Black man, that actually helped me get good jobs. When I was younger, I experienced outward racism. Believe me, I was called “nigger” all over the place.

Regarding current issues in American culture and in the news, racism is incendiary especially in the old industrial towns like Detroit, Newark, Baltimore, Newark, St. Louis, and of course Milwaukee. These urban cities experience a lot of segregation. I wonder what you’ve been thinking about the current state of racism and divisiveness between the cultures.

When I hear of racial incidents in Milwaukee, carjackings, burnings, shootings, crimes that involve Black people, I get discouraged. When I was young in the 1950s, segregation was present in Milwaukee and yet the city was great because people had jobs and families. Black people had thriving neighborhoods. There wasn’t a lot of crime like in recent times. Right now, I live in White Plains, a safe city of 50,000—20 miles from New York City, which has turned into a cesspool. Attacks on the subways. Black boys and girls are sucker punching white people on the streets. There’s been anti-Black police brutality. In too many cities, there are racial conflicts. Racism has never been as bad as it is now.

Let me give you a view of today’s Milwaukee, the inner city, the hood, the ghetto, almost all Black residents. I have spent considerable time in the central city, and some of the problems I’ve found form the basis for unrest. A major issue is fatherless families. I believe that around 90% of inner city children do not have a father living in the home. Then, because of a lack of proper education and a dysfunctional home life, too many children cannot keep up with the suburban children including the middle-class Blacks who have moved out there. A teenager might earn money through drug dealing or car stealing, which pays better than McDonalds. All these things result in lack of hope for a future. 

I think you’re correct. I was lucky that I had caring, responsible parents. My father was a strong role model. Some of my friends didn’t have fathers in their homes, but I can’t remember that much crime in our Black community. I knew nothing about drugs or drug dealing. 

Yet you’ve experienced prejudice and racism in your life.

When I was in college and I’d go out with my white friends, sometimes a bar or restaurant wouldn’t serve me cause I was Black. In Virginia when I was about 18, we Blacks had to sit in the balcony at a movie theater. And I’ve been called a nigger more times than I can remember. I’ve been called “boy,” been given snide looks. In the Army, I was called a “Midnighter” by a sergeant. It’s the name calling and racial epithets that could get to me. Even at my age, I might get what I call the “family look” in a store, namely a security guy keeping an eye on me because I am Black and I might steal something. Through the years, I’ve been an unapologetic activist in my own way. Through my writing and columns, I’ve made my statements.

You’ve had experience with Martin Luther King. Tell me about Dr. King

I interviewed Dr. King twice. First was a Milwaukee Star interview in 1964 when we picked him up at the airport. We took him to the Schroeder Hotel downtown, and I did a group interview with a couple other Black reporters, although I did most of the questioning. Three years later in 1967. when I worked for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I scored a one-on-one interview with Dr King at the Hotel Sheraton.

First thing he said to me was, “Milwaukee, wasn’t it?’ He remembered little old me. I was overwhelmed. It was like talking to your father. He was so folksy, and he called me Richard, and we talked about Rosa Parks and what he thought about Black journalism, asked me what it was like being a Black reporter in a white journalism world.  I told him I had to prove myself every day. He told me to keep up the good work.

And then, tragically, Dr. King was killed the next year in 1968.

I was driving home from work The Plain Dealer in Cleveland when I heard on sports talk radio that Dr King was assassinated. I pulled over to the side of the road and I cried for five minutes.