TBD on Ning

A death in the family

It is always interesting to me at what events in my life and in the world I shed tears. A friend once told me you can’t help how you feel. Tonight, I learned of the death of Walter Cronkite. As I saw his face on the television and heard the sound of his voice once again, the tears started to come. I found this odd, at least at first.

Growing up black in America was not as hard on me as it was on my parents, grandparents, or even my older sister, but it was no walk in the park either. As I watched the progress of civil rights through newspapers and news broadcasts, I learned two contradictory facts. There were many white people who hated any notion of blacks (or any other race or color of people) achieving parity or anything approaching parity in terms of civil rights. At the same time, there were white people who stood with, marched with, and worked to support black people protesting for justice. They were threatened, beaten, pummeled with fire hoses and even killed right along side black folks. Walter Cronkite covered their struggle honestly and with professionalism even when it was not popular to do so. He was virtually always the objective journalist, even though I thought he was on our side. But that’s not why my tears came.

Cronkite was named “the most trusted man in American” in several polls in the early 1970s. And he earned that title day after day in living rooms across the country, not just because he was there, but because of the way he did his job. It is difficult to even imagine what I’m talking about in these days of opinion-flavored, opinion-laden, news-sort-of-but-mostly-opinion-that-passes-for-news, let’s-pit-two-opposing-views-against-each-other-and-call-it-fair-and-balanced coverage. Walter Cronkite tried mightily to get it first and get it right. His voice and his face became synonymous with objectivity and fairness. To hear him say, “and that’s the way it was,” was to signify the definitive end of the daily evening briefing/continuing-education of the nation. I trusted him. Still that’s not why my tears came.

Cronkite became, in my young mind, a white face that could be trusted, a honest bearer of news both good and bad, a regular fixture of the American landscape, and a reassuring presence that for me meant “safe harbor” in an America that was still sometimes hostile to people to looked like me. Losing him on July 17th 2009 was like losing a family friend. In a place where acceptance, in my mind, was always tentative at best, I recognized in Cronkite someone more trustworthy than the police, more honest than the president, and perhaps more spiritually centered than my pastor. Were I a child lost in a crowd and saw Walter Cronkite, I would go to him without fear or hesitation, secure in the knowledge that I would somehow be helped. What is that worth? Who and how many engender that kind of trust today? Cronkite is worth shedding some tears over.

He was a pillar, an icon, a master journalist, but he was also one of us. This, we recognized, and so bound ourselves to him, like to a life preserver in the vast and tossing sea of time and events. I mourn along with his family and his nation and pray that the likes of him will dare to walk among us again.