The HistoryMakers video oral history with Thomas Fleming.

Chicago, Illinois : The HistoryMakers, [2016]

1 online resource (6 video files (2 hr., 59 min., 27 sec.)) : sound, color.

Access is available to the Yale community.

Videographer, Scott Stearns.

Access restricted by licensing agreement.

Journalist Thomas C. Fleming was born on November 29, 1907, in Jacksonville, Florida. He was the oldest and longest-serving black journalist in the country. After graduating from Chico High School in 1926, Fleming worked as a bellhop and later as a cook for the Southern Pacific Railroad. In the early 1930s, he began working as an unpaid writer for the Spokesman, a progressive black paper in San Francisco. In 1944, he became the founding editor of the Reporter, the only black paper in San Francisco at the time. It later merged with another black paper, the Sun, to become the Sun-Reporter. Fleming's writing covered civil rights issues and gave an editorial voice to the Bay Area's black communities. He retired as executive editor of the Sun-Reporter in 1997, although he continued to write for the syndicated column, "Reflections on Black History." Thomas Fleming passed away on November 21, 2006 at age 99.

Images / Online / Video & Film

English

February 04, 2021

Videographer, Scott Stearns.

Julieanna L. Richardson, interviewer.