Groundbreaking Daily News columnist Chuck Stone wins a special Pulitzer citation

Trailblazing former Daily News columnist Chuck Stone has been posthumously honored with a special citation from the Pulitzer Board.

Stone received the award for his groundbreaking work covering the Civil Rights Movement, his role as the Daily News’ first Black columnist, and his position as a cofounder of the National Association of Black Journalists half a century ago, administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes Marjorie Miller said Monday.

“This recognition is so well-earned and so well-deserved,” said Gabriel Escobar, editor and vice president of The Philadelphia Inquirer and a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.

“Chuck Stone left his mark in many places — as a veteran, as a prominent figure in the Black press, as a mentor and inspiration to many, as a pivotal founder of the National Association of Black Journalists and of course as a prominent and influential columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News,” Escobar said.

A native of St. Louis who was raised in Hartford, Conn., Stone served as a member of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II before attending Wesleyan University. There, Stone earned undergraduate degrees in political science and economics in 1948 before attending the University of Chicago, from which he later received a master’s degree in sociology.

In the 1950s, Stone entered the field of journalism, serving first as a reporter and later an editor at the New York Age. Stone’s outspoken writing style was present from the early days in his career, with Newsweek dubbing him the “angry man of the Negro press” after he became a White House correspondent for the Washington Afro-American.

“Chuck was around for the beginning of Black folks working in mainstream newsrooms,” said Michael Days, former Daily News editor-in-chief and current NABJ Philadelphia president. “He was beyond iconic in Philadelphia.”

Stone came to Philadelphia in the 1970s, starting work as a columnist at the Daily News in 1972. He held that position until 1991, quickly earning readers’ trust for his raw criticisms of the Philadelphia Police Department, which was then known for its racially charged brutality against Black criminal suspects.

In those days, said former Daily News editor and reporter Zack Stalberg, the People Paper was filled with big personalities — but none bigger than Stone. He was, Stalberg said, someone who “made people want to read newspapers.”

“Chuck was far more than a columnist. He was a gigantic figure in town,” Stalberg said. “He was the only person I can remember in Philadelphia newspapers at that period who people really had to pay attention to.”

By 1977, suspects began surrendering to Stone rather than police directly, believing that his involvement would afford a kind of protection from heavy-handed officers. Among the first people to surrender to Stone was a man charged with murder who asked him to arrange a transfer to police custody.

“He said he reads my column and he likes the way I handled things and he trusted me,” Stone said in 1977.

Then-Mayor Frank L. Rizzo, however, was not a fan. During a 1977 news conference, he lashed out at Stone over a column that had been critical of his administration, calling the columnist “the bottom of the cesspool … a racist [who] represents everything that is wrong with this city.”

“Politically, [Rizzo] is a functional illiterate who cannot read the handwriting on the wall,” Stone wrote in a column.

Stone, however, was not critical of just white politicians during his time as a columnist. In 1991, a single column saw him refer to then-State Rep. Dwight Evans as “an oleaginous eel,” Mayor W. Wilson Goode as a “paternalistic ferret,” and U.S. Rep. William H. Gray III as a “peacock.”

Stone likely took some amount of joy in Rizzo’s lament, as well as that of other prominent figures who felt crossed by his coverage. As Stone’s nephew, former Daily News reporter Gene Seymour put it, Stone “loved being on somebody’s s— list.”

“He loved making people angry,” Seymour said. “If you mentioned Chuck Stone’s name to somebody, their eyes would either light up with recognition or they would narrow with, ‘Chuck Stone, huh?’”

Often, Seymour added, he would see Stone typing away in the newsroom, seeming to sail through his columns as other reporters struggled with their work. Sometimes, he would even see him giggling — an odd, somewhat infuriating sight amid the grind that Seymour often felt. That is, until he realized there was a lesson.

“Even then, he was teaching me something,” Seymour said. “He was saying make a joyful noise even when you’re giving them hell.”

Over the course of his near-two-decade career with the Daily News, more than 70 criminal suspects, all of whom were Black, surrendered to Stone. But he is perhaps best known for serving as a key negotiator in a 1981 crisis at Graterford Prison, in which escaped inmates — led by a man who had been convicted of multiple murders — captured dozens of hostages, several of whom were guards.

The siege lasted five days, with Stone joining the effort on the fourth day at the recommendation of then-Gov. Dick Thornburgh’s administration, as well as at the behest of one of the inmates’ mothers, The Inquirer reported at the time. Stone helped negotiate the release of the final six hostages, reports from the time indicated.

“I damn near had a nervous breakdown,” Stone later said of the negotiations. “I spent two days negotiating, and they released the hostages after the second day. So then when people got in trouble and there were hostages … they said, ‘Call Chuck Stone to get us out of this.’”

Seymour, who started at the Daily News the weekend of the Graterford Prison incident, said he never worried about the potential outcomes of the negotiations as they were going on. It was Chuck, after all.

“He was impervious to all of it,” Seymour said. “He had his business to do, and nothing stuck. It wasn’t Teflon exactly, but like a force field that stuff just bounced off.”

Once Stone departed the Daily News, the practice of suspects turning themselves in at the paper’s offices stopped, Days said. The paper’s remaining writers lacked the je ne sais quoi Stone possessed to carry it on, he added — himself included.

“I said, ‘I’m not doing that,’” Days said.

During his time at the Daily News, Stone served as a cofounder of the National Association for Black Journalists and was the organization’s first president from 1975 to 1977. Sandra Dawson Long Weaver, a fellow NABJ cofounder and former Inquirer managing editor, credited Stone with leading the charge to form a national chapter of the group in 1975.

In fact, she said, his name was No. 1 on the sign-in sheet from the meeting that resulted in the establishment of the NABJ as it is known today.

“The foundation he laid was strong enough for us to continue thriving,” Long Weaver said. NABJ has about 4,500 members, growing more than 100 times from its 44 cofounders half a century ago.

With NABJ celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, seeing Stone celebrated with the Pulitzer citation is “wonderful,” Long Weaver said.

Ken Lemon, current NABJ president and a reporter at WSOC-TV in Charlotte, N.C., said that the citation “speaks volumes” in the current political climate.

“The timing on it is impeccable,” Lemon said. “It speaks to the importance of Black journalists, even in this moment now when being Black and being a journalist is under attack by the federal government. It speaks volumes to people who are underserved and overlooked.”

Stone left the Daily News in 1991, going on to teach at the University of North Carolina, from which he retired in 2004. He died a decade later at age 89 in an assisted-living facility in North Carolina.

“When he walked into the room, he filled it up,” Days said of Stone. “Everyone knew Chuck Stone.”