Maybe you’ve heard of him; maybe not. William Raspberry wasn’t quite a household name, even though he had won a Pulitzer Prize for political commentary. But for my money, he was one of the finest columnists we’ve yet produced--and for the simple reason that he was impossible to categorize. You couldn’t call him a liberal, or a conservative, or anything in between. He simply called them as he saw them, and he was content to let the chips fall where they may.
He died a year ago this month at his home in Washington, and an obituary by Dennis Hevesi in The New York Times captured his style perfectly: for 39 years in more than 200 newspapers he brought a moderate voice to social issues, including race relations--sometimes to the ire of civil rights leaders. And still, when the National Association of Black Journalists presented him with its lifetime achievement award in 1994, the citation read: “Raspberry’s clarity of thought and his insistence on speaking the truth as he sees it--even when others disagree--have kept his column fresh, unpredictable and uncommonly wise.”
William Raspberry’s home paper was The Washington Post, and it published his column first under the title “Potomac Watch” and later under his own name. As Hevesi’s obituary pointed out, he focused not on Washington power brokers but on moral issues: street violence, drug abuse, criminal justice, poverty, parenting, education and civil rights.
It was this concentration that often frustrated better-known civil rights leaders, well illustrated by this excerpt from a 1989 column when Raspberry, a black man himself, addressed them directly: “I don’t underestimate either the persistence of racism or its effects. But it does seem to me that you spend too much time thinking about racism. It is as though your whole aim is to get white people to acknowledge their racism and accept their guilt. Well, suppose they did. What would that change?”
Maybe it’s because of the generation I come from, but I especially liked his take on the song lyrics associated with rap. “Words matter,” he wrote. “And because I know words matter, I wish my children, and kids younger than my children, would get back to innocent, hopeful lyrics. I wish their music was more about love and less graphically about intercourse. I wish their songs could be less angry and ‘victimized’ and more about building a better world.”
William Raspberry was 76 when he died. On his retirement in 2005, he organized an educational facility for low-income families in his native Mississippi, “where,” he once said, “we had two of everything--one for whites and one for blacks.” He financed the project out of his own pocket.
A former editor at the Post said that Raspberry “made sense of the issues that roiled the community.” That was surely the case when he once deplored the absence of troops that would insure the safety of Washington schoolchildren. “If we can deploy American soldiers in Mogadishu.” he wrote, “is it beyond reason to deploy a few hundred troops here?”
William Raspberry: neither liberal, nor conservative, nor anything in between. He called them as he saw them, and was content to let the chips fall where they may. Do we need a few more like him? And how.
(This essay is this week’s “Light One Candle” column, written by Jerry Costello, of The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.)
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