Advocating in column inches: Journal When Derrick Jackson was 10 years old, he went to visit his grandparents in DeKalb, Mississippi. He remembers one trip with his grandfather into town, where young Jackson wanted to buy some comic books and an ice cream cone from a local drug store. When he ordered his dessert, Jackson, who is Black, recalled that the white girl working the register looked petrified. A white man poked his head out from the back and said, “He’s not from around here. Just give him the ice cream cone.” When Jackson returned to their car, his grandfather asked where he’d bought the comic books. Jackson told him. “He said, ‘Oh. You know that’s the white folks’ drug store.’ This was not all that long after Emmett Till was murdered,” Jackson recalled. “He got all quiet and a soft smile came to his face. He said one word. He said, ‘Good.’” Young Jackson felt validated in that moment, like he could go anywhere and had the right to do so. When he looks back, he says, his long career in journalism started in that truck. “My feeling of saying what was on my mind and not being afraid to put it on paper, I really attribute it to that moment,” Jackson said. Since then, Jackson has gone so many places. A self-described recovering sports writer and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, Jackson is also a Pulitzer Prize nominee; an award-winning author of two books; and has become a passionate advocate for public health, the environment, and social justice. Milwaukee origins Jackson’s parents always expected him to go to college, but they weren’t 6 • IN FOCUS • October, 2021
picky about where. So, Jackson, a product of Milwaukee Public Schools, headed to the university in his backyard. He majored in mass communication (now journalism, advertising, and media studies) at UWM, a love he discovered while writing for his school newspapers in middle and high school. He also worked at the Milwaukee Courier in high school and his first few months at UWM. Shortly after beginning classes, though, he dropped the Courier job when he was offered a position covering high school sports for the Milwaukee Journal. “At the same time, I became an apprentice photographer at the Associated Press. I worked under the sports photographer for the Wisconsin AP,” Jackson said. There, he covered Green Bay Packers games with his mentor, and occasionally covered the Brewers and the Bucks – including the Bucks’ 1974 championship series against the Celtics. Inside of the classroom, Jackson counted himself lucky to work with the faculty in the mass communication department, most of whom were industry professionals themselves. “They have instant credibility with you as a student. Everybody cared about their craft,” he recalled. “No one was mailing it in. No one was sleepwalking through their own past glories. They were teaching the best in journalism.” After graduating in 1976, Jackson spent two years covering sports for the Kansas City Star before moving to New York to join Newsday. There, he wrote about some of the city’s most notorious events at the time, including Bernard Goetz’s shooting of four Black youths on a subway. Jackson also covered the 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis. The more time he spent on the campaign trail, the more he found himself wishing he could express
UWM alum and former Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson holds restoration to the Atlantic Coast in Maine. Photo courtesy of Derrick J
his own opinions on the issues. When he and his wife, Dr. Michelle Holmes, moved back to her hometown of Boston, Jackson joined the Boston Globe as a columnist, where he spent the rest of his career before taking a buyout in 2015. In his opinion To be a good columnist, it’s not enough to just have an opinion. “I had a tremendous mentor, the late Les Payne,” Jackson said. “He always told me that a column is the subject of a made-up mind, but you can only make up your mind when you report, gather your facts, and marshal your facts. Even if someone disagrees with your point of view, they have to wrestle with your facts.”
