George Curry, who turned Emerge into a provocative, must-read newsmagazine for black readers in the 1990s and who, as the editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, wrote a weekly column carried by more than 200 black newspapers, died on Saturday in Takoma Park, Maryland. He was 69.
The cause was a heart attack, his sister Charlotte Purvis said.
Curry, a longtime reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Chicago Tribune, became editor-in-chief of Emerge, founded in 1989, after Black Entertainment Television acquired a majority interest in the magazine in 1993.
He immediately shifted the emphasis from entertainment to news, hired new staff members with journalism backgrounds, attracted contributors from top newspapers and magazines, and came up with a new motto: “Black America’s Newsmagazine.”
He told Washington City Paper that he wanted readers to “think of us as a black Time or Emerge covered subjects like policing in the black community, the effect of the NAFTA trade agreement on black Americans and US Supreme Court cases involving affirmative action.
It printed “Kemba’s Nightmare,” Reginald Stuart’s 17-page article about a young black college student, Kemba Smith, whose romance with a drug dealer led to a 24-year prison sentence for conspiracy to traffic in cocaine. Then-US president Bill Clinton pardoned Smith in 2000.
The magazine caused an uproar in 1993 when it depicted US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the cover wearing an Aunt Jemima-style kerchief on his head.
Unrepentant, Curry returned to the same subject in 1996, this time showing Thomas on the cover as a lawn jockey and, on an inside page, shining the shoes of US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. In an editor’s note, he accused Thomas of turning back the clock on civil rights.
Curry was born on Feb. 23, 1947, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His father, Homer Lee Curry, was an alcoholic who abandoned the family when George was seven. He was raised by his mother, Martha Brownlee, who worked as a domestic, and his stepfather, William Henry Polk, who drove a dump truck for the University of Alabama.
He became interested in journalism early on, inspired, in a perverse way, by the local paper, the Tuscaloosa News.
“In the eighth grade, I knew I could write better than that,” he told Presstime magazine in 1988.
He was the sports editor of the school newspaper at Druid High School and at Knoxville College, a historically black school, where he was quarterback of the football team. He graduated from Knoxville with a degree in history in 1970.
Curry worked for Sports Illustrated for two years before the Post-Dispatch hired him as a general-assignment reporter in 1972. One of his colleagues and close friends at the newspaper was Gerald Boyd, who later became the managing editor of the New York Times. In 1977, Curry and Boyd founded the Greater St Louis Association of Black Journalists.
George Curry became the Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune in 1983 and was later the newspaper’s New York bureau chief.
Under his editorship, Emerge reached a circulation of 170,000, more than respectable for a public-affairs magazine, but it struggled to turn a profit and printed its last issue in 2000.
After the magazine shuttered, he was named editor-in-chief of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade association for black newspapers, for which he wrote a weekly syndicated column on current events, public affairs and the press.
He was also the author of a biography and editor of an anthology.
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