By Ron Taylor
Special to the AFRO
A group of former colleagues gathered recently to commemorate and share the distinction of being part of a rare fraternal order. But this wasn’t just another governmental or corporate sub-unit meeting for drinks and chit-chat.
Assembled in a Martin Luther King Jr. Library conference room, were roughly 60 Howard University alum who were reporters, editors, photographers and business staff of The Hilltop, Howard ’s student newspaper, created 100 years ago, the largest student-run newspaper at a historically Black college or university in the U.S.
“We were the student voice of Howard University,” said Adrienne Mann-Israel, a Hilltop editor in the early 1960s who later served as acting editor of the Baltimore AFRO American.
She and other Hilltop alumni echoed that sentiment about their time as student journalists.
“It was a special time. It was a special place,” said Alonzo Robertson, a production editor in the late 1980s. “And I’m happy to a part of it.”
“We were part of the people, walking the street,” said Robertson. “We were reporting it and recording it. That’s what the Hilltop is.”
As students, they watched the Civil Rights Movement blossom and evolve into a national change agent, they documented student protests that were at the heart of the Vietnam anti-war movement blossom, they reported on higher education’s growing pains and watched D.C.’s population become more Black than White in the 1960s, and, after the District burned in riots, become White again at they end of the 20th century.
And there were world events to cover. As student journalists Hilltop staffers covered the march of Vietnam anti-war demonstrators as protesters crossed the Potomac River to the Pentagon.
Hilltop reporters were once challenged for being “too passive” amid student protests that forced Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater to step down from Howard’s board of trustees.
While non-journalist classmates claimed Hilltop reporters weren’t radical enough in the 1960s, some alumni said, sometimes Howard administrators told The Hilltop they were going “too far,” former editor Adrienne Mann-Israel said.
Howard administrators denied press credentials to students when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was to appear at Howard’s Cramton Auditorium and when vulgar language showed up in print in a feature about student attitudes, Mann-Israel said she was summoned to the university president’s office to explain the Hilltop editor’s judgment.
She said she was pleased with the commemoration of The Hilltop hitting the centennial mark and impressed that today’s Hilltop staff of 60 would dwarf the staff of 10 that she oversaw in the 1960s.
Like many Hilltop top editors, she came to D.C. from a mostly White background in Masselon, Ohio. Howard nurtured her eagerness to thrive in a Black background for her and others who came to Howard from White backgrounds.
Jazmine Goodwin, an Arizona native who was on The Hilltop Editor-in-Chief in 2018, said her time in D.C. helped develop her.
“I was able to build my skills, build my craft and really just see what everything looked like up close and person,” she said. “From the day I arrived at Howard there was, like, a protest, Black Lives Matter.”
Mann-Israel said the experience of handling competing demands prepared her to step up her game in journalism after Howard. She went to the Washington Daily News and then the Washington Post before being hired by Elizabeth Murphy Moss to write and edit the AFRO as a 23 year old.