Newspaper preserves history

AUSTIN (KXAN) - The publisher and editor of Austin’s African-American newspaper, The Villager , is partial to black history, in part, because he has lived it. He started living it in his home stomping grounds of west Texas.

“My family was migrant farmers,” said Wyatt. “We followed the cotton. Starting in the summer time, we'd start down around Ennis, Texas, and start picking cotton around August.

“Then we'd pick our way all the way back to Lubbock because the cotton would mature earlier in central and east Texas.

"In those days, they didn't have mandatory (school) attendance days. So consequently, many of us didn't get in school until after Christmas."

Wyatt’s cotton-picking days ended when he got to high school and worked his way onto the football team, but the memory, the history, stayed with him.

Meanwhile, life in west Texas was predictable in the early years of Wyatt’s life.

“There wasn't much interaction with the white community,” Wyatt recalled. “It was separate communities. I mean, you know, in the black community we had everything that they had.

“We had businesses and stores and hospitals. You know, we even had black-owned hospitals. The doctors built their own hospital because they were having a hard time getting credentials to practice in the major hospital in the city; so they built their own hospital."

All that changed in the mid-'50s, when the United States Supreme Court ruled the doctrine of “separate but equal” schools unconstitutional.

“We didn't start actually mingling until '55 when the desegregation order came down," Wyatt said. "At that point was when they integrated.

“But west Texas was different from most of Texas. I mean, the minute that order came in, they integrated that same year.”

So, when Wyatt landed in Austin to sell insurance, he was astonished at what he found.

“I came to Austin in 1962 as a grown man,” he said. “I had been in the Army when I came here and I felt like I had been dropped back in time. When I came to Austin, it was completely segregated. Every stitch of this town was segregated in 1962.

“So I had to go through a whole new cultural thing and I just couldn't believe it.”

Wyatt went to work trying to make some changes.

“I was the first African-American in Austin to join the Austin Jaycees, the Junior Chamber of Commerce,” he said. “I was the first African-American in Austin to join the Life Underwriters Association, the insurance association of the city.

“It wasn't that they didn't want members, it was the fact that some people they invited in wouldn't go because they thought that they would be viewed negatively in their own community by trying to integrate.

“But on the other hand, when I joined the Jaycees, five board members quit the night I was accepted. They later came back, but that was the kind of trend you looked at.”

When Wyatt decided to run for the Travis County Commissioners’ Court in the early '70s, he lost – twice.

The experience taught him that despite the presence of two newspapers in town, there was no effective way to communicate directly to the minority community.

He tried to join forces with a struggling black newspaper in town, but when that didn’t pan out, he started his own.

From the beginning, Wyatt harbored a particular philosophy for The Villager.

“We are the ‘good news’ newspaper,” he said. “We do not cover violence unless it's what I call, of a redeeming nature.

“You know, if we got a neighborhood rapist running around, we’ve got to cover that, you see what I mean.

“If we get what we've had lately, police shootings, we have to cover that. That's violence but we have to cover that because this has a very negative effect on our community.

“Someone had to be out in front of that situation trying to get justice for the community. It doesn't always happen but at least someone is speaking.”

Wyatt does his speaking through a front page editorial column, but he maintains a strict impartiality when it comes to news reporting.

He also joins co-hosts ‘Mz. Marla’ and Damita Shanklin for an hour-long “Breakfast Club” radio show on KAZI each Friday morning.

“The trio often refers to The Villager as they discuss African-American community, culture, history and politics.

“I consider The Villager a way of a community talking to itself,” said Wyatt. “Anybody who has an issue that they want to promote, you know, can bring it to us and we'll put it out there.

“I mean, we don't say it's good, bad, indifferent; but if that's your issue, let the community decide.”

So, as you might expect, a big part of The Villager’s readership hails from the black community, but not all of it.

“You'd be surprised to know that 45 to 50 percent of my readers are not black,” said Wyatt, “because what they're trying to do is find out what this community thinks about certain issues. So we are the bridge sometimes between, you know, the broader community.”

The annual Black History Month , of course, also helps bridge the racial gaps, as the broader community gets exposed