Quick Facts
- NAME: Robert C. Maynard
- OCCUPATION: Educator, Journalist
- BIRTH DATE: June 17, 1937
- DEATH DATE: August 17, 1993
- EDUCATION: Harvard University
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Brooklyn, New York
- PLACE OF DEATH: Oakland, California
Best Known For
Robert C. Maynard was a journalist and publisher best known for being the first African American to own and publish a major daily newspaper (Tribune).
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Play NowRobert Clyve Maynard. (2013). The Biography Channel website. Retrieved 02:52, May 18, 2013, from http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749.
Robert Clyve Maynard. [Internet]. 2013. The Biography Channel website. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749 [Accessed 18 May 2013].
"Robert Clyve Maynard." 2013. The Biography Channel website. May 18 2013, 02:52 http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749.
"Robert Clyve Maynard," The Biography Channel website, 2013, http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749 [accessed May 18, 2013].
"Robert Clyve Maynard," The Biography Channel website, http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749 (accessed May 18, 2013).
Robert Clyve Maynard [Internet]. The Biography Channel website; 2013 [cited 2013 May 18] Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749.
Robert Clyve Maynard, http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749 (last visited May 18, 2013).
Robert Clyve Maynard. The Biography Channel website. 2013. Available at: http://www.biography.com/people/robert-c-maynard-9403749. Accessed May 18, 2013.
Synopsis
Journalist and publisher Robert C. Maynard knew at age 16 that he wanted to be a writer and dropped out of school to begin work as a reporter for the New York Age,
an African American weekly. He later wrote for the Gazette and the Washington Post. He is best known for being the first African American to own and publish a major daily newspaper when he bought controlling interest in the Tribune.
Profile
Journalist and publisher. Born in New York City. The son of immigrants from Barbados, Maynard decided early he wanted to be a writer. He quit school at age 16 and began to work as a reporter for the New York Age, an African American weekly, obtaining his first job on a white newspaper in 1961, the York Gazette and Daily (Pennsylvania).
He spent 1966 as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, returned to the Gazette and then joined the Washington Post (1967) as its first black national correspondent. In 1972 he was named an associate editor of the Post, and his stature was such that he was one of three journalists invited to question President Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in their 1976 campaign debate.
In 1972 he was co-director of a program at Columbia University School of Journalism to train minority journalists, and in 1977 he left the Post and went to establish (with his wife, Nancy Hall Hicks, also a journalist) a similar program at the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute for Journalism Education.
Maynard became the editor of the Oakland Tribune (California) (1979), the first African American to direct editorial operations for a major daily paper, and became the first African American to own and publish a major daily newspaper when he bought controlling interest in the Tribune (1983). Eroding circulation and advertising forced him to sell it to the Alameda Newspaper Group (1992), but he remained as publisher and editor.
A Pulitzer Prize juror, and a leader in various professional organizations, Maynard took greatest pride in helping scores of minority youths enter journalism, an effort that earned him the title "the Jackie Robinson of publishing."
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