Editorial director of the St. Louis American
By Elaine X. Grant
Photograph by Peter Newcomb
Your position raises the question: Can a white man adequately represent St. Louis’ black population? It’s not my job to represent. My job is to coordinate the efforts of other editors. I’m just a glorified traffic cop. And I’m the only white editor here, so I think the black community is ably represented.
You’ve written for Car & Travel, the AAA magazine for the New York metropolitan area; for The New York Times, covering Connecticut; for the Riverfront Times and the Post-Dispatch. How is the American different? It’s a community newspaper. It covers things that may be under the radar for other newspapers. We do annual awards called “Salutes” in three categories: health care, education and business. That’s liberating if you’re interested in good news, and I am.
You’ve been the editorial director for almost a year now. What has been the biggest surprise about the job? The abundance of journalistic talent in the black community in St. Louis. We ran an ad for a staff reporter and I have to admit I probably never got to the bottom of the pile. At the RFT there was the mentality that there weren’t enough black reporters—as if we had to trap them in the wild. All we had to do was put an ad in our own paper. The black talent pool is richer in every sense than most white people here would guess.
With all that journalistic talent in the black community, it does seem strange that the top job went to someone white. I don’t know, is it strange? Julius Hunter read the news to a majority white audience. My mentors and my teachers and my bosses have mostly been black men.
What is the biggest issue facing black St. Louisans today? The entrenched white privilege and how desperate white people are to hold on to it. There are seats at the table for black decision makers, but there should be more. There are a lot of white people who aren’t comfortable with black folks as peers.
Have you ever felt prejudged because of your race? Of course. Once I was documenting a company picnic in Mississippi. The photographer and I were the only white people probably in the county and certainly at the picnic. This drunk brother got in my face and told me he hated white people. I said, “You don’t know white people well enough to hate them.”
At the time the St. Louis American job came around, you were trying to find a way out of New York after having lived there for six years. Why? Homesickness, I guess. I love St. Louis.
What do you love about it? I love the scale of it—it’s the right size. If a city’s too big, no one will talk about other people because no one knows anyone. If a city is too small, everyone will talk about everyone. Here, everyone knows someone who knows someone, so every conversation is potentially interesting.
How has it changed since you last lived here? I’ve changed so much, I couldn’t say. There do seem to be more of the things that I find interesting—art, food, beer, music. It’s a great town for meeting people—you just need a point of entrance, especially if you’re going to cross the color line. I’ve always had that doorway, and now I have maybe the best doorway of all.
What was your doorway before the St. Louis American? Poetry. I was friends with Eugene Redmond, the poet laureate of East St. Louis. And musicians. As Miles Davis said, “I don’t care if your skin is green and your breath is polka-dotted, if you can blow a horn you have a seat in my band.”
What most surprised you about New York? That it’s knowable. I got to the point where I knew it the way I knew St. Louis. It lost its sense of being bigger than my imagination. I liked it when it was more mysterious.
Why did you move there in the first place? I was a traveling musician who was finding it harder to support myself. I met Carley [now his wife] on a plane to New York, so I stayed to be with her. She was a little concerned that if we came back [to St. Louis], I might slip back into being a musician. It’s still a bit of a struggle to be a mature person in a city where I have so many friends in the music scene. I still play with my band, Three Fried Men. I’m the frontman and rhythm guitarist.
If you could guarantee that one thing about St. Louis would never change, what would it be? The deep affection for beer and baseball.
Do you allot any time to indulge your inner immaturity? Tuesday is the night the sports section is put together, so I usually go somewhere then come back to the office around midnight to look at the sports section. You should be able to edit a sports section after having a few beers.
You were a philosophy major at Wash. U. What’s your personal philosophy? An American Indian friend of mine told me a Santee Sioux saying: Observe the obvious in everything always.
Meaning? Pay attention. You never know what’s going to be on the test.
