William Worthy, a Reporter Drawn to Forbidden Datelines, Dies at 92
By MARGALIT FOX
MAY 17, 2014
New York Times
William Worthy, a foreign correspondent who in the thick of the Cold War ventured where the United States did not want him to go — including the Soviet Union, China, Cuba — and became the subject of both a landmark federal case concerning travel rights and a ballad by the protest singer Phil Ochs, died on May 4 in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.
His death, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was announced on the website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Mr. Worthy was a Nieman Foundation fellow in the 1956-57 academic year.
A correspondent for The Afro-American of Baltimore, a weekly newspaper, from 1953 to 1980, Mr. Worthy also contributed freelance reports to CBS News, The New York Post and other publications. He became an international cause célèbre in the early 1960s when, returning from Cuba, he was found guilty of violating United States immigration law.
The son of a distinguished obstetrician, William Worthy Jr. was born in Boston on July 7, 1921.
“Despite the respect and certain privileges derived from membership in a professional ‘black bourgeoisie’ family, my sisters and I were clearly aware, as children, of our ‘inferior’ minority group status,” Mr. Worthy wrote in a 1968 article for The Boston Globe. “ ‘The problem’ was discussed at the dinner table. More importantly, it was all around us.”
After graduating from the Boston Latin School, Mr. Worthy earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bates College in Lewiston, Me., in 1942. In World War II, though an ulcer would have let him be classified 4-F, he chose to become a conscientious objector.
Mr. Worthy began his career as a press aide for the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. During his years at The Afro-American, he kept one foot in the realm of direct advocacy, joining Freedom Riders on their pilgrimages through the South and later becoming a close ally of Malcolm X.
As a journalist, Mr. Worthy quickly earned a reputation for venturing into forbidden places to report on the effects of war, revolution and colonialism. In 1955, he spent six weeks in Moscow, interviewing ordinary citizens and the Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Toward the end of 1956, during his Nieman fellowship, Mr. Worthy, who had spent years petitioning the Chinese government for a visa, learned he had been granted one.
Defying a United States travel ban, he crossed into mainland China from Hong Kong. He was one of the first American journalists admitted there after the United States broke off relations after the 1949 Communist takeover.
He spent 41 days traveling the country, interviewing the premier, Zhou Enlai, as well as people in schools, factories and hospitals.
He also visited the Shanghai prison, where he interviewed American P.O.W.s captured during the Korean War. The United States knew the men were being held somewhere in China, but in several cases Mr. Worthy’s reports were the first to pinpoint their location.
After returning to the United States in 1957, Mr. Worthy tried to renew his passport. The State Department refused.
In a statement, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, “It is evident from Mr. Worthy’s testimony that should his passport be renewed he would not feel obligated, under present world conditions, to restrict his travel abroad in any way.”
Indeed, Mr. Worthy felt no such obligation. In 1961, without a passport, he went to Cuba, debarking in Havana from a ship bound from the United States for Mexico. He interviewed Fidel Castro and filed articles about the country under Communism, with particular attention to race relations, which he judged far better than those in the United States.
Returning, he was arrested in Florida and indicted on a charge of entering the country illegally — that is, without a passport. (He had shown immigration officers his birth certificate as proof of citizenship.)
In 1962, in a nonjury trial in federal court in Miami — Mr. Worthy’s lawyers included William M. Kunstler — he was found guilty and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment plus nine months’ probation.
The case became a sensation. Rallies on Mr. Worthy’s behalf were held in cities around the world. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell petitioned the United States attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, in support of him.
Mr. Ochs wrote “The Ballad of William Worthy,” which includes these lines:
William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door.
Went down to Cuba, he’s not American anymore.
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.
In 1964, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned Mr. Worthy’s conviction, ruling that the lack of a passport was insufficient ground to bar a citizen from re-entering the country. Concurring in the opinion was Judge Griffin B. Bell, a future United States attorney general under President Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Worthy was not granted a new passport until 1968. Over the years, his other travels — with a passport or without — took him to North Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and Algeria.
In 1981, Mr. Worthy and two colleagues traveled to Iran to examine the effects of the Islamic revolution there. He bought a multivolume set of books said to be reprints of intelligence documents taken from the United States Embassy in Tehran after revolutionary militants seized it in 1979.
Though the books were readily available in Iran and were already circulating in Europe, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, deeming them classified, seized them on the journalists’ return to the United States.
Mr. Worthy was able to furnish a duplicate set to The Washington Post. In 1982, after authenticating them, The Post published a series, based partly on their contents, about United States intelligence operations in Iran.
The federal government agreed that year to pay $16,000 to settle a suit by Mr. Worthy and his colleagues over the seizure.
In later years, Mr. Worthy taught journalism at Boston University; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Howard University; and elsewhere. In 2008, he received the Nieman Foundation’s Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.
His survivors include a sister, Ruth Worthy.
Mr. Worthy was the author of a book, “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods,” published in 1976.
In 1982, The Associated Press asked Mr. Worthy why he had brought the Iranian volumes into the United States. His response could well describe what propelled his entire career.
“Americans,” Mr. Worthy said, “have a right to know what’s going on in the world in their name.”
William Worthy, 92; reporter battled US over access to world leaders
By Bryan Marquard
BOSTON GLOBE STAFF
MAY 07, 2014
As a reporter in the late 1950s and early ’60s, William Worthy interviewed a constellation of Communist leaders in their homelands: Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, Chou En-lai in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba.
When his reporting defied US rules prohibiting visits to foreign foes, though, the Boston-born journalist became part of the news he covered. On Christmas Eve 1956, he slipped into China and broadcast reports for CBS. Upon returning to his Nieman fellowship studies at Harvard, the government refused to renew his passport unless he constrained his travel, and he challenged the State Department ruling all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Mr. Worthy, who was 92 when he died Sunday evening in the Epoch nursing home in Brewster, lost that legal battle and did not get a passport for about a decade. But he prevailed in skirmishes with the federal government over subsequent reporting trips. In the process, he set a constitutional precedent in passport law and inspired a protest song, “The Ballad of William Worthy,” which folk singer Phil Ochs recorded on his 1964 debut album “All the News That’s Fit to Sing”:
William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door,
Went down to Cuba, he’s not American any more,
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
‘You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.’
The song chronicled Mr. Worthy’s decision to travel, absent a passport, to report in Cuba. At trip’s end he was arrested and convicted of entering the United States without a passport.
“According to top civil liberties attorneys in this country, on April 24, 1962, I became the first person ever to be indicted for coming home,” he wrote in The Catholic Worker newspaper that year.
This time Mr. Worthy persuaded a federal appeals court to declare the law unconstitutional and overturn his conviction. “I was out to defeat them in the circles of public opinion and the courts,” he recalled in a 1977 interview with The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper.
Legendary civil rights lawyer William Kunstler jump-started his own career by representing Mr. Worthy in the China and Cuba court battles.
“This was the first time I had ever invalidated a statute,” Kunstler later wrote about the Cuba case, adding: “I had changed the law! I had made a contribution! I felt an enormous thrill and a desire for more of the same.”
During about 40 years as a journalist, Mr. Worthy wrote perceptively and with sweeping historical context about race, civil rights, black militants, student protests, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, interviewing the likes of Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Yet by 2008, his role as groundbreaking journalist had all but faded from view when the Nieman Foundation presented Mr. Worthy the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.
“Throughout his life in journalism, Bill Worthy demonstrated a remarkable spirit of courage and independence in his determination to inform readers about places our government wanted to keep hidden from public view,” Robert Giles, then the Nieman curator, said in 2008.
The Nieman award arrived when Mr. Worthy was 86 and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Of course, he was African-American, and my feeling always was that if he had been a white journalist, he’d be much better known,” said Michael Lindsey, a retired journalist and longtime friend who co-taught a course with Mr. Worthy in the 1980s at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “He had that black journalist tag put on him, but Bill was a journalist that white and black readers could learn a lot from.”
William Worthy Jr. was one of four children, and the only son, born to Dr. William Worthy, a physician, and the former Mabel Posey.
Mr. Worthy’s parents were from the South, and the family lived in Boston’s South End. Growing up, he studied piano and clarinet but wrote in the Globe in 1968 that “despite the respect and certain privileges derived from membership in a professional ‘black bourgeoisie’ family, my sisters and I were clearly aware, as children, of our ‘inferior’ minority group status — from age 3 on. ‘The problem’ was discussed at the dinner table. More importantly, it was all around us.”
In another 1968 essay for the Globe, “From Black Brahmins to Black Power,” he wrote about the “winds of change that have shaped and are shaping Boston’s troubled racial scene.”
In a concluding paragraph that anticipated shifting demographics in Boston and elsewhere, he said he hoped his writing showed “that all the Latin in Latin School, all the gentility in cultured Boston, all the pro-American gods in a white Christian missionary heaven cannot stop the relentless flow of black-yellow-brown history the world over.”
Mr. Worthy graduated from Boston Latin School, was awarded a Burroughs Newsboys’ Foundation scholarship, and received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bates College in Maine.
He worked as a CBS News correspondent and a reporter for The Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore.
In the mid-1950s, Soviet officials allowed him to use Radio Moscow facilities to broadcast news reports directly to the United States, and at one Kremlin reception, the Globe reported, Mr. Worthy “was singled out by Nikita S. Khrushchev and told to dance with a Russian girl.”
Returning to Boston, Mr. Worthy joined a class of Nieman fellows that included future New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who months later waited at Logan International Airport to welcome Mr. Worthy home from his rule-breaking trip to China.
Years later, Mr. Worthy’s experiences living in New York City prompted his book “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods,” which examined what he called “unneighborly institutions.” Like corporations, he argued, nonprofits such as churches, hospitals, and universities often expand at the expense of neighborhoods in which those with limited resources are pushed aside, losing their homes.
At the end of the 1970s, he taught at Boston University but was ousted after tangling with the administration when John Silber was president. He later taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and also served on the board of directors of the National Whistleblowers Center.
David Colapinto, the organization’s general counsel, called Mr. Worthy “a great strategist” and mentor who provided helpful advice on cases the nonprofit handled.
A service will be announced for Mr. Worthy, whose only immediate survivor is his older sister Ruth, of Washington, D.C.
In the early 1980s, Mr. Worthy again took on the US government. During a reporting trip to Tehran, he and other journalists were given copies of US documents seized in the Iranian revolution, which US authorities confiscated when they returned to Logan Airport.
After a legal battle, the Reagan administration paid $16,000 in damages in 1982 to Mr. Worthy, Randy Goodman, and Teresa Taylor, and the US Justice Department agreed to destroy fingerprints and investigative records.
“Bill’s primary trait was his integrity,” Lindsey said. “A lot of people thought he was stubborn because he wouldn’t move on any moral issues, but the thing about Bill is that he never really gave up. He got his teeth into something and he went to the end of it.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.
William Worthy, defiant journalist, dies at 92
By Emily Langer, Published: May 12
Washington Post
William Worthy, a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper who made news — and inspired a folk song — by challenging U.S. policies to report from China and Cuba in the 1950s and ’60s, died May 4 at a senior living facility in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said a friend, Michael Lindsey.
The son of an obstetrician, Mr. Worthy grew up in Boston in a family that was active in progressive causes and that encouraged his intellectual development from an early age. He called himself “anti-colonialist, anti-militarist, anti-imperialist.”
He claimed conscientious objector status during World War II and later pursued a career in journalism with multiple outlets, most prominently with the Baltimore Afro-American. In 1956, along with two other journalists, he defied State Department travel restrictions to visit Communist-led China. At the time he held a Nieman fellowship, a prestigious honor in journalism; Time magazine reported that he was the first U.S. reporter to enter China in seven years.
That 41-day reporting trip — which included an interview with leader Zhou Enlai — was his most noted early act in what he described as his pursuit of the open exchange of information.
Four years later, and without a valid passport, he traveled to Cuba to report on the effects of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution. When Mr. Worthy returned to the United States, he was convicted of illegally entering the country.
The conviction, later reversed by an appellate court, inspired protest singer Phil Ochs to record the “Ballad of William Worthy” in 1964.
William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door, goes the refrain,
Went down to Cuba, he’s not American anymore
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.
In the early 1980s, Mr. Worthy challenged the U.S. government with his reportage from Iran after the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the course of his reporting, Mr. Worthy obtained copies of documents that were stolen from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis and later published in Iran. U.S. government officials seized one set of copies. Mr. Worthy and his colleagues provided another copy to The Washington Post, which published a series of articles based on the documents and other sources.
The journalists later reached a legal settlement with the U.S. government in which the reporters were awarded $16,000 stemming from the confiscation of the volumes.
“Americans have a right to know what’s going on in the world in their name,” he said at the time.
Mr. Worthy reported for media outlets including CBS and was honored in 2008 by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University with an award for “conscience and integrity in Journalism.”
William Worthy Jr. was born July 7, 1921, in Boston. In 1942, he received a bachelor’s degree from Bates College in Maine. In the early years of his career, he was a public relations assistant to civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph.
In his reporting, Mr. Worthy seemed to seek out perspectives not widely understood in the West. After his trip to China, he said the position of the average Chinese was, “We like the American people but we don’t agree with their government.”
He added that he had “no way of fathoming whether they believe, themselves, what they say.”
He reported from the Soviet Union when few Western reporters were permitted there and later from North Vietnam and Cambodia. He said he recognized at an early date the dangers of military engagement in the region.
“I traveled to Vietnam for the first time in the spring of 1953, and found the situation to be drastically different from the New York Times accounts,” he told the Harvard Crimson in 1977. “The French were completely hopeless, and I could see America slowly getting sucked into the tragedy.”
Mr. Worthy taught at institutions including Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and Howard University. In 1976, he published the book “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods: And How Communities Are Resisting Take-overs by Colleges, Hospitals, Churches, Businesses, and Public Agencies.”
Survivors include a sister, Ruth Worthy of Washington.
Raymond H. Boone, the former editor of the Baltimore Afro-American, said in an interview that he admired Mr. Worthy’s “courage and . . . his commitment to the First Amendment on a global level.”
“He wanted people to know what was happening in the world,” Boone said, “and that was reflected in our conversations when I would call him in Boston in the last five years. I would ask him, ‘Bill, how are you doing?’ He would say, ‘Ray, how is the world doing?’ ”
 |
| African American journalist William Worthy with Zhou Enlai in China during 1957. |
MAY 17, 2014
New York Times
William Worthy, a foreign correspondent who in the thick of the Cold War ventured where the United States did not want him to go — including the Soviet Union, China, Cuba — and became the subject of both a landmark federal case concerning travel rights and a ballad by the protest singer Phil Ochs, died on May 4 in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.
His death, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was announced on the website of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Mr. Worthy was a Nieman Foundation fellow in the 1956-57 academic year.
A correspondent for The Afro-American of Baltimore, a weekly newspaper, from 1953 to 1980, Mr. Worthy also contributed freelance reports to CBS News, The New York Post and other publications. He became an international cause célèbre in the early 1960s when, returning from Cuba, he was found guilty of violating United States immigration law.
The son of a distinguished obstetrician, William Worthy Jr. was born in Boston on July 7, 1921.
“Despite the respect and certain privileges derived from membership in a professional ‘black bourgeoisie’ family, my sisters and I were clearly aware, as children, of our ‘inferior’ minority group status,” Mr. Worthy wrote in a 1968 article for The Boston Globe. “ ‘The problem’ was discussed at the dinner table. More importantly, it was all around us.”
After graduating from the Boston Latin School, Mr. Worthy earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bates College in Lewiston, Me., in 1942. In World War II, though an ulcer would have let him be classified 4-F, he chose to become a conscientious objector.
Mr. Worthy began his career as a press aide for the civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph. During his years at The Afro-American, he kept one foot in the realm of direct advocacy, joining Freedom Riders on their pilgrimages through the South and later becoming a close ally of Malcolm X.
As a journalist, Mr. Worthy quickly earned a reputation for venturing into forbidden places to report on the effects of war, revolution and colonialism. In 1955, he spent six weeks in Moscow, interviewing ordinary citizens and the Soviet premier, Nikita S. Khrushchev.
Toward the end of 1956, during his Nieman fellowship, Mr. Worthy, who had spent years petitioning the Chinese government for a visa, learned he had been granted one.
Defying a United States travel ban, he crossed into mainland China from Hong Kong. He was one of the first American journalists admitted there after the United States broke off relations after the 1949 Communist takeover.
He spent 41 days traveling the country, interviewing the premier, Zhou Enlai, as well as people in schools, factories and hospitals.
He also visited the Shanghai prison, where he interviewed American P.O.W.s captured during the Korean War. The United States knew the men were being held somewhere in China, but in several cases Mr. Worthy’s reports were the first to pinpoint their location.
After returning to the United States in 1957, Mr. Worthy tried to renew his passport. The State Department refused.
In a statement, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said, “It is evident from Mr. Worthy’s testimony that should his passport be renewed he would not feel obligated, under present world conditions, to restrict his travel abroad in any way.”
Indeed, Mr. Worthy felt no such obligation. In 1961, without a passport, he went to Cuba, debarking in Havana from a ship bound from the United States for Mexico. He interviewed Fidel Castro and filed articles about the country under Communism, with particular attention to race relations, which he judged far better than those in the United States.
Returning, he was arrested in Florida and indicted on a charge of entering the country illegally — that is, without a passport. (He had shown immigration officers his birth certificate as proof of citizenship.)
In 1962, in a nonjury trial in federal court in Miami — Mr. Worthy’s lawyers included William M. Kunstler — he was found guilty and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment plus nine months’ probation.
The case became a sensation. Rallies on Mr. Worthy’s behalf were held in cities around the world. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell petitioned the United States attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, in support of him.
Mr. Ochs wrote “The Ballad of William Worthy,” which includes these lines:
William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door.
Went down to Cuba, he’s not American anymore.
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.
In 1964, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overturned Mr. Worthy’s conviction, ruling that the lack of a passport was insufficient ground to bar a citizen from re-entering the country. Concurring in the opinion was Judge Griffin B. Bell, a future United States attorney general under President Jimmy Carter.
Mr. Worthy was not granted a new passport until 1968. Over the years, his other travels — with a passport or without — took him to North Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and Algeria.
In 1981, Mr. Worthy and two colleagues traveled to Iran to examine the effects of the Islamic revolution there. He bought a multivolume set of books said to be reprints of intelligence documents taken from the United States Embassy in Tehran after revolutionary militants seized it in 1979.
Though the books were readily available in Iran and were already circulating in Europe, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, deeming them classified, seized them on the journalists’ return to the United States.
Mr. Worthy was able to furnish a duplicate set to The Washington Post. In 1982, after authenticating them, The Post published a series, based partly on their contents, about United States intelligence operations in Iran.
The federal government agreed that year to pay $16,000 to settle a suit by Mr. Worthy and his colleagues over the seizure.
In later years, Mr. Worthy taught journalism at Boston University; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Howard University; and elsewhere. In 2008, he received the Nieman Foundation’s Louis Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.
His survivors include a sister, Ruth Worthy.
Mr. Worthy was the author of a book, “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods,” published in 1976.
In 1982, The Associated Press asked Mr. Worthy why he had brought the Iranian volumes into the United States. His response could well describe what propelled his entire career.
“Americans,” Mr. Worthy said, “have a right to know what’s going on in the world in their name.”
William Worthy, 92; reporter battled US over access to world leaders
By Bryan Marquard
BOSTON GLOBE STAFF
MAY 07, 2014
As a reporter in the late 1950s and early ’60s, William Worthy interviewed a constellation of Communist leaders in their homelands: Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union, Chou En-lai in China, Fidel Castro in Cuba.
When his reporting defied US rules prohibiting visits to foreign foes, though, the Boston-born journalist became part of the news he covered. On Christmas Eve 1956, he slipped into China and broadcast reports for CBS. Upon returning to his Nieman fellowship studies at Harvard, the government refused to renew his passport unless he constrained his travel, and he challenged the State Department ruling all the way to the US Supreme Court.
Mr. Worthy, who was 92 when he died Sunday evening in the Epoch nursing home in Brewster, lost that legal battle and did not get a passport for about a decade. But he prevailed in skirmishes with the federal government over subsequent reporting trips. In the process, he set a constitutional precedent in passport law and inspired a protest song, “The Ballad of William Worthy,” which folk singer Phil Ochs recorded on his 1964 debut album “All the News That’s Fit to Sing”:
William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door,
Went down to Cuba, he’s not American any more,
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
‘You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.’
The song chronicled Mr. Worthy’s decision to travel, absent a passport, to report in Cuba. At trip’s end he was arrested and convicted of entering the United States without a passport.
“According to top civil liberties attorneys in this country, on April 24, 1962, I became the first person ever to be indicted for coming home,” he wrote in The Catholic Worker newspaper that year.
This time Mr. Worthy persuaded a federal appeals court to declare the law unconstitutional and overturn his conviction. “I was out to defeat them in the circles of public opinion and the courts,” he recalled in a 1977 interview with The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper.
Legendary civil rights lawyer William Kunstler jump-started his own career by representing Mr. Worthy in the China and Cuba court battles.
“This was the first time I had ever invalidated a statute,” Kunstler later wrote about the Cuba case, adding: “I had changed the law! I had made a contribution! I felt an enormous thrill and a desire for more of the same.”
During about 40 years as a journalist, Mr. Worthy wrote perceptively and with sweeping historical context about race, civil rights, black militants, student protests, and the anti-Vietnam War movement, interviewing the likes of Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Yet by 2008, his role as groundbreaking journalist had all but faded from view when the Nieman Foundation presented Mr. Worthy the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.
“Throughout his life in journalism, Bill Worthy demonstrated a remarkable spirit of courage and independence in his determination to inform readers about places our government wanted to keep hidden from public view,” Robert Giles, then the Nieman curator, said in 2008.
The Nieman award arrived when Mr. Worthy was 86 and in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
“Of course, he was African-American, and my feeling always was that if he had been a white journalist, he’d be much better known,” said Michael Lindsey, a retired journalist and longtime friend who co-taught a course with Mr. Worthy in the 1980s at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “He had that black journalist tag put on him, but Bill was a journalist that white and black readers could learn a lot from.”
William Worthy Jr. was one of four children, and the only son, born to Dr. William Worthy, a physician, and the former Mabel Posey.
Mr. Worthy’s parents were from the South, and the family lived in Boston’s South End. Growing up, he studied piano and clarinet but wrote in the Globe in 1968 that “despite the respect and certain privileges derived from membership in a professional ‘black bourgeoisie’ family, my sisters and I were clearly aware, as children, of our ‘inferior’ minority group status — from age 3 on. ‘The problem’ was discussed at the dinner table. More importantly, it was all around us.”
In another 1968 essay for the Globe, “From Black Brahmins to Black Power,” he wrote about the “winds of change that have shaped and are shaping Boston’s troubled racial scene.”
In a concluding paragraph that anticipated shifting demographics in Boston and elsewhere, he said he hoped his writing showed “that all the Latin in Latin School, all the gentility in cultured Boston, all the pro-American gods in a white Christian missionary heaven cannot stop the relentless flow of black-yellow-brown history the world over.”
Mr. Worthy graduated from Boston Latin School, was awarded a Burroughs Newsboys’ Foundation scholarship, and received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Bates College in Maine.
He worked as a CBS News correspondent and a reporter for The Afro-American newspaper in Baltimore.
In the mid-1950s, Soviet officials allowed him to use Radio Moscow facilities to broadcast news reports directly to the United States, and at one Kremlin reception, the Globe reported, Mr. Worthy “was singled out by Nikita S. Khrushchev and told to dance with a Russian girl.”
Returning to Boston, Mr. Worthy joined a class of Nieman fellows that included future New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, who months later waited at Logan International Airport to welcome Mr. Worthy home from his rule-breaking trip to China.
Years later, Mr. Worthy’s experiences living in New York City prompted his book “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods,” which examined what he called “unneighborly institutions.” Like corporations, he argued, nonprofits such as churches, hospitals, and universities often expand at the expense of neighborhoods in which those with limited resources are pushed aside, losing their homes.
At the end of the 1970s, he taught at Boston University but was ousted after tangling with the administration when John Silber was president. He later taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and also served on the board of directors of the National Whistleblowers Center.
David Colapinto, the organization’s general counsel, called Mr. Worthy “a great strategist” and mentor who provided helpful advice on cases the nonprofit handled.
A service will be announced for Mr. Worthy, whose only immediate survivor is his older sister Ruth, of Washington, D.C.
In the early 1980s, Mr. Worthy again took on the US government. During a reporting trip to Tehran, he and other journalists were given copies of US documents seized in the Iranian revolution, which US authorities confiscated when they returned to Logan Airport.
After a legal battle, the Reagan administration paid $16,000 in damages in 1982 to Mr. Worthy, Randy Goodman, and Teresa Taylor, and the US Justice Department agreed to destroy fingerprints and investigative records.
“Bill’s primary trait was his integrity,” Lindsey said. “A lot of people thought he was stubborn because he wouldn’t move on any moral issues, but the thing about Bill is that he never really gave up. He got his teeth into something and he went to the end of it.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bmarquard@globe.com.
William Worthy, defiant journalist, dies at 92
By Emily Langer, Published: May 12
Washington Post
William Worthy, a correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper who made news — and inspired a folk song — by challenging U.S. policies to report from China and Cuba in the 1950s and ’60s, died May 4 at a senior living facility in Brewster, Mass. He was 92.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer’s disease, said a friend, Michael Lindsey.
The son of an obstetrician, Mr. Worthy grew up in Boston in a family that was active in progressive causes and that encouraged his intellectual development from an early age. He called himself “anti-colonialist, anti-militarist, anti-imperialist.”
He claimed conscientious objector status during World War II and later pursued a career in journalism with multiple outlets, most prominently with the Baltimore Afro-American. In 1956, along with two other journalists, he defied State Department travel restrictions to visit Communist-led China. At the time he held a Nieman fellowship, a prestigious honor in journalism; Time magazine reported that he was the first U.S. reporter to enter China in seven years.
That 41-day reporting trip — which included an interview with leader Zhou Enlai — was his most noted early act in what he described as his pursuit of the open exchange of information.
Four years later, and without a valid passport, he traveled to Cuba to report on the effects of Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution. When Mr. Worthy returned to the United States, he was convicted of illegally entering the country.
The conviction, later reversed by an appellate court, inspired protest singer Phil Ochs to record the “Ballad of William Worthy” in 1964.
William Worthy isn’t worthy to enter our door, goes the refrain,
Went down to Cuba, he’s not American anymore
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say
You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.
In the early 1980s, Mr. Worthy challenged the U.S. government with his reportage from Iran after the Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Khomeini.
In the course of his reporting, Mr. Worthy obtained copies of documents that were stolen from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran during the hostage crisis and later published in Iran. U.S. government officials seized one set of copies. Mr. Worthy and his colleagues provided another copy to The Washington Post, which published a series of articles based on the documents and other sources.
The journalists later reached a legal settlement with the U.S. government in which the reporters were awarded $16,000 stemming from the confiscation of the volumes.
“Americans have a right to know what’s going on in the world in their name,” he said at the time.
Mr. Worthy reported for media outlets including CBS and was honored in 2008 by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University with an award for “conscience and integrity in Journalism.”
William Worthy Jr. was born July 7, 1921, in Boston. In 1942, he received a bachelor’s degree from Bates College in Maine. In the early years of his career, he was a public relations assistant to civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph.
In his reporting, Mr. Worthy seemed to seek out perspectives not widely understood in the West. After his trip to China, he said the position of the average Chinese was, “We like the American people but we don’t agree with their government.”
He added that he had “no way of fathoming whether they believe, themselves, what they say.”
He reported from the Soviet Union when few Western reporters were permitted there and later from North Vietnam and Cambodia. He said he recognized at an early date the dangers of military engagement in the region.
“I traveled to Vietnam for the first time in the spring of 1953, and found the situation to be drastically different from the New York Times accounts,” he told the Harvard Crimson in 1977. “The French were completely hopeless, and I could see America slowly getting sucked into the tragedy.”
Mr. Worthy taught at institutions including Boston University, the University of Massachusetts and Howard University. In 1976, he published the book “The Rape of Our Neighborhoods: And How Communities Are Resisting Take-overs by Colleges, Hospitals, Churches, Businesses, and Public Agencies.”
Survivors include a sister, Ruth Worthy of Washington.
Raymond H. Boone, the former editor of the Baltimore Afro-American, said in an interview that he admired Mr. Worthy’s “courage and . . . his commitment to the First Amendment on a global level.”
“He wanted people to know what was happening in the world,” Boone said, “and that was reflected in our conversations when I would call him in Boston in the last five years. I would ask him, ‘Bill, how are you doing?’ He would say, ‘Ray, how is the world doing?’ ”
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