I get a fair amount of hate mail. We’re talking about people who call you the N-word, the B-word, the C-word. I just say, “I don’t think we agree on this, but I really appreciate you sharing your thoughts.” That is so disarming, because they want you to scream and yell.
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My mother was a big newspaper reader — the Sun-Times, mainly. We’d read newspapers at the breakfast and dinner table. She was very politically active with Rainbow PUSH, back when it was Operation Breadbasket. She would drag me to Saturday morning meetings there. I grew up hearing her talk about standing up for your rights, the importance of voting, and the importance of belonging to things. And I loved to write. That’s how I evolved into journalism.
Before graduate school at [Northwestern’s] Medill, I took a couple of graduate-level courses at the University of Southern California. I had an esteemed professor who hated my work and threw everything back at me. It was eye-opening, because I already had a journalism degree, but I still wasn’t where I needed to be as a journalist or even as a writer. At the end of the semester, he told me, “Go into another line of work, because you’re never going to be a journalist.” That’s such terrible advice to give a young person just starting out. But maybe I wouldn’t have pushed as hard if not for that kick in the butt. When I got my first job at The Chicago Reporter, I sent him a copy of my first story and said, “Hello, remember me?”
The Chicago Reporter was great grounding for me. Nobody wants to talk to an investigative reporter. That toughens you up and helps you develop more skills to get the story. You have to figure out your way around the no.
I left reporting in 1985 to be one of Harold Washington’s spokespeople. I’d never worked in government before, but he was a history-making, crusading, paradigm-changing mayor, and I wanted to be part of that. Mayor Washington thrived on politics, he thrived on the Council Wars. He loved to mix it up and take on the enemy. If he got harsh criticism, he would just give it back. But he never got personal. He stayed above the fray that way.
I served on a board with Barack Obama at the Woods Fund when he was a state senator. He was a lot younger than most other board members, but he was always the smartest person in the room when we were discussing public policy or what was going on in the city. He also had a huge ego. When I got a professorship at DePaul, he offered some unsolicited advice about teaching: “Well, you’re going to learn a lot.” I had taught before at Medill, so I found it patronizing.
One of the reasons I got into journalism is to make things better for communities that have gotten a raw deal. There’s a lot of pressure for people like me. We feel like we have to speak for our people all the time. That’s pressure I don’t really want. We’re a diverse community with different perspectives. And if I fail, somehow that means Black people failed.
Mike Thomas is a freelance writer for Chicago magazine.