Wallace Terry

2024

By Ray E. Boomhower

Raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, by his mother, Nancy, and stepfather, Frederick G. Schatz—whose interracial marriage had shocked both the city’s Black and white communities—Wallace H. Terry was urged by his stepfather to rise above the racism he faced daily in his hometown, where African Americans could not sit down and eat with white customers in local restaurants, register as guests in downtown hotels or swim in public pools.

The youngster discovered, however, that he was always welcome at the city’s public library. One eventful day, Terry asked a librarian for her recommendation about a new book to read. He remembered that she thrust into his hands a volume with what he considered “an unpronounceable title” —"The Iliad,” the Greek epic poem by Homer.

Baffled about what he had been given, Terry felt some relief when the librarian told him: “Wally, don’t worry. It’s a word you can learn like any other words. And as you make your way through these pages, if you have trouble with other words, I’ll help you to the dictionary and we’ll see how we can work our way out of it.” He recalled that he began to realize that he had in his hands a book about war with a “very important message.”

A few years later, as a student at Shortridge High School, while enrolled in a fourth-year Latin class taught by Josephine Bliss, he was introduced to another book about war, Virgil’s “The Aeneid.” Burned into his brain were its opening lines: “Arms and the man I sing, who, forced by fate / And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, / Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.” Terry began to wonder if perhaps someday he could write a book.

If he wished to become an author, Terry certainly attended the right school. Shortridge had earned a reputation for emphasizing writing skills to its students. Shortridge even sponsored the country’s first daily high school newspaper, the Shortridge Daily Echo. Terry became part of the Echo team, rising to serve as editor of the newspaper’s Tuesday edition, the first Black to do so.

Terry graduated from Shortridge in 1955. Applying to several colleges, he picked Brown University, an Ivy League institution in Providence, Rhode Island, attending thanks to a U.S. Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps scholarship.           

Visiting the Daily Herald’s offices during its freshman recruitment period, Terry announced to the newspaper’s staff that he would one day be its editor.

Reflecting about his boldness, he said it delayed his admission to the newspaper’s staff.

“I had to heel longer than anyone in history just to cool me down,” said Terry.

He eventually became a reporter and the first Black to serve as the Daily Herald’s editor in chief. Before his senior year, Terry worked at the Washington Post, where he “was treated like a regular reporter [and] paid union scale. That was phenomenal because I was only 19 when they offered me the job.”

The summer after his freshman year, he freelanced articles for the Indianapolis News. For his second summer at the newspaper, he carried coffee to publisher Eugene C. Pulliam’s office and wrote obituaries. He recalled that for many years he kept a photocopy of the first check he received from the News.

After graduating from Brown in 1959, Terry received a Rockefeller theological fellowship to the University of Chicago and became an ordained minister with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). He missed journalism, however, and sought a part-time job in the field.

Terry received career advice from Fletcher Martin, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter and the first Black to win a prestigious Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, an honor Terry later received. Learning that Terry had worked the previous summer for the Post, Martin told him: “Son, it took me 20 years to get where you got to before you even got out of college. You don’t need to talk to me. You need to go back to the Washington Post.” Martin called Al Friendly, the Post’s managing editor, asking him to hire Terry; Friendly did.

After about a year with the newspaper, Terry became deeply involved in covering the civil rights movement. He did a series of articles about the Nation of Islam, interacting with a charismatic minister named Malcolm X, as well writing about protest marches in the South. Terry continued to cover the struggle for civil rights after moving from the Post to Time magazine.

Terry had his first opportunity for an overseas assignment in early 1967 when he suggested that the magazine do a cover article about Black soldiers fighting in Vietnam. Richard Clurman, Time’s chief of correspondents, called Terry to ask him to fly to Vietnam to help with the story; Terry accepted the assignment.

The piece, which ran in the magazine’s May 26, 1967, issue, pointed out that for the first time in the country’s history, Black soldiers were “fully integrated in combat, fruitfully employed in positions of leadership, and fiercely proud of their performance.”

Impressed by Terry’s work, Clurman asked him to return to Vietnam for a two-year stint in Time’s Saigon bureau, working as its deputy chief. Terry quickly accepted the assignment, as Vietnam represented “the biggest story in the world.” Also, in the back of his mind, he thought he could produce a book about his experiences.

Terry learned that racial relations among American troops in Vietnam had deteriorated from the hopeful story Time had published just a year before. After traveling all over the country, from the demilitarized zone to the Mekong Delta, interviewing American forces, Terry saw that the gung-ho professional soldiers who had volunteered for service early in the war had been superseded by draftees who were much more cynical and “filled with a new sense of black pride and purpose.”

Terry set out to use the information he had gleaned in notebooks and tape cassettes to produce a book about the war, leaving his job at Time to do so. As he sorted through the material and wrote, Terry supported his family by serving as a consultant to the U.S. Air Force, teaching journalism at Howard University and working for an advertising agency. Terry wrote his more than 600-page manuscript as both a narrative and oral history, almost a “series of one-act plays or like a film script.”

Finally, after suffering numerous rejections from publishers, Random House, in 1982, expressed interest in his work. Erroll McDonald, an editor at the publisher, suggested that instead of a narrative the book should be done as an oral history.

From a list of 50 possible subjects, he featured 20 in “Bloods,” with the common thread among them being they were Black veterans talking about what they had faced during the war and after. “Bloods” achieved for Terry what he had set out to accomplish, eventually serving as the basis for a program by the PBS television series “Frontline” and adapted for the National Public Radio program “All Things Considered.”

Terry died on May 29, 2003, from a rare, undiagnosed vascular disease.

Note: Quotes in this story were drawn from various historical resources.

Photo courtesy Indianapolis Recorder Collection, Indiana Historical Society