[2] He rose to fame while a reporter at The New York Times when he refused to disclose information to the FBI and the Nixon administration involving his sources in the Black Panther party.
He was the lone reporter to witness the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April 1968 and he was on the streets of Chicago in 1968, covering the riots as the police challenged demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention.
Caldwell covered the trial of Angela Davis, the controversial black scholar accused of a central role in the murder of a Marin County, California, judge during an escape attempt from San Quentin Prison.
Jesse Jackson during his historic run for the presidency in 1984, and in Africa he covered the fall of the white regime and election of the first black government in Zimbabwe.
In April 1994, three years before the Abner Louima incident, he reported the story of six Haitian male cab drivers who came forward after being raped and sodomized by a police officer.
This was based on Caldwell, then with The New York Times, refusing to appear before a federal grand jury and disclose confidential information involving his sources in the Black Panther Party.
Writer-in-Residence at Hampton University, VA in addition to teaching, he has organized efforts to videotape/audiotape African-American journalists selected for an oral history collection.