Jack Newfield
Jack Abraham Newfield (February 18, 1938 – December 20, 2004) was an American journalist, columnist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist.
"[4] A career beat reporter, Newfield wrote prolifically about modern society, culture, and politics, on a range of topics relevant to urban life, such as municipal corruption, the police, and labor unions, and also professional sports, especially baseball and boxing, as well as contemporary music.
[5][6][7] He wrote numerous books about modern social and political subjects, including A Prophetic Minority (1966) and Robert Kennedy: A Memoir (1969).
During the 1960s, he was drawn to the Civil Rights Movement and the antiwar New Left politics of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) under the tutelage of Michael Harrington.
He was arrested in the South at a sit-in in 1963 and spent two days in a Mississippi jail with Michael Schwerner, who was murdered in that state in June 1964 with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
[15] Newfield served as a copy boy at the New York Daily Mirror and later became editor of the West Side News, a local weekly.
Newfield said he set out to "combine activism with writing" and advised like-minded journalists to "create a constituency for reform and don't stop until you have made some progress or positive results."
Ardently pro-labor, he made a principled choice to support a 1990 strike by the newspaper's unionized reporters and refused to cross the picket line, resigning his editorship.
Since 2006, Hunter College awards the Jack Newfield Professorship each spring to a distinguished journalist representative of his legacy of investigative journalism.
[27][28][29][30][31] In City for Sale (1988), Newfield and longtime Village Voice collaborator Wayne Barrett chronicled patronage-driven municipal corruption in New York during the three-term mayoralty of Ed Koch.
His series of articles on wrongly convicted and imprisoned Brooklyn resident Bobby McLoughlin helped to exonerate and release him from prison in 1986.
[6] In 2005, a commemorative sculpture by William Behrends was installed at the center of a circular lawn and perimeter walkway designed by Ken Smith, inscribed with commentary related to the lives and achievements of the athletes, in front of a Brooklyn ball field, Key Span Park.
[49] Still working until the end of his life, Jack Newfield died in New York City, succumbing to kidney cancer on December 20, 2004, at the age of 66.
