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.

The Cooper Square office of the Village Voice , where Newfield contributed over 700 published articles over his career
The entrance to 35 Charlton Street in Greenwich Village , where Newfield lived for most of his life