Thomas C. Fleming

[8] Fleming covered nine national political conventions and met many of the leading black intellectuals and celebrities of his day, including Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Jackie Robinson, Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.[2][9][10] He received numerous public honors for his work, including the Career Achievement Award for Print from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists,[11] an annual scholarship in his name at his alma mater,[12][13] and accolades in the Congressional Record.

[6] When she died, he spent several years with his father in Harlem, New York City before heading for Chico, a town in north central California, to join his mother and sister.

In 1934, he worked briefly as a columnist for the Oakland Tribune,[14] which made him the only black journalist for a daily newspaper on the West Coast; no other would follow for almost 30 years.

[19] Fleming's closest friend since 1935 was Carlton Goodlett, an African American scholar from Omaha, who earned a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley in 1938 at age 23, then left to attend medical school in Nashville.

During the war, San Francisco's black population grew by more than 665 percent,[20] and Fleming urged Goodlett to return to the Bay Area and establish a medical practice there.

[10] The Goodlett-Fleming partnership gave voice to all the major civil rights struggles in San Francisco, such as the hiring practices of the police and fire departments, public transportation companies, hotels and automobile dealerships; discrimination by hospitals, landlords, city government and the media; police brutality; and the dismantling of the city's major black neighborhood by the urban renewal program, which local blacks cynically dubbed "Negro removal.

"[21] Fleming got the inside story on everything from the city's race riot of 1966[22] and the student strike at San Francisco State University – which gave birth to the nation's first ethnic studies department in 1969 – to the Jonestown tragedy of November 1978, which claimed more than 900 lives.

[19] The Sun-Reporter's political power first became evident in 1949, when Cecil F. Poole was named San Francisco's first black district attorney after receiving the newspaper's endorsement.

[4] In 1962, on Fleming's recommendation, Sun-Reporter alumnus Ben Williams was hired by the San Francisco Examiner, becoming the first African-American reporter for any daily paper in the Bay Area.

That year the address of San Francisco City Hall was renamed 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place by then-Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., whose political career had been kick-started by the Sun-Reporter.

[23][24] From 1963 to 1997, Fleming held court at the Sun-Reporter building in San Francisco's Fillmore district, writing articles, receiving phone calls, and greeting visitors as they entered.

But in April 1997, when the newspaper moved across town to the Bayview district – which had replaced the Fillmore as the city's largest African American neighborhood – Fleming retired from his day-to-day duties.

[1] The Thomas C. Fleming papers, including photographs, certificates, programs, manuscripts, and newspaper clippings documenting his life and career as a journalist, are housed at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland, California.