Samuel F. Yette, a reporter, teacher, author and photojournalist whose publication of the 1971 book The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America, coincided with his dismissal as the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine, died Friday at an assisted living facility in Laurel, Md.
He was 81 and had Alzheimer’s disease, Yette’s son Michael Yette said.
“My dad would like to be known for teaching,” Michael Yette said. “He was a natural teacher, and he wanted to spread knowledge and wisdom to particularly his people to help them advance the lives of his people, and journalism was his tool of preference in doing that.”
Yette’s controversial Vietnam-era book The Choice, however, put him in headlines. It came to be used as a textbook on 50 college campuses, including DePaul University, the University of Chicago and the University of Nebraska, he said, as well as at traditionally Black schools such as Howard University.
“The book dealt with things they did not want people to know about at the time,” Yette told the Tennessee Tribune, which he joined as a columnist in 1996. “There were those well-placed in our government who were determined to have a final solution for the race issue in this country — not unlike Hitler’s Final Solution for Jews 50 years earlier in Germany. I wrote this and documented it. It caused the Nixon White House to say to Newsweek in effect, ‘Don’t come back until you are rid of him.’”
Yette charged that he had become “unacceptable on the scene” as a correspondent for Newsweek as a result of the book, and filed suit. Michael Yette said that his dad won the wrongful termination case in a lower court but that Newsweek won on appeal. Osborn Elliott, editor-in-chief of Newsweek, said then, “The decision to dismiss Mr. Yette was made on purely professional grounds.”
When Black scholars commemorated The Choice’s 13th reprinting in 1991, Ronald A. Taylor wrote in the Washington Times that Yette asserted that the book “best documents the genocidal conclusion” held by many about the effect of government policies on Blacks.
Yette was born in Harriman, Tenn., in 1929, according to a biographical piece in 1996 in the Tennessee Tribune. He attended Morristown College in that state, earned a bachelor’s degree at Tennessee State University, and went on to secure a master’s at Indiana University.
“Yette founded Tennessee State University’s The Meter — a publication that for more than 60 years has gone on to train, educate and provide practical journalism experience to thousands of TSU graduates ...” alumnus Marshall A. Latimore, who now works at the school, wrote to Journal-isms.
When the Tribune piece was written, Yette was a Washington correspondent and columnist for the Richmond Free Press, the Philadelphia Tribune and the Tennessee Tribune.
In 2005, Yette returned to Tennessee to become a writer in residence at Knoxville College. But he took ill there, and his sons, Michael and Frederick Yette, brought him home to Maryland in 2008, the two told Journal-isms.
“He was a warm intelligent man who loved his family greatly,” Alexander, asked for his thoughts on Yette, told Journal-isms.
Culled from:
The Michigan Citizen
He was 81 and had Alzheimer’s disease, Yette’s son Michael Yette said.
“My dad would like to be known for teaching,” Michael Yette said. “He was a natural teacher, and he wanted to spread knowledge and wisdom to particularly his people to help them advance the lives of his people, and journalism was his tool of preference in doing that.”
Yette’s controversial Vietnam-era book The Choice, however, put him in headlines. It came to be used as a textbook on 50 college campuses, including DePaul University, the University of Chicago and the University of Nebraska, he said, as well as at traditionally Black schools such as Howard University.
“The book dealt with things they did not want people to know about at the time,” Yette told the Tennessee Tribune, which he joined as a columnist in 1996. “There were those well-placed in our government who were determined to have a final solution for the race issue in this country — not unlike Hitler’s Final Solution for Jews 50 years earlier in Germany. I wrote this and documented it. It caused the Nixon White House to say to Newsweek in effect, ‘Don’t come back until you are rid of him.’”
Yette charged that he had become “unacceptable on the scene” as a correspondent for Newsweek as a result of the book, and filed suit. Michael Yette said that his dad won the wrongful termination case in a lower court but that Newsweek won on appeal. Osborn Elliott, editor-in-chief of Newsweek, said then, “The decision to dismiss Mr. Yette was made on purely professional grounds.”
When Black scholars commemorated The Choice’s 13th reprinting in 1991, Ronald A. Taylor wrote in the Washington Times that Yette asserted that the book “best documents the genocidal conclusion” held by many about the effect of government policies on Blacks.
Yette was born in Harriman, Tenn., in 1929, according to a biographical piece in 1996 in the Tennessee Tribune. He attended Morristown College in that state, earned a bachelor’s degree at Tennessee State University, and went on to secure a master’s at Indiana University.
“Yette founded Tennessee State University’s The Meter — a publication that for more than 60 years has gone on to train, educate and provide practical journalism experience to thousands of TSU graduates ...” alumnus Marshall A. Latimore, who now works at the school, wrote to Journal-isms.
When the Tribune piece was written, Yette was a Washington correspondent and columnist for the Richmond Free Press, the Philadelphia Tribune and the Tennessee Tribune.
In 2005, Yette returned to Tennessee to become a writer in residence at Knoxville College. But he took ill there, and his sons, Michael and Frederick Yette, brought him home to Maryland in 2008, the two told Journal-isms.
“He was a warm intelligent man who loved his family greatly,” Alexander, asked for his thoughts on Yette, told Journal-isms.
Culled from:
The Michigan Citizen
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