When Samuel Yette arrived on the campus of Tennessee State University in Nashville from the small town of Harriman, Tenn., some of his fellow students sensed he was destined for a career of achievement.
Over the course of the next half century, Yette would make his mark in journalism, education, public service, photography and as an author. No dust would ever gather beneath his shoes. Yette, 81, died Friday evening at an assisted living facility in Laurel, Md., after a long battle with Alzheimer’s, according to his family.
“Sam showed promise in college,” says Xernona Clayton, founder and president of the Trumpet Awards and a classmate of Yette’s. “He was focused. He knew that he was going someplace. He wanted to make it big and he did.”
Yette was always an achiever. In 1950, he started The Meter, Tennessee State’s campus newspaper. The paper continues publication today. He would endure the racial segregation policies of the time and earn a master’s in journalism from Indiana University, where he also wrote for the school newspaper.
By the mid-1960’s, after stints at several newspapers, Life and Ebony magazines and in college public relations, Yette found himself in Washington, D.C., serving as executive secretary of the Peace Corps alongside the late Sargent Shriver, who also died earlier this month. A few years later, Yette was appointed the first Black Washington correspondent for Newsweek magazine. His coverage of Capitol Hill reflected his passion and great sense of the institutionalized racism that still pervaded much of federal Washington.
In 1971, Yette would author The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America. The provocative, non-fiction book suggested that emerging federal policies being discussed by then President Richard Nixon and Nixon administration officials — such as expanded abortion opportunities and birth control — were converging to promote Black genocide. The book created a national firestorm, and although it as widely praised in Black academic circles Yette always cited the furor it incited as a factor in his separation from Newsweek. His termination from the magazine sparked a bitter, seven-year legal battle, which was finally settled.
A year later, Yette was teaching journalism at Howard University. During his decade-plus tenure there he taught scores of aspiring college students and eventually completed a photo essay book, Washington and Two Marches, 1963 and 1983. The book captured the images and faces of the historic 1963 March on Washington and the commemorative 1983 march. The book was published by Cottage Books, a small publishing house Yette founded in Washington.
