Ronald Smothers, a reporter who covered racial turmoil as well as milestones for African Americans in a career spanning nearly four decades, including 35 years at The New York Times, where he served as Atlanta bureau chief during the bombing there at the 1996 Summer Olympics, died on April 24 in Wilmington, Del. He was 79.
His death, at a nursing home, followed a stroke last year, his daughter, Val Dorah Smothers, said.
Mr. Smothers was among a small wave of African American reporters hired by nearly all-white newsrooms in the late 1960s with the expectation they could gain access to Black sources and bring insights during a turbulent period of the civil rights movement. He considered it his role to ensure that Black social and political trends were reflected in news coverage.
“Being a Black journalist in those days was a calling as much as a profession,” Jack E. White, a friend of Mr. Smothers who worked for Time magazine for 29 years as a correspondent and editor, said in an interview.
Mr. Smothers once called himself “a riot baby” because he cut his teeth as a journalist covering racial uprisings in American cities. Weeks after landing an internship at The Washington Post following college graduation, he was sent to Newark in July 1967 to report on looting and armed conflict that claimed at least 26 lives, triggered by the police beating of a Black taxi driver.
The next year, hours after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Mr. Smothers was dispatched to 14th Street Northwest in Washington to take the pulse of the tense streets. He fell in with a crowd led by Stokely Carmichael, the young militant who had coined the phrase “Black Power” and later took the name Kwame Ture. When a man in the crowd brandished a handgun, Mr. Carmichael seized it and shouted to his angry followers, according to Mr. Smothers: “You don’t have these. Go home.”
His report, phoned into the newsroom, was printed by The Post, seeming to contradict an account in The Times that Mr. Carmichael told the crowd to “go home and get your guns.”
Four days of looting and fires followed, claiming 13 lives. The Justice Department investigated Mr. Carmichael for inciting the riot, but no charges were brought.
“Prominently cited in those reports of an investigation was The New York Times’s erroneous version of the very encounter I had witnessed,” Mr. Smothers wrote in a reminiscence years later for Journal-isms, a website that reports on diversity in the news business.
Mr. Smothers left The Post soon after to follow a girlfriend to New York. The Times hired him in 1972 on the Metropolitan desk, where during the next decade his beats included City Hall, state government in Albany and suburban Westchester County.
Mr. Smothers soon joined a class-action suit against The Times that claimed the company discriminated against minority groups in hiring, pay and promotions. The suit was settled in 1980 with the company agreeing to commit more resources to minority recruitment and training, but with no provision for back pay or promotions.
Four years later, Mr. Smothers covered the historic but unsuccessful Democratic presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and progressive vision drew 3.2 million primary votes and made him the first serious Black contender for national office.
That same year, Mr. Smothers traveled to Syria with Mr. Jackson, who won the release of a downed U.S. Navy flyer after meeting with President Hafez al-Assad. Mr. Smothers’s dramatic account with a Damascus dateline led the newspaper’s front page on Jan. 4, 1984.
Mr. Smothers was interviewed for a Times article that March about whether Black reporters were pulling punches in covering Mr. Jackson, after it emerged that the candidate had used a slur for Jews, “Hymies,” that had gone unreported for weeks. Mr. Smothers said the scrutiny implied that “we are less professional as Black reporters and more susceptible than white reporters to the pressures that all reporters feel,” which he strongly denied.
For nearly a decade beginning in 1988, Mr. Smothers roamed widely across the South as a reporter in the Atlanta bureau.
“Ron was always ready to hop on a plane or hit the road,” Peter Applebome, who became the Atlanta bureau chief in 1989, recalled. “He was quite a gregarious guy, and I was always impressed how many sources he cultivated around the region. You walked into a courthouse and someone would invariably ask about Ron.”
Mr. Smothers succeeded Mr. Applebome as bureau chief in 1994. The terrorist bombing at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta during the 1996 Summer Games killed one person and injured more than 100 others and consumed the Times bureau for months.
“He was a clear head amid the chaos of an awful night and a long and dramatic aftermath,” said Kevin Sack, the lead Times reporter covering the bombing.
Mr. Smothers returned to the Metro desk in 1997, this time reporting about state politics in New Jersey, where he remained for 10 years until leaving the paper in 2007. He racked up more than 3,000 bylines during his Times career, a measure of his appetite to chase immediate news rather than pursue the slower grind of enterprise articles or investigations.
Ronald Eric Smothers was born on Sept. 3, 1946, in Washington, the only child of Warren Smothers, the owner of a janitorial services business, and Emily (Merritt) Smothers, a kindergarten teacher.
In 1967, he received a bachelor’s degree in English from Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y.
After retiring from The Times, Mr. Smothers taught journalism at the University of Delaware.
His marriages to Brenda Norris and Diane Weathers, who became editor in chief of Essence magazine, ended in divorce. In addition to his daughter, from his first marriage, he is survived by a son, also from his first marriage, DeJoseph Smothers; and a granddaughter.
Mr. White, who first met Mr. Smothers in high school, recalled that the teenage Ron “was then, as he remained for the rest of his life, a very cool and very popular guy.”
An internal Times personnel memo from 1973 nodded at the young reporter’s personal style, describing him as favoring “platform shoes, bells, flares, floppy bow ties, fitted suits and the like.”
“Ron was on top of a lot of Black cultural stuff,” Mr. White added. “I remember that he introduced me to the writing of Ishmael Reed and Albert Murray, jazz and blues from artists like bassist Ron Carter and bluesman James ‘Blood’ Ulmer, and plays and movies from Melvin Van Peebles.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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