Samuel F. Yette–The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America-Videos
Black Genocide–Maafa 21
“…They were stolen from their homes, locked in chains and taken across an ocean. And for more than 200 years, their blood and sweat would help to build the richest and most powerful nation the world has ever known.
But when slavery ended, their welcome was over. America’s wealthy elite had decided it was time for them to disappear and they were not particular about how it might be done.
What you are about to see is that the plan these people set in motion 150 years ago is still being carried out today. So don’t think that this is history. It is not. It is happening right here, and it’s happening right now. …”
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“I remember my mother telling me: ‘Keep stretching your arms for learning. Someday, somebody will ask you to show how long they are, and they won’t ask their color.’ ’’
Samuel Yette:African American Journalist
Samuel Yette:Jessie Wood’s Trial
Samuel Yette:The Challenge of Being an Objective Reporter
Samuel Yette:First Black Reporter at Newsweek
Samuel Yette:My Book, “The Choice”
Background Articles and Videos
Samuel Yette:One of My Proudest Moments
Samuel Yette :College as a Family Tradition
Samuel Yette:The Air Force and Officers Candidate School
Samuel Yette:Racial Discrimination in the Air Force
Samuel F. Yette, 81, educator, journalist, voice for civil rights
“…Samuel F. Yette, a journalist, author, and educator who became an influential and sometimes incendiary voice on civil rights, died Jan. 21 at an assisted-living facility in Laurel, Md. He was 81 and had Alzheimer’s disease.
As a young reporter, he covered the civil rights movement for black publications including the Afro-American newspaper and Ebony magazine. In the mid-1960s, he served as executive secretary of the Peace Corps and special assistant for civil rights to the director of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which administered antipoverty programs.
In 1968, Mr. Yette became the first black Washington correspondent for Newsweek. He said his three years at the magazine were rocky and blamed his firing in 1971 on the publication of his book “The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America.’’
The book asserted that the federal government showed a pattern of repression against African-Americans that, left unaddressed, could lead to genocide.
“Blacks are given a choice in this country,’’ Mr. Yette wrote. “To accept their miserable lot or die.’’’
He cited his experiences with the Johnson administration and the Office of Economic Opportunity and asserted that even government programs aimed at helping the most vulnerable citizens were vehicles to repress them further.
In the book, Mr. Yette used contemporary accounts from newspapers and government documents to back up his statements. …”
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.” …”
Samuel Yette and The Choice: Black Survival in the United States
“…Yette said that he could have kept his nice job had, ‘I been a nigger instead of Black, a spy instead of a reporter, a tool instead of a man, I could have stayed at Newsweek indefinitely.’”
Samuel Yette died last week and the choice he wrote of, a choice long ago reached by this country, is a choice we’ve still not caught up to. It is a choice of this nation to more or less discard an increasingly unnecessary Black population and a choice poised to that Black population as to how to respond. Our range of acceptable responses seems to have dwindled since Yette wrote the book and much of the bases upon which he developed his concerns seem to have only worsened. Having suffered heavy losses in the fight against the national will to discard its Black population, we have accepted the choices often imposed on the defeated, the colonized.
Yette was the first Black Washington correspondent at Newsweek magazine and author, in 1971, of The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America, the book that got him fired from that position. He said he was compelled to write his book after witnessing an absence of change over the decade of struggle in the 1960s. He said that he could have kept his nice job had, “I been a nigger instead of Black, a spy instead of a reporter, a tool instead of a man, I could have stayed at Newsweek indefinitely.” Instead Yette wrote in The Choice that at the dawn of the 1970s the United States was simultaneously at war with the “colonized colored people of Indochina” and “the colonized colored people of the United States.” He referenced the then exploding numbers of Black un- and under-employment and the statement made by the labor secretary that the nation was “piling up a human scrap heap” of surplus laborers. Yette concluded that “black Americans are obsolete people.”And since then these rates of un- and under-employment have risen while so many more of the Black surplus are siphoned off into the prison-industrial-complex, the post-1970s big boom business which scholar Lawrence Bobo also says is creating “Black internal colonies.” It is no wonder then that the Economic Policy Institute report from 2008 concluded then that Black America is in a “permanent recession.”
“Black elected leadership means nothing in the face of a system whose choice has been made regarding Black people.”
…”
http://www.blackagendareport.com/content/samuel-yette-and-choice-black-survival-united-states
Samuel Yette Biography
“…Samuel F. Yette, the author of The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival in America, was born July 2, 1929 in Harriman, Tennessee to Frank Mack Yette and his wife Cora Lee Rector Yette. The family name is pronounced “yet.” Growing up in segregated Tennessee during the Great Depression, Yette attended Jamieson Elementary School in Harriman and Campbell High School in nearby Rockwood, Tennessee. Campbell principal John Brown Olinger mentored Yette, who graduated in 1947. Enrolling in Morristown College in 1947, he was a student at Tennessee State University from 1948 to1951.
Joining the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War and serving from 1951 to 1953, Yette returned to teach and coach at Campbell High School from 1953 to 1954 and at Howard High School in Chattanooga from 1954 to 1955. Between 1954 and 1956, Yette worked as a sports writer for The Chattanooga Times and a sports caster for WMFS radio. Yette completed his B.S. in English from Indiana University in 1956 and his M.A. in journalism and government in 1959. Also in 1956, Yette was teamed with photographer Gordon Parks as a special correspondent for a four part series on civil rights that appeared in LIFE Magazine. In 1956 he became a reporter for the Afro-American Newspapers in Baltimore and Washington, before serving as associate editor of Ebony from1957 to 1959. That year, Yette was named director of information for Tuskegee University, where he remained until 1962. As their first black reporter, he covered City Hall for the Dayton Journal Herald in 1962. Yette became the Peace Corps’s press liaison for Sargent Shriver’s visit to Africa in 1963 and was made the executive secretary of the Peace Corps and in 1964. He was then appointed special assistant for civil rights to the director of the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, a position he held until 1967.
Becoming the first black Washington correspondent for Newsweek in 1968, Yette covered urban violence and began writing The Choice: The Issue of Black Survival In America. The Choice, published in 1971, was an African American insider’s view of the relationship between the Vietnam War, the War On Poverty and African American survival. For The Choice, Yette garnered a Special Book Award from the Capitol Press Club in 1971, and the Top Non-Fiction Work of Distinction from the Black Academy of Arts and Letters in 1972. Featured on PBS’s Black Journal, Yette lectured widely.
In 1972, Yette accepted a position as professor of journalism at Howard University and still wrote columns and commentary for the Miami Times, Tennessee Tribune, Philadelphia Tribune, Richmond Free Press, Nashville Banner and the Afro-American Newspapers and for magazines like Black World, Black Scholar, Black Collegian and Black Books Bulletin. He founded Cottage Books, Inc. and republished The Choice in 1982. In addition, Yette was political commentator for BET in 1987 and 1988 and hosted Talk TV Politics on WHMM-TV (now WHUT) from 1991-1992. Currently living in Silver Spring, Maryland, Yette, a widower with two grown sons, is still an active photojournalist and author. …”
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