Journalist and Columbia University professor Phyllis Garland speaks at Point Park University in 1990.
Photograph courtesy of Point Park University
Everyone who has lived in McKeesport and the surrounding area for a long time knows that our city has a reputation. As an outsider looking in, it may be difficult to see all of the good that our city has to offer. But the good is evident all around us, especially throughout the community and its people. Phyllis Garland was no exception. Her family was well known for their artistry and entrepreneurship.
Unfortunately, she passed away in November 2006 from complications of cancer. She was a gem from McKeesport and she accomplished a lot in her time here. I first learned of Phyllis from my time as an actor at the McKeesport Regional History & Heritage Center’s Annual Living History Tour. My assignment was to portray her and tell her life story. The first time I read the script, I immediately learned that she was everything I want to be in this world. We shared many similarities from where we grew up, such as having the same alma mater and choosing the same career path of journalism.
Phyllis grew up in Christy Park as one of the only two African-American families who lived in the mostly Italian neighborhood. In fact ,she lived a few streets over from where I live now. Ms. JoAnne Rogers, a good family friend of Phyllis, said, “The most striking thing about Phyllis was that she couldn't write for the Red and Blue, but she became a journalist.” The Red and Blue is the student newspaper at the high school and due to the changes over the years, I became senior editor of the same paper that once rejected my hero.
Garland graduated from McKeesport Area Senior High School in 1953 and went on to attend Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. After her college graduation in 1957, she returned to McKeesport to work at the Pittsburgh Courier as an editor and reporter like her mother Hazel Garland. Her mother was the first African American journalist to write a regular television column, "Video Vignettes," which became one of the longest running television columns in the newspaper’s history.
Garland began working at the paper in 1963 in the midst of the civil rights movement. At the Courier she was assigned to cover many hot topics such as the March on Washington and a history series on African-Americans in the labor movement. She also wrote stories about housing, education and the arts. As her work became more and more popular, she earned a Golden Quill Award. Soon after she left the Courier for a position at Ebony Magazine. While working at Ebony, Ms. Garland covered many great stories including ones about the first African Americans elected to public office to a profile about Martin Luther King Jr. and his life’s work. She took her work very seriously, and even cut her hair to really capture the essence of a story she was working on about the “natural look”.
While working at Ebony, Phyllis grew close with many of the legendary jazz artists like Isaac Hayes. She was so fascinated with that music genre it became the topic of her first book, "The Sound of Soul: The Story of Black Music. In the late 1980s, PBS interviewed Ms. Garland for a documentary about the Black press and what role she thought it played in society. She said it was "never intended to be objective because it didn't see the white press being objective. It often took a position. It had an attitude. This was a press of advocacy. There was news, but the news had an admitted and deliberate slant."
In 1973, Garland began a new career as a college professor at Columbia University teaching a class about reporting on cultural affairs. She also was the founder and administrator of the National Arts Journalism Program. Phyllis was known to be very passionate about her work and she shared her enthusiasm with her students. She believed that the arts were an important and fundamental part of education. Ms. Garland loved jazz music and every year she would invite a class to her Eighth Avenue apartment in Greenwich Village for a listening party where she would share music from her jazz collection. When her friends and family from McKeesport would visit her in New York, they were amazed at her jazz record collection. JoAnne Rogers stated, “She had records from the floor to the ceiling”.
Phyllis Garland was the first African-American journalism faculty member to earn tenure at Columbia. The Graduate School of Journalism even changed its scholarship program in her honor to the Black Alumni Network/Phyllis Garland Scholarship Fund. She worked at Columbia for 30 years before retiring in 2004. She passed away in Brooklyn in 2006, but she was brought back to McKeesport for the funeral service at Bethlehem Baptist Church and burial near her parents in the McKeesport and Versailles Cemetery.
Phyllis Garland was an extremely impressive woman, who showed passion beyond belief. The world of journalism was lacking in representation, and she took it by storm, and continues to be an inspiration. As an African American woman who is also interested in journalism, it was an honor getting to know her story. The opportunity to share it means the world to me. Her legacy as a woman of many firsts will live on forever.
- Tayler Cleveland