Wallace Terry: A Reporter's Journey from Selma to Saigon to Bloods

Award-winning biographer Ray Boomhower tells the story of a journalist who spent his life smashing barriers, from his childhood in Indiana and his Ivy League education at Brown to his reporting on the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South in the 1960s and, finally, covering what he described as “the biggest story in the world” of his time, the Vietnam War.

Pioneering Black journalist Wallace Terry risked his life on the battlefield writing for Time magazine during the Vietnam War. While in Vietnam, he captured the voices and experiences of Black soldiers and used the insights he gained to produce Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. The book remains a classic reflection of a war that fractured US society and cost the lives of nearly fifty-eight thousand Americans.

Before risking his life on the front lines, Terry became deeply involved in reporting about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s in the United States. “It was a story that I passionately cared for because it was going to affect me, my family, my children, and generations of Black people to come,” said Terry. Working for the Washington Post, he wrote the first newspaper series about the Nation of Islam, during which he interacted with Malcolm X, who sheltered him from harm when his stories upset some members of the movement. He also grew close to those who sacrificed their lives in the struggle for equality, including Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King Jr., who became godfather to Terry’s eldest son. Making civil rights his focus gave him the opportunity to report on such seminal events as the Birmingham campaign, the March on Washington, and the Selma to Montgomery marches.

During his two years covering the Vietnam War, Terry traveled overseas to conduct numerous interviews with Black fighting men—soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines—that he later used as the basis for Bloods. He sought with his work to topple the conviction that “white soldiers are invincible and black soldiers are invisible.” Terry faced numerous challenges, including rejections from publishers who believed the public did not want to read about Black veterans from the conflict. Finally published in 1984, Bloods became a bestseller and remains a landmark work of military and oral history.

Boomhower has written the first-ever biography of one of the first Black national correspondents to be hired in the overwhelmingly white mainstream media, a reporter whose name belongs with the greats in American journalism. Wallace Terry lived a life filled with danger and betrayal, scoops and cover-ups, while immersing himself in events that changed the course of US history.

About the Author :
Ray E. Boomhower is the acclaimed author of twenty books, including biographies about some of the country’s finest war correspondents such as Ernie Pyle, Richard Tregaskis, and Malcolm W. Browne.

Review :

“Ray Boomhower has captured all the gritty detail of a pioneering Black journalist’s professional and personal life in his Wallace Terry: A Reporter’s Journey from Selma to Saigon to Bloods. The reader is witness to Terry’s years-long strength and determination to tell the story of the Black soldier in the Vietnam War in his seminal best seller Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. The obstacles were many. Terry overcame them all!” - Leon Dash, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Rosa Lee: A Mother and Her Family in Urban America

“An outstanding biography of a trailblazing African American journalist whose coverage of the civil rights struggle and Vietnam War in the 1960s endures as a landmark in courage. Wallace Terry is a masterful work of scholarship, exquisitely researched and intricately detailed.” - Neil Henry, author of Pearl's Secret: A Black Man's Search for His White Family

“Highly recommended. Ray Boomhower’s biography of the journalist Wally Terry is a thorough and enlightening look at Terry’s remarkable life and career, including his courageous and pioneering work as a war correspondent in the Vietnam War.” - Marc Leepson, author of The Unlikely War Hero: A Vietnam War POW's Story of Courage and Resilience in the Hanoi Hilton

“This riveting and well-written biography sheds penetrating light on the career of a pioneering Black journalist and war correspondent. Wallace Terry's reportage from the battlefields of Vietnam—and Dixie before that—remains illuminating and remarkably educational.” - Gerald Horne, author of The Rise and Fall of the Associated Negro Press: Claude Barnett's Pan-African News and the Jim Crow Paradox