Mervin Aubespin, fifth president of the National Association of Black Journalists, who led the organization into its growth age, died June 26 at a hospice in California. He passed days short of his 87th birthday.
Aubespin succumbed to colon cancer, said Betty Winston Baye of Louisville, a colleague and friend who visited him last month at the hospice. “The room had his paintings, and Sarah Vaughan was playing,” Baye said. “He was not conscious,” but believe he could hear me. Merv was a soldier. He outlived many of his close friends.”
Aubespin was elected in 1983 during a raucous contest in which the board member responsible for supervising the election was absent and the substitute official discovered there were no ballots. Once the problems were resolved, Aubespin, champion of Black journalists from southern and midwestern states, defeated Acel Moore, one NABJ’s 44 founders, and a standard bearer of the media elite northern states and Washington, DC.
“Uncle Merv,” often referenced fondly, inherited a board that for the first time had no founding members, and instead second-generation mainstream media Black journalists in their late 20s and early 30s. Aubespin counseled his young colleagues to check their egos at the door and work together to grow and modernize the association. His charges included future media leaders Paula Madison, Will Sutton, Sheila Brooks, and Thomas Morgan.
And yes, they did grow NABJ. The elected board members doubled as volunteer staff. The following year in Atlanta, convention attendance tripled from 330 to 1,000. NABJ, at the time barely recognizable to the industry and public, had its profile raised when as network news cameras rolled, civil rights icon Andrew Young complained to convention delegates that “smart-ass white boys” were giving presidential candidate Walter “Fritz” Mondale bad advice. Mondale did lose badly to Republican incumbent Ronald Reagan.
Also, Rev. Jesse Jackson, a contemporary of Young, ran for president too, but succumbed to Mondale, the Democratic nominee. Jackson spoke at that closing convention banquet. While speaking at the dais, Jackson gestured with both hands and nearly smacked Aubespin, seated by his side, in the face. Aubespin excused himself and retreated under the raised platform to smoke a cigarette and calm his nerves.
Post-convention, Aubespin and his young board continued to grow the association. The national headquarters – a Washington P.O. box – was upgraded to an office on a half-floor of the Louisville Courier-Journal office, where Aubespin worked as a reporter.
In 1985, when Aubespin finished his two-year service as president and passed the baton to Al Fitzpatrick of Knight Ridder newspapers, the national office was moved to DC-area Reston, Virginia [NABJ headquarters is now in DC-area College Park, Maryland.]
Aubespin grew up in Opelousas, Louisiana and moved to Louisville in 1958. He took note of the racially segregated city and by 1961 took part in civil rights demonstrations for public accommodations, reported the Courier-Journal.
In 1967 Aubespin was hired by that newspaper as the first Black news artist, however he was pulled into reporting to cover racial unrest and riots in West Louisville the next year. In a first-person account, Aubespin wrote that a police officer shoved a shotgun to his chest and ordered him to leave, refusing to believe he was a reporter despite presenting his credentials. A white photographer abandoned Aubespin out of fear for his safety,” said the C-J account. Aubespin directed his younger brother and a friend to take photos while he reported from the scene.
Aubespin had a 35-year career at the C-J and retired in 2002. Aubespin was colorful and reliably avuncular. He famously kept bottles of Tabasco sauce under his newsroom desk. At his lavish Christmas parties, he notoriously put too much Kahlua in the eggnog. Like many in Kentucky he loved his bourbon but served well-known Wild Turkey to the amateurs who put soda in their drinks and “messed up his good liquor,” he said to a colleague. So Aubespin shared Maker’s Mark only with his intimate friends.
Aubespin entertained C-J summer interns at his home and “was instrumental in putting the third generation of Black journalists on the map,” said Baye. Wife Deborah Cahill Aubespin, a California native, and daughter Eleska, a former journalist, was with Merv Aubespin in his final hours.
The writer, emeritus editor of BA Network, is NABJ’s historian
