William Worthy, Jr. (July 7, 1921 – May 4, 2014) was anAfrican-Americanjournalist, civil rights activist, and dissident who pressed his right to travel regardless ofU.S. State Department regulations.

William Worthy
Born	July 7, 1921 (1921-07-07) Boston, Massachusetts, US
Died	May 4, 2014 (2014-05-05) (aged 92) Brewster, Massachusetts, US
Education	Bates College
Occupation	Journalist

Worthy was born inBoston, Massachusetts,^[1] as the son of a wealthyobstetrician. He graduatedBoston Latin High School and received a B.A. degree in sociology fromBates College, Lewiston, Maine, in 1942. Worthy was aNieman Fellow atHarvard University, class of 1957.

DuringWorld War II, Worthy was sentenced to one day in prison for dodging a physical examination for military service and failing to register at aconscientious objector's camp. In 1954, he voiced early opposition to American involvement inVietnam after he visited Indo-China in 1953.

In 1955, Worthy spent six weeks in Moscow, interviewingNikita Khrushchev. In 1956, he managed to board a plane toApartheidSouth Africa, but was deported after 36 hours.^[2] He then traveled toChina (1956–57), where he interviewedZhou Enlai^[3] andCuba (1961), where he interviewedFidel Castro, in violation ofUnited States State Department travel regulations. At the time he entered China, Worthy was the first American reporter to visit and broadcast from there since the country'scommunist revolution in 1949.^[4] While in China Worthy interviewedSamuel David Hawkins, an American soldier who was captured by the Chinese during theKorean War and defected to China in 1953.^[5] Worthy'spassport was seized upon his return to the U.S. from China and American lawyersLeonard Boudin andWilliam Kunstler represented Worthy in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking the return of his passport.

Without a passport, Worthy traveled to Cuba in the early days ofFidel Castro to report on the Cuban revolution. He was able to return to the U.S. in October 1961, showing his birth certificate and vaccination record at Miami Airport. However, in April 1962, he was summoned again to Miami, where he was tried and convicted for "returning to the United States without a valid passport." During this time, he was placed under surveillance by the FBI.^[6] Worthy was again represented by Kunstler, who successfully persuaded a federal appeals court to overturn Worthy's conviction. TheU.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found the restrictionsunconstitutional. The court held that the government could not make it a crime under theConstitution to return home without a passport. Years later, Kunstler wrote in his autobiography,My Life As A Radical Lawyer, that the Worthy passport case was his "first experience arguing an issue about which I felt passionate," was the "first time I had ever invalidated a statute," and that success "confirmed my faith in the justice system."^[7]

The Committee for the Freedom of William Worthy was formed in 1962 and was chaired byA. Philip Randolph and Bishop D. Ward Nichols. In a telegram toAttorney GeneralRobert F. Kennedy, Randolph,James Farmer andJames Forman noted that "white citizens who have come home without passports have never been prosecuted."^[6] FolksingerPhil Ochs wrote a song called "The Ballad of William Worthy" about Worthy's trip to Cuba and its consequences.

Worthy continued to travel toNorth Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and Iran. He only received a passport again in 1968.^[2] In 1981, the luggage of Worthy and two other journalists working with him, Terri Taylor and Randy Goodman, containing paperback copies of classifiedCIA documents, was seized by theFBI on their return fromIran. They subsequently won a suit onFourth Amendment grounds and were awarded $16,000 in damages.^[8]

Worthy was acivil rights activist and member of organisations such as theFellowship of Reconciliation, theNAACP or theFair Play for Cuba Committee, which advocated for a more balanced coverage of Cuba in the US media.

In 1947, he participated in theJourney of Reconciliation together with other prominent civil rights leaders, in which they challenged state segregation laws on public transport. The action inspired the laterFreedom Riders.^[6]

In the early 1960s he was an outspoken critic of the civil rights movement for not going far enough to achieve civil rights in housing and all areas of American life. William Worthy was one of the most important political allies ofMalcolm X. In the late 1960s, Worthy organized arent strike against aCatholic hospital inNew York City that attempted to tear down Worthy's apartment building and turn it into a parking lot. Worthy later wrote about those experiences in a critically acclaimed book,The Rape of Our Neighborhoods, published in 1976.

Worthy was a reporter for theBaltimore Afro-American on and off from 1953 to 1980. He wrote a column and covered revolutions in Iran, Cuba, and China. Although a supporter of Malcolm X, he was critical of theBlack Panthers in a 1969 column for "gratuitous and indiscriminate" 'Uncle Tom' attacks on virtually all the black bourgeoise" and their exposure to law enforcement due to "sloppy, inefficient, undisciplined organizational follow-through".^[9]

While Worthy continued to work in the field of journalism; in the 1970s, he was appointed as head of the African American journalism program atBoston University. However, the BU president,John Silber, removed Worthy as head of the program after Worthy criticized the BU administration and supported BU campus workers who were attempting tounionize. Following his BU appointment, Worthy taught journalism atUMass Boston. William Worthy and Michael Lindsey co-taught the first class in Critical Journalism in the country at the College of Public and Community service, a branch of UMass Boston, which Noam Chomsky attended as a guest lecturer. William Worthy also taught atHoward University in the 1980s and 1990s, where he held the Anneberg Chair. During most of the 1990s until 2005, Worthy lived inWashington, D.C., where he served as a special assistant to the dean of the School of Communications at Howard U. and served on the board of directors of theNational Whistleblower Center.

On February 22, 2008, theNieman Foundation honored Worthy with the prestigiousLouis M. Lyons Award.^[10]

Worthy died inBrewster, Massachusetts on May 4, 2014, at the age of 92, ofAlzheimer's disease.^[11]

The late psychologistKenneth B. Clark said of Worthy: "The Bill Worthys of our society provide the moral fuel necessary to prevent the flickering conscience of our society from going out."

• Our Disgrace in Indo-China. 1954.
• The Silent Slaughter: The Role Of The United States In The Indonesian Massacre. With Eric Norden, Andrew March, and Mark Lane. 1967.
• The Vanguard: A photographic essay on theBlack Panthers. With Ruth-Marion Baruch and Parkle Jones. 1970.
• The Rape of Our Neighborhoods: And How Communities Are Resisting Take-Overs by Colleges, Hospitals, Churches, Businesses, and Public Agencies. 1976.
• Pampered Dictators and Neglected Cities: The Philippine Connection. 1978.

• Robeson Taj Frazier,The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.

• "'The Most Important Journalist You've Never Heard Of': Remembering William Worthy (1921-2014)",Democracy Now!, May 19, 2014.
• biographical notes
• Ochs' song
• Harvard Crimson 1957 biographical notes
• Harvard Crimson April 28, 1977 article on Worthy
• February 22, 2008 Boston Globe column