Palo Alto Review

I met an old man in a typewriter shop. That’s how I always answer the questions of how I met Maury Maverick Jr. and how I got to the San Antonio Express-News, because the answer is the same.

            I met an old man in a typewriter shop.

            The old man was Maury and realizing he was 67 years old at the time, I understand that he really wasn’t that old when we first met in 1988 in a now-defunct typewriter shop on Goliad Road that was owned, I later learned, by the father of novelist and lawyer Jay Brandon.

            Having read his Sunday column in the Express-News for years, I immediately recognized him and introduced myself so that I could tell him how much I enjoyed his work. Looking at me and shaking my hand, he said, gruffly, “Black people need another Malcolm X.” Not “hello” or “how are you young man?” but “Black people need another Malcolm X.”

            I’m down with that, I thought to myself, and was struck by the force and sincerity of his comment. Over the years, I would learn that social justice, politics, and animals were never far from his mind and always in his heart. And part of his DNA, something he couldn’t help but do, was to reach out to people in need and to mentor and nurture young people.

            When I met Maury I was struggling as a substitute teacher and writing for a small black newspaper, The San Antonio Informer. Maury told me to call him sometime but I didn’t until five years later, while I was working as a community organizer and after I’d just read a biography on Maury’s father. Maury invited me to lunch at a BBQ place on Broadway that he liked and learned that I was interested in journalism but not having any luck catching a break. He didn’t promise anything but said he’d see what he could do.

            He mentioned me to Bob Richter, the deputy associate editor of the Express-News editorial page, and when Bob called me and asked me to write an op-ed piece for the paper, that was the break that I needed and that eventually led me to being hired by the paper. It wasn’t until the last year of his life that I learned from Maury that before he ran interference for me at the paper, he did a background check on me with his brother in the fight for social justice, Rev. Claude Black, who I grew up across the street from.

            The generosity Maury extended to me wasn’t unusual. It was emblematic of a man who fathered no children of his own but who took a deep and loving paternal interest in younger people whose lives he influenced. I’m simply one of dozens who are proud to be one of “Maury’s children.” Once he adopted you, he never hesitated to give you advice, to tell you when you’d done something he really liked, and to brag on you to other people.

He always asked if you were being treated well and, especially important for a man who always seemed to think he was about to die, if you were taking care of yourself. When Maury learned I was closing in on the age of 40, he encouraged me to go get a prostate exam and recommended a particular doctor. “That is,” he said. “If you don’t mind a white man sticking his finger up your ass.” “Maury,” I replied. “I don’t want any man to stick anything up there.”

            I never ceased to be amazed by him, by his intellect, knowledge, courage, passion and empathy for others. But the one time he truly astounded me was at the funeral of Sporty Harvey, the black boxer whose case Maury won in 1954 to end the prohibition of professional boxing matches between blacks and white.

I drove Maury to the black Baptist church on the West Side where the services were being held. Maury, who was hard of hearing and seeing, couldn’t hear what the preacher was saying and kept asking me, “What did he say?” People were looking at us and I was feeling self-conscious. When the preacher asked if anyone wanted to say a few words about Harvey , Maury got to his feet and stumbled forward as I slumped in my seat. But once Maury reached the podium, he delivered an incredible, soul-stirring 10-minute talk that had the congregation clapping and saying, “Amen!” I was so proud of him that I sat up straight in my seat, looked around and nodded like, “Yeah, I brought him here.”  

            After the funeral, as we drove away from the church, Maury said, “But Sporty couldn’t fight worth a damn.”

            There was a memorable night when I drove him to an awards dinner I was emceeing at the Institute of Texan Cultures . Maury thought he was going to present an award, The Sojourner Truth Award, to Rev. Black but that was a ruse because, in reality, he was to be the surprise recipient of the award. When I introduced Maury and he began talking about Rev. Black, the reverend got up and said, “Hold on there Maury,” nudged him aside and said, “Let me talk.” After Rev. Black extolled Maury and presented him with the award, Maury was visibly moved and it was the closest I ever saw him to tears.

            The only time Maury ever raised his voice with me was one day when I got on the phone with him and addressed him as Mr. Maverick. “Stop calling me Mr. Maverick you little bastard,” he thundered. “It’s Maury.”

            I wish I’d had the foresight to do what Naomi Nye did and record the funny phone messages Maury would leave. When he’d call me, he’d pretend to be G. J. Sutton or Valmo Bellinger or some other legendary but deceased local black leader. Or he’d ask, “Kiddo, can you help an old honky out.”

            I have a few books of Maury’s that his wife, Julia, gave me after he died. I also have books that were given to me by Maury which are special because the inscriptions he wrote in them were sometimes as interesting and long as the actual books. He gave me his copy of Willie Morris’ book, The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, Mississippi and Hollywood , that Morris had given and inscribed to him. Maury wrote, “With all good wishes for Cary Clack, the first African-American editorial writer in the history of the San Antonio Express-News, a Hearst newspaper. Willie Morris gave me this book. (See the next page.) You have a different fight than I did. When I was your age they killed the messengers. Now they buy him off. Good luck. Maury Maverick Jr. 78 years old.”

            When he gave me Eric Foner’s The Story of American Freedom, he included instructions:

            There are so many good and correct things that can be said about Maury that sum up who he was and what he was about. One of the things that quickly leaps to my mind is this: he was always there. On political issues and on personal matters, he was always there. He was there for people who were being persecuted. He was there for those who were being discriminated against and denied their rights. He was there to speak out against the fighting of unjust wars. He was there to protect the Constitution when it was under attack. He was there when civil liberties were being threatened.

            But he was also, always, there for strangers, for the down and out, who needed a few bucks to get a bite to eat or to pay a light bill or buy some medicine. Not that he was ever wealthy. “People think, because of my name, that I’ve got money,” he used to say.

He was always grateful to G.J. Sutton, the first black legislator from Bexar County, and his wife, Lou Nelle, who succeeded him, because they put him on their staffs to write speeches and newspaper columns for them so that he could earn the necessary years to receive his state pension.

            “Don’t tell that story until I’m gone,” he told me in January of 2003, the day before he entered the hospital for the last time.

            As I write this, he’s been gone almost four years and there’s not a day that I don’t think about him or miss him but that makes me no different than everyone else who cherished him and treasure a trove of personal memories. Like everyone else, there’s not an issue or political personality that doesn’t make me think, “I wonder what Maury would write about this.”

            Maury went into the hospital, that final time, a couple of months before our foolish venture into Iraq . I can only begin to imagine the outrage that Maury would expressed about this war and the gratification he would have gotten as he saw the majority of the nation come around to his view, albeit a gratification that would have been tempered by his sorrow of the deaths of so many American soldiers and Iraqi civilians.

            When so many voices in the media were afraid to speak out against the war and the encroachment of civil liberties in the name of the war on terror, Maury would have been there, fearless and passionate as always.

            In life and death, Maury has been called an unrepentant liberal and he was. But he was more than that. He was an unrepentant humanitarian who believed that his time on this earth should be spent making it better for those living now and for the generations to come, for the children of his children.

            The power of Maury is such that I think that all of us who loved and were inspired by him continue to be challenged by him, challenged to not be afraid to speak out in opposition or support of something we believed in even though our opinions may be unpopular and cause us considerable discomfort. From his grave, and through the example of his life, words, and action Maury demands that we never let our consciences sleep, our voices be mute, our hearts be hardened and our response to suffering and injustice be passive.

            The old man, who, I’m convinced, still takes daily walks through Brackenridge Park will always haunt us into being better and doing better, towards each other and the world we live in and, of course, better for the purple martins.

            In my office at the newspaper, a photo of Maury is above my computer. Taped to my door, is the cartoon tribute of him by Express-News cartoonist John Branch, another of his children, which ran in the paper the day after he died and hanging in my office is one of his canes.

            One of my most prized possessions, one that’s in my office at home, is a typewriter of Maury’s that was given to me by his wife, Julia. I often wonder if it’s the same typewriter that he was having fixed the day I met him; the day I met that unforgettable and remarkable old man in the typewriter shop who changed my life forever.

— San Antonio , TX