Montgomery, Ala. – In the 1950s when female news reporters were rare – and black female reporters rarer still – Inez J. Baskin made a place for herself in the pages of the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama. She covered cross burnings and sit-ins and the Montgomery bus boycott, which led to an end to segregation on city buses.
Through such coverage Baskin broke ground again, joining a prestigious sorority: Sisters whose efforts during the civil rights movement are little known, but whose hands influenced the outcome nonetheless.
Baskin, who rose from a position as a typist to write stories that documented some of the most tumultuous moments in the nation’s history, died of heart failure June 28, said her goddaughter, LaWanda Mason Goodwine. She was 91.
In later years, Baskin seemed in awe of her younger self, of the moxie displayed by a woman in her late 30s, who with pen and notepad thrust herself into the center of hostility and danger and unprecedented change.
“In the ’50s I didn’t have any sense,” she told a Washington Post reporter in 1995. “I thought I could walk on water in those days.”
She didn’t perform any miracles, but on a historic day in 1956 when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sat on a Montgomery bus and rode in seats that once had been reserved for white people, Baskin rode in the seat in front of him, reporting it all. That moment was made possible only by Baskin’s persistent efforts to realize a dream of becoming a reporter.
After a stint as a teacher Baskin sought work as a typist for The Montgomery Advertiser’s weekly “Negro News” section. When she asked if she could report the news herself, the section editor’s answer was “no,” Goodwine recalled.
She made the pitch to a different editor. The answer then was “yes.”
As the push for equal rights intensified, Baskin’s job gave her a front-row view of the biggest story of the day.
Until the end of her life Baskin continued to write, producing a newsletter called “The Monitor.” Her last issue was found still in the typewriter at her home in Montgomery the day she died, Goodwine said.
