Omega Pioneer Passes

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Death Notices


George McElroy collected more than 100 honors, including a lifetime achievement award a week ago. Society.
R. Clayton McKee: Chronicle file




Oct. 9, 2006, 9:49AM
GEORGE MCELROY 1922 — 2006
Pioneering columnist inspired black voices
By SARAH VIREN and ALEXIS GRANT
Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle

George McElroy, the first black columnist to write for the Houston Post who a week ago won a lifetime achievement award, died Saturday from acute respiratory distress syndrome at a Houston hospital. He was 84.
As the first black with a journalism degree to teach the trade to Houston high school students, McElroy broke down racial barriers and inspired generations of journalists.
"He paved the way for a lot of other people to get through doors that just weren't open before he got there," said state Sen. Rodney Ellis, a friend who counted on McElroy for advice on his political career. "He did it in such a quiet and unassuming way."
During the course of his career, McElroy interviewed Martin Luther King Jr. and Fidel Castro, and collected more than 100 honors, including the recent award from the Houston Association of Black Journalists.
Despite his illness, just one week before his death the man who friends say was always humble stood onstage at the Hilton Post Oak to accept the award.
"He didn't have a pretentious bone in his body," said Serbino Sandifer-Walker, his former student and later colleague at Texas Southern University who now serves as president of the Houston Association of Black Journalists.
"He was such a generous, kind and overwhelming person: a man who would allow you to be yourself."
He fought discrimination
After becoming the first black to earn a master's degree in journalism from the University of Missouri, McElroy taught at both Wheatley and Yates high schools and later at the University of Houston and Texas Southern University.

Former students, who called him Mr. Mac, say he inspired them with war stories — both symbolic and real. The son of a decorated war veteran, McElroy, too, was a veteran, of World War II and the Korean War.
He also fought discrimination. He once sued the University of Texas, claiming the school had denied him admission because of his race, said daughter Kathleen, an editor with the New York Times.
Sonceria Messiah-Jiles, publisher of the Houston Defender who was mentored by McElroy, said she planned to attend law school until she took his journalism class at the University of Houston.

"He did have a pride and a need to promote the positiveness of African-Americans," she said. "His articles were the only exposure the general market had to a black perspective back in the time when very few people had the opportunity or the access to hear the other side."

Wrote youth column at 16

Raised in the Third Ward, McElroy entered the newspaper world at 16, when he snagged a job writing a youth column for the Informer, Houston's oldest black newspaper. He was paid $2 a week. By the time he retired in 2005 from newspapers, McElroy had served in virtually every position at that paper, including executive editor.

He met his second wife, Lucinda Martin, at Ellington Field, where she served in the Air Force and he in the Navy. Married for 45 years, the couple had four daughters: Toni, Linda, Kathleen and Sherridan.
His oldest daughter, Madeline, was from his first marriage to Maxine Prudhomme.

Returned to Houston
McElroy earned his bachelor's degree from TSU after leaving the military, then went on to teach at Houston schools. A Wall Street Journal scholarship sent him to the prestigious University of Missouri journalism school for his master's degree.
Afterward, he returned to Houston to work as a professor and continued to write for the Informer and the Post, where he had worked before graduate school.
At the Post he covered sports and later became the paper's first black columnist. Beside a black-and-white sketch of McElroy's face each week ran a story of one person's life — both the great and the common. Through the years he profiled barbers and beauty queens, TV producers and police chiefs, most of them black.
In 1989, he retired from TSU. Six years later, his wife died of cancer.

A multicolored world

In one of his later columns for the Post in the 1970s, McElroy responded to a letter from a young man asking about journalism.
"The world, the nation, the state, the city are all multicolored, as in a rainbow and multiracial," he wrote. "A professional journalist simply cannot afford to reside in a racial-isolation ward. He must travel and he must converse and he must observe and he must be curious."
That, say those who knew McElroy, is exactly what he did.
He is survived by two brothers, James McElroy and Philip McElroy; his sister, Lucy McElroy; and five daughters; as well as five grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and a special friend, Doris Williams.
Services are planned for later this week at St. Mary of the Purification Catholic Church