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by Xion Abiodun
The Bay View has a new editor-in-chief! The honorable title has been given to JR Valrey, minister of information, writer, author, activist and teacher. He has been working with the Bay View newspaper for 23 years now, and has written hundreds of articles for the paper. I recently interviewed him to talk about his journalism career and this is what he had to say.
Xion: When and how did you get into writing?
JR: I was a teenager chasing a girl who had ambitions of being a journalist. She signed up for a summer program where the students lived in the San Francisco State dorms for two weeks to learn journalism. I signed up too, not really having an interest in journalism. When the time came, me and her were not friends. So I kind of checked the program out.
When it came to writing, they were impressed with what I wrote. In the program, we took a field trip to a now-defunct youth-run magazine called Youth Outlook. There I met a lot of Black teenage journalists as well as young people of other ethnicities. I was amazed and inspired by how politically educated they were, not only by books but also by experiences.
Some of them were into the streets: drug dealing, using, robbery and more. They were what the system would call criminals, but they were also full fledged journalists. Some of the other ones were living full time on the pavement homeless, and their articles would help them make ends meet in the metropolis of San Francisco and the surrounding areas. Still others were suburban Black youth from Concord.
There was a very eclectic mix of young people at Youth Outlook, while at the same time there was high camaraderie. Everybody in the group dealt with some kind of revolutionary politics. There were no Democrats and Republicans.
At the time, I knew that I sympathized with the Black Panther Party, because my family was from Oakland. But at that time, I was not able to point out the ideas that they were about and why I agreed with them, because I had not studied. The other teenage journalists, however, had studied peoples movements either here or in other countries. They had a better range of vocabulary and of revolutionary concepts of what is humanly possible.
Writers like the late Kevin Weston, the late Ri’Chard Magee, Malcolm Marshall, now publisher of the Richmond Pulse, Charles Jones, Ladii, Hanif, Lynn Duff, Nelson Lam, Kash, Will Roy and more were part of the team at Youth Outlook, and our weekly meetings and their magazine is what introduced me to the journalism game.
Xion: Have you always wanted to be a writer? Why?
JR: No, I didn’t always want to be a writer. At first I pimped my own skills, and used to look at it as a hustle. I used to think that I was good at writing so I could just write a few stories just to pay for when I went out with my friends.
Then there was the moment when Kevin Weston asked me and another writer, Kai Milner, to write about our experiences going to private schools. I wrote a story about the racism that I experienced being a student at St. Joseph Notre Dame High School in Alameda.
The story made it into the Examiner, which at that time was a major daily newspaper in San Francisco. The school convened a meeting of powerful teachers and administrators at the school including the two Black male teachers that I was cool with, then brought me in. I was told that they were disappointed in me and that the history teacher had not made the racist remarks that I accused her of saying.
They demanded that I write a retraction to the story. I told them I would not, because she did say what I accused her of. The Chinese valedictorian of the school was in the class and heard the history teacher say it, so I brought him in to back my play. The history teacher brought in a star basketball player, who was until that point my friend, and was always asleep in class, as her witness.
She also threatened to sue me and my family, in front of the other teachers and administrators in attendance. I stood my ground against her lies, threats and witness, and said that I would not print the retraction. After the meeting, scared, I called Youth Outlook, who helped get the story placed in the Examiner. I talked to Kevin Westin and Malcolm Marshall, and both of them told me to stand firm and that the school couldn’t force me to do anything.
They told me my rights as a writer and told me that they would call the school. They called the school. And the next day, the teachers brought me into a meeting similar to the one a day prior, with the teacher and administrator audience. This time, the history teacher talked about how she had a religious epiphany and she said that Jesus came to her personally in her dream the night prior and told her to leave the issue alone.
Because I had talked to Kevin and Malcolm prior to the meeting, I knew that they had run game and acted like they were editors for the San Francisco Examiner and spoke to the school with that voice of authority. They were the Jesus that she talked to prior to this meeting. Kevin and Malcolm told the school that they could sue them for harassing me, and that if they did not leave me alone, they would dedicate a five part series to the racism at St. Joe’s.
When I saw how a powerful and prestigious school like St. Joe’s had to change course on making good on any of their threats because some early 20-year-old Youth Outlook editors told them that they have my back and that the school better stop trying to intimidate me, I was sold on the power of journalism.
Xion: How did you start working for the Bay View and how old were you when you started?
JR: I started working for the SF Bay View 23 years ago. I was 22 years old when Kevin Weston and Malcolm Marshall started editing a poetry section in the Bay View. I had never seen a Black newspaper at that time except the Final Call. I was juiced that my big writer potnas were involved in a San Francisco based national Black newspaper. I was intrigued and inspired. I asked them to see if I could write for the SF Bay View.
They did and I ended up writing an article. In 2003, a few years later, I moved to a room at the San Francisco Bay View newspaper and lived there for about two years. In that time, I was able to live, breathe and learn about Black life in Hunters Point San Francisco.
Xion: How long have you been with the Bay View? What made you stay with them for so long?
JR: I’ve been with the SF Bay View newspaper for 23 years on and off because they had a revolutionary element to their paper as well as a grassroots street element to their paper, and those are two important aspects of the Black community to me. They also gave me the journalistic freedom to write about what I thought was important, and paid me.
At times I made good money, other times, I waited for half a year for money; that was just how the boat rocked at that time. It was kind of like being a musician. I always loved that I could get up every day and that I could interview somebody different from the person I interviewed yesterday.
I liked that if I ever meet somebody that I am impressed with, I have a reason to talk to them, whereas my friends who are not journalists do not really have a reason to associate, so they do not have the license to really interact or they may be seen as a groupie. In the journalism world, if you use the connection for work, you are seen as ambitious.
I always felt that journalism could be used as a weapon against the oppressors of Black people, kind of like the Black Panther Party’s newspaper. I wanted to be that kind of journalist in the Black newspaper.
Xion: What was the first article in the Bay View that you feel represents the type of writer you are today and why?
JR: I can’t say that there is one article that represents who I am because as the Minister of Information I am all over the place. You have to use more than a few articles to illustrate who I am because one of the beauties of how I apply my craft is that I report on a variety of issues, things and services. Now some of the articles that I am most proud of are my reports both times I went to Haiti in 2003 and 2010. I am very proud of my writings during the Oscar Grant movement that helped to keep the movement informed and in full swing, from the courtrooms to the rebellions on the streets as well as a recent series that was published on the pandemic’s effect on school age youth.
Some of my biggest interviews have been with legendary jazz artist Herbie Hancock, political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, political prisoner Imam Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown), former Congresswoman and international peace activist Cynthia McKinney, the late Malcolm Shabazz, the grandson of Malcolm X, Black Panther Emory Douglas, legendary playwright Ishmael Reed, the late jazz legend Gil Scott Heron, the legendary Last Poets,the legendary rapper Mos Def, legendary singer India Arie and many more.
Xion: Have you always wanted to be editor in chief of this newspaper? Why?
JR: Not always. I enjoyed being a well known writer and journalist with a few extra responsibilities for many years. I did not want to assume all of the responsibility of putting out the newspaper, which, when I started, was weekly. It is now monthly.
As I got older and I ran my own news website, Black New World Media, and I saw all of the issues that the SF Bay View was having with editors over the last few years, I knew that I had enough experience as a writer for the Bay View, but also as an editor of my own website, to play more of an executive position at the newspaper. I understand the paper, the people that the paper serves, and the market that we live in.
Thanks to then webmaster Terone Ward and former Editor Mary Ratcliff, when I lived at the newspaper we had endless overnight sessions that dealt with many different components to putting out a newspaper. That was my first experience understanding what the editor in chief of the newspaper does.
Xion: In the next few months, what do you see for the paper under your leadership?
JR: Under my leadership, I plan to train a number of new community multimedia journalists to work for the SF Bay View. I want to place a major concentration on what is happening in San Francisco’s Black communities, Oakland’s Black communities and surrounding Bay Area cities.
We want to continue to be a movement newspaper. At the same time we have to write more stories about the Black business community because that is where our ad revenue comes from, which is what finances the newspaper. We also want to include more local artists in our pages, not only to help them, but also because we recognize that non-corporate art is the bringer of new ideas.
We also want to become more of a community resource to provide information on where to go for certain services, such as homeless services, domestic abuse, trafficking, pregnancy, how to acquire city permits and more.
We definitely want to do more to bring a younger generation into the newspaper. That is why I am juiced that you, Xion, my oldest child, are writing on a serious level with the newspaper. I think it is super dope, because I think you are a great writer and articulator of ideas, and in some cases you even have ideas more progressive than mine. It’s going to be a positive challenge as well as honor and pleasure to rock in one of the biggest jobs of my life with my daughter honing her skills right next to me.
Me and you, Xi, teamed up before Lebron and his son were able to. By creating an informative, revolutionary newspaper on the regular, our teamwork serves the interests of Black people’s political and social education. Lebron and his son’s teamwork is fun to watch, but politically it is a distraction that leads the masses to organize in groups to support bourgeois sports teams that give nothing back to our communities, while ignoring changemakers in our community because they are not validated by television and celebrity culture. So my leadership of the newspaper at this time provides me a chance to do freedom fighting journalism with my first born, and she can hold her own on the field.
After all of that, I want the SF Bay View to be the most visually stunning newspaper with revolutionary ideas. I always remember what Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, said about the revolution: “It has to capture the imagination of the people.”
JR Valrey, The People’s Minister of Information, is the Editor in Chief of the SF Bay View. He is also the instructor for The Community Journalism Program.
