Wallace Terry - Early Life

Early Life

Terry was born in New York City and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he was an editor of the Shortridge Daily Echo, one of the few high-school dailies in America. As a reporter for The Brown Daily Herald, he posed as a waiter to get an interview with Orval Faubus, the outspoken segregationist governor of Arkansas, and gained national attention when a photograph of him shaking hands with Faubus hit the front page of The New York Times on September 14, 1957. Later, at Brown University, Terry became the first black editor-in-chief of an Ivy League newspaper. He did graduate studies in theology as a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Chicago, and in international relations as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.