Wallace Terry

Wallace Houston Terry, II (April 21, 1938 – May 29, 2003) was an African-American journalist and oral historian, best known for his book about black soldiers in Vietnam, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War (1984), which served as a basis for the 1995 crime thriller Dead Presidents.

Terry had a wide-ranging and eclectic career that reflected his many interests. Though primarily a journalist, he was also an ordained minister in the Church of the Disciples of Christ, and worked as a radio and television commentator, public lecturer, and advertising executive. He taught journalism at Howard University and The College of William & Mary, where he sat on the board of trustees.

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 got 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.

...
Wikipedia