12 Facts About Wallace Terry

Wallace Terry had a wide-ranging and eclectic career that reflected his many interests.

Wallace 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.

Later, Wallace Terry became the newspaper's editor-in-chief, and the first African American to run an Ivy League newspaper.

Wallace Terry 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.

Wallace Terry was hired by The Washington Post in 1960, when he was just 19; three years later, he was hired by Time magazine.

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In 1967, Wallace Terry left for Vietnam, where he became the magazine's deputy bureau chief in Saigon and the first black war correspondent on permanent duty.

Wallace Terry's Time cover story, "The Negro in Vietnam", was written in 1967 and the book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans was published in June 1984.

Wallace Terry wrote and narrated the only documentary recording from the Vietnam battlefields, Guess Who's Coming Home: Black Fighting Men Recorded Live in Vietnam, which was released by Motown in 1972 and re-released independently in 2006 as a CD.

Wallace Terry wrote and narrated the PBS Frontline show, "The Bloods of Nam".

In 2003, Wallace Terry developed a rare vascular disease called granulomatosis with polyangiitis, which strikes about one in a million people.

Wallace Terry is survived by his wife of 40 years, Janice Terry, and by their three children: Tai, Lisa, and David, and two grandchildren: Noah and Sophia.

At the time of his death, Wallace Terry was working on Missing Pages: Black Journalists of Modern America: An Oral History.