William Worthy was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, class of 1957.
15 Facts About William Worthy
2.
In 1955, William Worthy spent six weeks in Moscow, interviewing Nikita Khrushchev.
3.
William Worthy then traveled to China, where he interviewed Zhou Enlai and Cuba, where he interviewed Fidel Castro, in violation of United States State Department travel regulations.
4.
At the time he entered China, William Worthy was the first American reporter to visit and broadcast from there since the country's communist revolution in 1949.
5.
Worthy's passport was seized upon his return to the US from China and American lawyers Leonard Boudin and William Kunstler represented Worthy in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking the return of his passport.
6.
William Worthy was able to return to the US in October 1961, showing his birth certificate and vaccination record at Miami Airport.
7.
William Worthy was again represented by Kunstler, who successfully persuaded a federal appeals court to overturn William Worthy's conviction.
8.
The Committee for the Freedom of William Worthy was formed in 1962 and was chaired by A Philip Randolph and Bishop D Ward Nichols.
9.
William Worthy continued to travel to North Vietnam, Indonesia, Cambodia and Iran.
10.
William Worthy was a civil rights activist and member of organisations such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the NAACP or the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, which advocated for a more balanced coverage of Cuba in the US media.
11.
William Worthy was one of the most important political allies of Malcolm X In the late 1960s, Worthy organized a rent strike against a Catholic hospital in New York City that attempted to tear down Worthy's apartment building and turn it into a parking lot.
12.
William Worthy was a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American on and off from 1953 to 1980.
13.
William Worthy wrote a column and covered revolutions in Iran, Cuba, and China.
14.
William Worthy taught at Howard University in the 1980s and 1990s, where he held the Anneberg Chair.
15.
William Worthy died in Brewster, Massachusetts on May 4,2014, at the age of 92, of Alzheimer's disease.