PUTNAM COUNTY
Wanda Lloyd will be the “Meet the Author” presenter at noon on Tuesday, March 14 (doors open 11:30 a.m.), at Georgia Writers Museum in Eatonton. In a free-to-attend event, Lloyd will be presenting via Zoom, with registration available at georgiawritersmuseum.org. Copies of Lloyd’s book, Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism are available through the museum shop.
Lloyd will be interviewed by Rexanna Keller Lester, a former executive editor and columnist for the Savannah Morning News.
We start life defined by geography and family.
Author Wanda Lloyd remapped both.
In Coming Full Circle: From Jim Crow to Journalism she describes the dichotomies of growing up in the Savannah of the 1950s and ’60s: separate waiting rooms, separate education, separate health care that devastated her family. Her mother had escaped with a good job that required extensive travel, and Lloyd created her nuclear family from the extended kin who loved her.
Homework in schools for African Americans often necessitated teamwork. The worn and recycled books from the white schools had pages missing. A call to a friend might produce a book with the page essential for an assignment. Research meant long bus rides to the only library that served Blacks.
Working at newspapers from the 1970s to the 2010s was fascinating and frustrating. Lloyd has seen it as a young woman in a building underbelly as a Washington Post production editor, the newsroom representative checking typeset pages, reading upside down and backward. Guys brushed her backside in the composing room. She got a loan from a pressroom man with a wad of bills in his pocket.
Her journalism could eventually be practiced with a phone in her pocket. Executives didn’t always eagerly offer the chairs at the tables where decisions were made, but she worked hard and earned her seating. She sometimes appeared on C-SPAN running the news meetings at USA Today to the delight of the people she inspired.
Lloyd leads readers through Providence, R.I., Miami, Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Greenville S.C., Nashville, Montgomery, Ala., and a multitude of award-winning stories, projects, and honors.
Lloyd was the first black executive editor in Montgomery. When she spoke at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the crowd overflowed. A woman in the audience gave her $5 after the speech, and it reminded Lloyd of the woman on her street in Savannah who would give her a little money when she came home during college breaks. They were part of her success.
In Montgomery, she encountered a fully robed Ku Klux Klan family on the street. Threats on her life came electronically.
She led the coverage of domestic abuse issues that community leaders said saved lives. Savannah is lucky that Savannah State University called Wanda Lloyd out of retirement, and she found her way home to write.
- Contributed by Rexanna Keller Lester, a former executive editor and columnist for the Savannah Morning News.