Alexander McAllister Rivera Junior: photojournalist, part of the first delegation of an African American press corps to accompany a U.S. Vice President overseas, friend of President Richard Nixon, influential with President Gerald Ford, inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. That last achievement may be, perhaps, why you’ve never heard of this distinguished photojournalist, reporter, and public relations expert.
Glen Harris, a history professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, first learned about Rivera in 1989. He started writing a book about him in earnest in 2019. By April of 2023, Lexington Books published Social Justice and Liberation Struggles: the photojournalistic and public relations career of Alexander McAllister Rivera Junior.
On this edition of CoastLine, we learn how Rivera influenced civil rights in the United States, what happened to his family after his grandfather fled Wilmington during its bloody 1898 coup d’etat, and why Professor Glen Harris thought Rivera important enough to devote years of his own life to the study of him.
Links:
Professor Glen Anthony Harris, Department of History, University of North Carolina Wilmington
