Acel Moore, Founder of Black Journalists’ Organization

Acel Moore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who co-founded the National Association of Black Journalists and awakened his white colleagues and their readers to everyday life in black communities, died at his home in Wyncote (PA), near Philadelphia. He was 75.

Moore, who was hired as a copy boy by The Philadelphia Inquirer and worked his way up to reporter, columnist and associate editor, blazed the trail for countless protégés by lobbying for more minority hiring in newsrooms, mentoring prospective reporters and advocating more coverage of black life. “I saw how racism and the exclusion of blacks from both employment and news coverage by The Inquirer and other news agencies impacted on the events daily,” Moore recalled in his column, Urban Perspectives, in 1981. “I saw how blacks were only featured in crime stories, how stories about the masses of blacks were ignored,” he continued. “Only the extreme elements of the black community were news. Blacks never died, never married, never did the normal things that whites did.” To Moore there were no ordinary people, just people whose voices would not ordinarily have been heard.