I didn’t know I wanted to be an investigative reporter or a writer until I met Wayne Barrett, who died Thursday night after a long struggle with lung disease. I started working for him as a shy, insecure, overworked white working class girl from the Midwest in my last year of college, 1998.
It’s a wonder that Wayne, legendary for his loud and scathing rebukes, didn’t scare me off. But, as an intern, I had two things going for me: I could work hard, and I was mostly open to deserved criticism, whatever the volume.
And that, it turns out, was enough for Wayne.
Wayne took one look at my work ethic and demanded I put it to good use. He told me which government offices to call and what to ask them, and he wanted answers by 5 p.m., so get to work. If I paused, he reminded me that it was our information because it was our tax dollars. We had every right to know, as journalists and as citizens, what was being done with our money.
We “just” needed to do the work to get the evidence: just retrieve the scraps of paper from reluctant bureaucrats’ files, just walk into a Soho sweatshop on a Sunday to interview workers, just visit politicians unexpectedly at their homes.
I loved working for Wayne so much that I shifted to part-time classes, just to learn from him for another four months; I graduated late instead.
But what I always admired most about Wayne wasn’t the digging. It was the profound equity with which he raged at injustice — and the relentlessness of his real and concrete support for people who didn’t look anything like him.
In a field known for masculine bad-assery, he trained and treated generations of young women as equals — myself included. And, decades before the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, Wayne was doing journalism to make just that point.
For instance, as I neared the end of my work with Wayne, then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani announced a legal settlement of $1.1 million to Hasidic residents. They had successfully argued that police had failed to protect a Hasidic scholar who had been stabbed during the 1991 Crown Heights riots.
Wayne saw that sum and remembered: The city had recently settled another negligence case for about $1 million. That was to compensate for the deaths of nine young people killed when police passively watched as a stampede erupted at a celebrity basketball game at City College in Harlem. He saw that and called it what it was: one white life being valued more than nine black and brown ones.
Later, reporting on Giuliani’s disconnection from, and disrespect for, the city’s black residents and leaders, Wayne described the administration as a “world as white as Seinfeld’s.” When Trump came to prominence last year, Wayne didn’t mince words about the now-President’s appeal: “This is a race button that Donald has pushed.”
Truthfully, the only time I remember Wayne really yelling at me, my failure wasn’t as a journalist. The Voice had put his story on the cover, an exposé of police abuses against citizens. I remember the cover illustration as an elderly woman of indeterminate race, wielding a rolling pin as she loomed over a cop. Wayne asked what I thought of it, and I, 20 years old, steeped in early hipster irony, hedged: “I guess it’s funny?”
“Funny?” he roared over the phone. “You think that is funny? It makes it look as if the victim is the one causing the problem!”
And I realized that I’d failed, not just him, but myself and the whole damn human race — if only for a moment.
And, for me at least, that was the real gift of Wayne’s training. Because he didn’t just show me how to do work that makes the world a better place. And he didn’t just tell me that the world needed me to do it.
He taught me that I needed to do it, too; that in doing that work, I’d become a better person. And I imagine I’ll spend my life doing the best I can to live up to that.
McMillan is the author of “The American Way of Eating” and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism.