Opening Doors: Carmen Fields (COM’73), Pioneering Journalist

Bostonia: You’ve described the vibrant, segregated community you grew up in and how important that was in shaping you and giving you the confidence to go out into the larger world. Can you talk more about that?

Carmen Fields: I think part of the advantage of that era is the fact that the teachers and the other role models lived in your same community. So you would see them in the supermarket, at church, at the bus stop, or wherever your life took you. And all of these people were like your parents. I think someone said in the T-Town documentary that we had the uppers, the middles, and the lowers—we were all just kind of there together. And so that gives a context that I think is missing in today’s society. My very real experience was of a nurturing and encouraging community. They cheer you on when you give your Easter speech at church or at the Christmas Pageant. They made you feel like you can do it. 

My mother [Bernice Copeland Fields] taught third grade and later on became a reading specialist. Her motto was, “If you can read, you can do anything,” and that meant reading anything from a recipe to an instruction manual to a history book.

Reading was the font of knowledge and accomplishment. We were very familiar with the library. I can remember when they built a big, citywide library downtown and we were able to go to that. That was a big deal. Any time my mother said, “Entertain yourself,” reading was the go-to activity.

Bostonia: You’ve mentioned that your seventh grade English teacher was the person who introduced you to journalism.

Carmen Fields: Juanita Lewis, who later married and was Juanita Hopkins. For part of the school year, she had a unit on journalism. And we would take turns writing up the school news and submitting it to the Oklahoma Eagle [Tulsa’s Black newspaper]. That was my first experience with seeing my stuff in print, and feeling affirmed in some seventh-grade kind of way. That really opened my eyes to this field of journalism.

When I was a senior in high school, Jeanne Goodwin, who wrote a column for the Eagle—her family still runs the Eagle today—invited me to write a couple of columns while she was away on vacation. That was an important opportunity.

Bostonia: You majored in journalism at Lincoln University, in Missouri, one of the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities. What was that like?

Carmen Fields: It was a fabulous experience, and I’d recommend it for every student of color. It was so affirming to see African American PhDs everywhere. They were your teachers, the heads of the departments, the president of the university, the head librarian. The head of the music department, who was also the choirmaster—I was in the choir—was Oscar Anderson Fuller, and he was the first African American in the United States to get a PhD in music. Dr. Lorenzo Green, who was the head of the history department, was a close friend and colleague of [pioneering Black historian] Carter Woodson, who started the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and out of that grew Black History Week, which is now Black History Month.

Bostonia: When you were accepted to BU’s broadcast journalism program in the early 1970s, were you aware of Boston’s reputation as a city that was hostile to Black people? And what was your experience as a Black student at BU?

Carmen Fields: I had no sense of Boston’s reputation whatsoever. And what was shocking for me was that for the first time in my entire life, I was the only person of color in the classroom. It was very intimidating to me. It was very lonely. I think the first semester was probably the worst three months of my life. I kept thinking, what am I doing here? I reminded myself of the importance of education, and the importance of representing.