Under the Sun

Under the Sun: A Black Journalist’s Journey  

By Harold Jackson  

The University of Alabama Press, 2025  

Paperback: $29.95 

Genre: Memoir  

Reviewed by C.G. Crawford  

In Under the Sun: A Black Journalist’s Journey, Harold Jackson offers a personal account of his life and hopeful legacy as one of America’s last real newspapermen. As the printing press days of fact-based news, corporate newspaper politics, and news editorials die at the hands of the digital beast that is social media, artificial intelligence, podcasts, and influencer-driven news media, Jackson’s memoir does the work of reflection, remembrance, and reckoning. 

His reflections begin in the corridors of a segregated Birmingham, where Jackson was born and raised. He then pulls on history, education, and family to depict the social, political, and ontological pathways that gave shape to a man whose experience at a summer journalism workshop at the University of Alabama led to a forty-five-year-long career and a 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing on Alabama’s discriminatory and inequitable tax system. And what seems most interesting about Jackson’s story is the ordinariness of it all.  

The chronicling of his time with publicans like the Birmingham Post-Herald, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Birmingham News, and others comes with the fruits of promotion, the woes of demotion, and the weeded territory found in being Black in predominantly white spaces, or being experienced yet rejected in what Jackson sometimes alludes to – but never directly describes – as a quid-pro-quo, nepotism-like industry where relationships supersede success. 

Here lies the tension Jackson brings forth in his relative articulations of double consciousness – a construction found in W.E.B. Du Bois’ monumental, sociological text The Souls of Black Folk. Double consciousness tells of a twoness the African American finds in their attempted navigation within a country where their Blackness and their Americanness often collide. While it is true that Jackson, as an African American, is both an administrator and product of double consciousness, his familial, communal, and work-related accounts tell of a different kind of consciousness – one that neighbors double consciousness but has its own mailbox and driveway on the avenue of political respectability.  

The formations of political respectability within the African American consciousness often derive from familial or sociological orientations, insistence, and upbringings. Jackson grew up in Loveman Village, a project of Birmingham, Alabama. The socioeconomic conditions of living in an underbelly of American capitalism seem to have pushed Jackson toward a kind of dream. And in that dream, he attends Baker University in Baldwin City, Kansas, before joining the workforce back home and remaining in Loveman Village with his mother until opportunities for promotion and transition arise. The house, the wife, and the children, all the nuclear elements that tell of ordinary American living, come later. But these kinds of American events lead to Jackson’s compilation of ordinariness amid respectable ways of knowing and being. 

Jackson tells of a hard-working father and the grief that comes with his unexpected passing. He also highlights the will, fortitude, and capacity of a loving mother who, while raising Jackson and his four other siblings, worked a myriad of jobs, including as a maid in the white suburbs of Birmingham, to make ends meet. His mother’s commitment to religiosity, like churchgoing, defines Jackson’s Christian faith with Presbyterian inclinations.  

In his accounts on faith and church, Jackson wrestles with the relationship between race and religion. He describes the Presbyterian Church as a predominantly white space, yet he frequents its sanctuary. The Presbyterian Church is where Jackson embraces baptism and where he and his wife, Denise, leave years later when the church he attended while working for the Philadelphia Inquirer succumbs to Trumpism at the behest of a new pastor. Until this point in his narrative, Jackson communicates about how he was rightly suspicious of his fellow white siblings in Christ while remaining ambitiously hopeful that their collective Christology would run deeper than their political sociology.  

Suspicion is a wonder worker throughout Jackson’s becoming, shaping, and maneuvering – from his tedious and critical support of then-candidate Barack Obama to the wonders about his youngest brother’s (Calvin) health after one holiday family visit during Jackson’s journalistic stint in Baltimore. Jackson is often clear about where he stands when it comes to race, religion, and politics. Still, his memoir’s snapshot-like, short chapters leave much room for wonder regarding his thoughts on love, sexuality, and familial secrets. The existential dimensions of the unsaid seem to play a unique role in Jackson’s childhood, adulthood, and the evolution of his social and political thoughts.  

In 2022, he officially said goodbye to his role as a newspaperman with the Houston Chronicle, where Jackson’s crafty attempts at reporting and writing about the facts and truths of the world in 800 words or less met with the bodily realities of a changing journalistic landscape and his willingness (or lack thereof) to remain inside it. His departure reads like a eulogy of what’s been and a journal entry about what is to come:  

“There’s no going backward. Digital journalism isn’t the future; it’s now! And print newspapers will continue to die. That doesn’t make me sad. I’m just grateful for the forty-five years during which I got to work for some outstanding publications” (p.155).  

To read Under the Sun is to read about how that sense of gratitude shows up in Jackon’s unending attempts to let facts, truth, and opinion work together to tell an ordinary American story. Jackson communicates this ordinariness with a kind of poise and control that could leave the critical readers of the earth wanting more.  

C.G. Crawford is a writer from Birmingham, Alabama, and an MFA in Creative Writing student at the University of Alabama. He has a political science degree from Auburn University at Montgomery and a Master of Theological Studies from Vanderbilt University with concentrations in American Studies and Black Church Studies.