Charles “Chuck” Stone, Jr., pioneering African American Newspaper Columnist, Editor Author and Professor, was born July 21, 1924 to Charles and Madeline Stone in St. Louis, Missouri. Soon after, the family moved to Connecticut where Stone’s mother worked for the Hartford Board of Education and his father was business manager at a local college. Stone graduated with honors from Hartford Public High School in 1942, just as the United States was entering World War II. After being drafted in 1943, he became one of the Tuskegee Airmen, serving in the Army Air Corps as a flight navigator. Once the war ended Stone, who had been accepted to Harvard, decided to attend Wesleyan University instead where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English followed by an M.A. in sociology from the University of Chicago. Stone then worked for the humanitarian organization, Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), in India and Egypt between 1957 and 1958.
Upon returning to the United States, Stone worked various jobs for several African American newspapers. He became a reporter and then editor for the New York Age in 1958, White House correspondent and editor of the Washington Afro-American in 1960, and editor-in-chief at the Chicago Defender in 1963. Stone began to write articles critical of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley and was eventually fired in 1964 after refusing his publisher’s request to stand down on the issue. Stone then gravitated toward politics, working for Harlem Representative Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. as a speech writer. During this time Stone became friends with civil rights icons like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael.