The Posf s Lone Ranger

He has never been to a White House briefing or a presidential news conference. He does not entertain Cabinet officers at dinner parties or travel the chichi social circuit open to influential Washington journalists. He shuns the press clubs, including the one where other black newsmen meet. His beat is largely confined to a cluttered, windowless office just off the Washington Post's news room and a vast network of telephone sources. Were it not for a slight resemblance to Comedian Flip Wilson and a penchant for wearing red plaid trousers, Columnist William Raspberry could do his work unnoticed, until another of his provocative articles appears.

That would be fine with him. He tries to live up to one colleague's description of him: the Lone Ranger of columnists.

This personal independence is reflected in what he writes. As his growing number of readers* know, Raspberry has emerged as the most respected black voice on any white U.S. newspaper. Neither a Pollyanna nor a raging militant, he considers the merits rather than the ideology of any issue. Not surprisingly, his judgments regularly nettle the Pollyannas and militants.

The latest example of Raspberry's painstaking approach dealt with an explosive issue: the performance of students in Washington's predominantly black public school system. Recent tests showed that local pupils are year by year falling farther behind the national norms in reading and math. The release of these findings brought charges--most notably from Barbara Sizemore, a dynamic black who is Washington's new school superintendent--that the tests themselves are "culturally biased" against ghetto children. But Raspberry was dissatisfied with that familiar argument, calling it "a sort of cop-out."

Persuaded that local schools must do better in teaching fundamentals, Raspberry devoted six successive columns to intelligence tests, presenting the views of D.C. teachers who agreed with his criticism as well as a rejoinder from Sizemore. He concluded last week that black parents--and the schools--must teach their children to pass standardized exams, which he called the "keepers of the gate" to better lives.

Such meticulous work may seem gritty and unassuming, especially since it appears thrice weekly on the same Post page that features such stars as Joseph Alsop, Joseph Kraft, and Evans and Novak. Yet Raspberry's strength rests precisely in the quiet, offbeat nature of his interests. Years of street experience have made Raspberry, 38, an expert in three areas usually shunned by general columnists: education, criminal justice and drug abuse.

Though he favors integration, he has consistently opposed school busing to achieve racial balance, arguing that it is demeaning for blacks to be told that a proper education is impossible in black schools. "My recurring nightmare," he says half jokingly, "has all the white people moving off to Alaska and all the black kids following them, with school buses strung out in a line all the way."

Columns exposing a few individuals' brushes with judicial tyranny have made him an unofficial ombudsman for local underdogs (thanks to Raspberry, a Washington prisoner was allowed to attend his mother's funeral, although police insisted that he wear handcuffs and leg irons). He has suggested that the vast problem of drug addiction cannot be solved unless the answer to a single question is found: What makes someone try the needle the first time?

No Token. Raspberry's questioning turn of mind came from his parents, both schoolteachers in the northeastern Mississippi hamlet of Okolona. After graduating from the local black high school, he entered Indiana Central College in Indianapolis and helped support himself by reporting for a local black weekly. A stint in the Army brought him to Washington, where he got a job as a teletypist for the Post. Some months later a sympathetic editor recognized Raspberry's potential as a reporter. He spent four years on civil rights stories. In 1966 he got a chance as a columnist.

Although blacks criticize him for some of his views, many admire his independent stands. Says a black colleague: "This fellow is not a token of anything. They don't know what he's going to write." Raspberry has no interest in being a racial spokesman: "I think of myself as a black columnist as much as Joe Kraft thinks of himself as a white columnist." That neutrality may be easier for Kraft than it is for Raspberry. Blacks still must cope with pressures and hurts that whites are spared. But Raspberry's column shows that the pain need not be disabling.

* Offered to the 350 clients of his paper's news service, the Raspberry column appears in a number of major dailies round the country.

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