Former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Chuck Stone wore many hats. He was a journalist, an agent of legislative fine print, a novelist, a historian and an esteemed professor. He was a Civil Rights activist who helped save Black lives, and a role model who co-founded the National Association of Black Journalists. For his work, Stone was awarded a posthumous special Pulitzer Prize this week, something he always wanted but never achieved in his lifetime.
Stone was The Daily News’ first Black columnist when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1972 at age 48. He stayed in this city until he retired at 71. What he accomplished went beyond words on the page. In our deeply shaken world of low trust and escalating polarization, Stone’s success started and ended with just that: trust. But Stone also brought action-based empathy, deep listening, curiosity, and a collaborative instinct grounded in mutual respect.
During his two decades in Philadelphia, Stone was called in several dozen times to help defuse crisis situations—by the City, and once, dramatically, by the governor of Pennsylvania. But most often, he was sought out by Black men seeking safe passage in negotiations with the Philadelphia Police Department. More than 70 people — including two women — turned themselves in to Stone rather than surrender directly to police. They wanted some measure of protection and a hedge that they wouldn’t get roughed-up, or worse, at police headquarters. They believed that Stone would make sure that they were treated fairly.
Each time, Stone would talk to the men and listen to their stories. He would also have a Daily News photographer take their pictures, saying in effect, Here’s what they looked like before they went in. It was a desire for protection if not insurance.
That role — as a kind of ad hoc mediator — was one he never asked for but rarely turned down. The trust he built in the Black community was mirrored, eventually, in relationships with detectives and officials. His exchanges with police, once adversarial, became complex, even collaborative. Over time, a few officers, including the famously tough Detective Mike Chitwood, came to rely on Stone, too.
Stone continually modeled a sense of purpose, candor and character. He lived his own faith and never held back. His optimism was inseparable from his realism. For those he didn’t like he could be a serious pain in the ass. His work in Philadelphia wasn’t clean or perfect. But it was real. He acted out of conviction and, often, out of urgency. He was sometimes impatient, sometimes difficult. Still, he showed up, again and again—when few others did.
A life changed
In the summer of 1986, I met Chuck Stone. I was a nerdy 15-year-old White kid, but without the nerdy good grades. My encounter with Mr. Stone made a soaring impression.
The Philadelphia Daily News was a co-sponsor of the Mellon Jazz Festival, and Stone, a jazz aficionado, hosted a few of the musicians and fans at his home. I was there with my close friend Paul Carrier and his father Jerry, an editor at the paper.
Mr. Carrier introduced Stone to Paul, “who is playing lead trumpet in the All-City Jazz band with” Christian McBride (bass) and Joey DeFrancesco (piano). Then Mr. Carrier introduced me. “Chuck,” he said, “I’d like you to meet an up-and-coming tenor player: Tom Devaney.”
Mr. Stone brightened and turned to face me directly so I couldn’t squirm away. He asked me what tenor players I liked. I had been listening to Dexter Gordon, so I said his name.
He said, “Wha???? How old are you?”
“I just turned 15,” I said.
“Well, I don’t know a lot of 15-year-olds who know Dexter Gordon — especially not any teen-age White boys! So how much do you practice?”
On the spot, I said, “At least four to five hours a week.”
Stone hit the roof. His eyes rolled back as he literally screamed: “Jerry! I thought you said this guy was serious? Four to five hours a week. No, that’s just warming up. Nah, no, oh dear. This guy isn’t serious.”
He swayed away, and then unexpectedly leaned back toward me. My stomach completely dropped. Stone leaned in for one more follow-up: “Well, you know that’s not enough,” he said in a quieter tone. “But what are you practicing then?”
He liked to quote Francis Bacon: “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island, cut off from other lands.”
For the past week, I had gotten a good handle on the lush sax lead in George Michael’s hit song Careless Whisper. But I didn’t dare say that. What I did say – and what was true — was that I had also been playing a lot of long-tones, working on my sound.
Stone was not smiling. He said, “OK, long-tones. You have to practice long-tones. Dexter has such a full-bodied sound. Dear Lord, dear Dexter, those low notes!”
Stone stepped away. I figured that was it—but then he came back and handed Paul and me his card. On the back of mine he scribbled Sonny Rollins / Lester Young. On the back of Paul’s, he scribbled Clifford Brown. “Be in touch, OK? And check those guys out,” he said.
Then he turned slightly and said, “Paul and Tom, there’s a man I like you meet. Grover, please my friend Jerry Carry and Paul and Tom … Paul is Jerry’s son and is playing trumpet in the Philadelphia All-City. And Tom, well, we have high hopes for Tom. He’s working on the tenor, but we have to keep an eye on him.” Mr. Stone paused, and then smiled, “Tom and Paul, please meet Mr. Grover Washington, Jr.”
After that night, I started practicing four or five hours a day rather than four or five hours a week. The next year I made it into the Philadelphia All-City High School Jazz Band, which Downbeat Magazine had just voted the number one high school jazz band in the country.
Over the years I had the urge to talk with Stone again. In 2013, when he was living in North Carolina, I wrote him an email asking if he remembered me. He did. “How many teenage White boys can talk jazz?” he asked. He invited me to look him up if I were ever nearby. But that was it and that was enough. Chuck Stone had remembered our exchange, and it was all I needed.
Hostage crisis at Graterford
In November 1981, Chuck Stone was called in to help negotiate the end of a hostage crisis at Graterford Prison. Four inmates, including Joseph “Jo-Jo” Bowen, had taken 38 people hostage after a failed escape attempt. After several days of stalled negotiations, prison officials turned to Stone — someone both the hostage-takers and state authorities trusted.
With the chance of bloodshed real, the mediator’s credibility had to be unimpeachable. And Chuck Stone, as The New York Times put it in 2014, had both “street and statehouse cred.”
Major Donald Vaughn, head of Graterford’s guards, laid out the plan to Stone and Bowen’s brother, Jeffrey. They would walk down a hallway and sit, unarmed, across from the kitchen door where the inmates were holed up.
Stone managed delicate conversations, searching for ways to move things forward without escalation. As part of the final agreement, the hostage-takers discharged their weapons down an empty hallway — a controlled act, negotiated in advance, that allowed them to save face before releasing the hostages.
Stone’s calm, credibility, and steady listening helped end the crisis without loss of life
Though Stone’s legacy remains less visible, I hope his Pulitzer citation becomes a gateway to his significant achievements.
Stone continually modeled a sense of purpose, candor and character. He lived his own faith and never held back. His optimism was part of his realism.
Growing up, I was fed a steady diet of workaday columnists and big-city journalists: sports writers with a punchy flair and heart, who seemed to be tracking the city’s emotional pulse as much as its score charts; sociable lone wolves; and old-school reporters who unearthed stories of the folks behind the scenes in kitchens, corner groceries, and the upstarts and old heads making the city work. And then there were critics like Chuck Stone, crossing race lines, deep in the fray—participant-observers through and through.
In an article written several days after the Graterford crisis, Stone details Major Vaughn’s constructive unflinching straight-talk about how to proceed. Other previous high pressure situations before this had taken place over the phone or between walls, not face to face. Stone writes:
Pudgy, brown-skinned Major Donald Vaughn, the soft-spoken, tough head of Graterford’s guards, laid out the battle plan with an exactness Patton would have admired to Jeffrey Bowen (brother of the hostage-takers’ ringleader, Joseph) and me.
“Now, you’re going to take your chairs, walk down that corridor to the open door across from the wall,” he began in the extended staccato style of an adult reasoning with an uncomprehending 2-year-old who has just wet his pants, “and you’re going to sit down with your backs against the wall and talk with Jo-Jo and anybody else who comes to the door.
I COULDN’T BELIEVE what I had heard.
“We’re going to do what?” I wailed. “Major, are you serious?”
[…]
“Now, let Jo-Jo do all the talking,” briskly continued the efficient major, brushing aside my intemperate outburst. “They’ve got two shotguns and two pistols. They may be trained on you. Be calm. Don’t get excited…”
This is a portrait of Vaughn’s character in a single stroke. Stone puts us in the moment. And he doesn’t paint himself as the hero — and for that, and for his immediate, voice-driven, wholehearted prose, he is.
At Graterford, the stakes were immediate. Stone was afraid — he said so plainly. He doubted the plan, feared for his life, and questioned what he was doing there. But he went anyway. He sat down, listened hard, and stayed steady. That was how he moved through the world: not without fear, but with resolve.
By his own account, the character trait he most aspired to was to be a citizen of the world. He liked to quote Francis Bacon: “If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island, cut off from other lands.”
Chuck Stone lived by that. It comes across not only in his comportment, but in his mind, body, and Keep the faith, baby spirit. And when it counted, he acted on it. He was there.
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