Chuck Stone, Pioneering Black Journalist And Professor, Dies At 89 : Code Switch : NPR

Chuck Stone, Pioneering Black Journalist And Professor, Dies At 89 : Code Switch : NPR: When Chuck Stone worked at the Philadelphia Daily News, staffers for the newspaper got used to calls from reception telling them a person the police were pursuing as violent and criminal was waiting to talk to Stone. The suspects trusted Stone but feared police brutality. The veteran newsman would talk to the accused, take the accused's photo to show he was intact and then call the police.

Elmer Smith, who inherited Stone's column after he retired, wrote that this was a prudent, even lifesaving measure: "If their features somehow got rearranged on the way to prison," Smith wrote in his appreciation on Monday, "a Daily News photo would be evidence of what had happened to them."

A total of 75 people would turn themselves over to Stone in the 19 years that he wrote one of Philadelphia's most closely read columns. All were black, and all feared being battered or even killed by Philadelphia's finest, which had a reputation for institutional brutality in the city's communities of color. Especially its black ones.