With Bob McGruder as editor, the Detroit Free Press was the largest newspaper in the country with an African American at the helm./Free Press photo by Nico Toutenhoofd

By Joe Grimm

If you see a ray of sunshine break through the clouds one of these days, it’s probably just Bob McGruder smiling.

On Sept. 15 in Denver, two diversity champions who struggled alongside him received the award named after him.

Greg Moore, editor of The Denver Post, and Sherrie Marshall, editor of The Telegraph in Macon, Ga., received the 10th annual Robert G. McGruder Award for Diversity Leadership.

The award is given by the Associated Press Media Editors. It is co-sponsored by the Detroit Free Press, The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, Kent State University and the Freedom Forum, parent foundation of the First Amendment Center. McGruder attended Kent State and was an editor at The Plain Dealer and the Free Press.

McGruder was my boss at the Free Press and made me recruiting and development editor. He is largely responsible for much of my philosophy about news and diversity. Sometimes, I still ask myself, as a lot of us did at the Free Press after he died of cancer in 2002, “What would Bob do?”

Ever since their days in Cleveland, McGruder and Moore were very close. After McGruder’s death, his wife, Annette, gave Moore the golden ring set with the light-green jade that McGruder always wore. “It’s been on my finger every day since,” Moore told me.

Annette McGruder gave Moore the ring at the 2002 Associated Press Managing Editors conference. This year, to mark the 10th occasion of the award, she donated $5,000 to the APME Foundation to support the prize, which is $2,500 for each winner. Moore said he thanked her for being such a strong guardian of McGruder’s commitment to diversity.

Marshall’s nomination, by Jeanne Fox-Alston, vice president of the NAA Foundation & Diversity at the Newspaper Association of America, and Reginald Stuart, corporate recruiter for the McClatchy Co., wrote: “She breathes it, as Bob did. She lives it, as Bob did! Through three publishers, two owners, flush and lean times, Sherrie Marshall has remained consistent in her dedication to diversity.”

One of the last major events McGruder attended was a Knight Ridder reception in San Jose, where he was awarded the John S. Knight Gold Medal in 2001. He crafted this for his acceptance speech:

“Please know I stand for diversity. I represent diversity. I am the messenger and the message of diversity. I represent the African Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans, Asians, Native Americans, gays and lesbians, women and all the others we must see represented in our business offices, newsrooms and our newspapers if we truly want to meet the challenge of serving our communities.”

Joe Grimm won the McGruder Award with Wanda Lloyd, executive editor of the Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser, in 2007. Grimm is a consultant and adjunct faculty member of the Freedom Forum Diversity Institute, and recruited for the Detroit Free Press, Knight Ridder and Gannett from 1990 until 2008. He now teaches at the Michigan State University School of Journalism. He has run the JobsPage journalism careers site at www.jobspage.com since 1996. Questions about careers? E-mail Joe for an answer.