Joan McClane and the Love That Breaks the Story

The first time I read a story that captured the lives of people I grew up around, classmates, family members, people whose names I knew long before I understood why their circumstances were so hard, something shifted in me.

I did not know much about journalism then. I just knew that somebody had finally told the truth about something this city preferred to leave alone.

Joan Garrett McClane's name was on it.

I have never stopped looking for that kind of journalism since.

I sat down with her this week over coffee and I was ecstatic to meet someone I highly respect.

Joan is not easy to compliment. When you tell her what her reporting has meant to communities that rarely see themselves reflected with dignity in a newspaper, she gets quiet. She redirects. She gives the credit back to the people who talked to her.

And she is precise about who those people are.

She calls them her people.

Not sources. Not subjects. The people in those neighborhoods are hers and she is theirs. That is a covenant. Something you show up for not because it is your job but because love demands it.

I pushed back. I told her: the people may make the story, but it is you that breaks the story.

She sat with that for a moment and we talked some more.

Then she quoted 1 Corinthians 13.

If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.

James Baldwin said it differently but meant the same thing.

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don't see.”

That is her answer.

Not ambition. Not craft, though the craft is extraordinary. Not awards, though the awards came.

Love.

The fact that she went there tells you everything you need to know about Joan and her heart. That of everything she could have said about her career, she reached for a love chapter.

And she meant every word.

She completed both her bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism at the University of Alabama. When the Chattanooga Times Free Press was named a Pulitzer finalist in 2014, her former professor George Daniels wrote about her publicly. He said it was a pleasure to start the day reading one of the top three examples of local reporting in all of journalism, knowing it was produced in part by one of his former students.

What stayed with me was not the praise. It was the specificity. A professor remembering a student for what she did with her education. Where she chose to take it mattered. Who she chose to serve with it mattered even more.

What her professor could not have fully predicted was the specific gift Joan would bring to the work. When people sat down with her they talked. Really talked. Not because she was skilled at extraction but because she was genuinely invested in them as human beings. She was not chasing the story. She was caring for the people inside it. And people can feel the difference. They always can.

She took it here. And she stayed.

Her 2013 series Speak No Evil took nine months to produce. More than 150 people interviewed. Families handed her diaries. She rode along with police at night, sat in court hearings, followed the story wherever it led and came back and kept reporting.

Fifty eight percent of open homicide and shooting investigations in Chattanooga were at dead ends because witnesses would not talk.

The Pulitzer board named the team finalists. The citation recognized them for illuminating a cycle this city had largely refused to name out loud.

She could have taken that nomination and gone anywhere. Bigger markets. Bigger platforms. Bigger paychecks.

She stayed in Chattanooga. She went even harder.

Her 2016 series The Poverty Puzzle was the result of more than a year of reporting, much of it begun in 2015, making it one of the most sustained journalism investments the Times Free Press had ever undertaken. The series went deep inside how Chattanooga, the renaissance city, the comeback kid, the best town ever, had quietly allowed one in four of its residents to fall into poverty while the cranes rose downtown and the national press wrote glowing features about riverfront development and the fastest internet in the Western Hemisphere.

She wrote about a homeless man named Jimmy who died surrounded by empty bottles behind a convenience store on Main Street. Nobody could find him in time to tell him that housing had finally come through.

The young social worker who had fought for him sobbed alone in her office when she heard. Then she walked down the hall and asked her boss a simple question. Could they hold a memorial? Because someone needed to say out loud that his life had mattered.

A news story gets filed and forgotten. What Joan produced was something else entirely. Love, reported.

I believe honest journalism is disappearing. Not because journalists are lazy. It is disappearing because so much of what passes for media right now is not interested in giving you facts, context from all sides, and then trusting you to sit in the tension.

It is interested in telling you what to think. What to feel. Who to be angry at.

That is not journalism. That is divide and conquer.

Joan said it simply. It is important that people have information and access.

When you deny people that, you do not just leave them uninformed. You leave them defenseless. You leave them defined by whoever does show up with a camera or a headline. And that definition is almost never generous.

But here is the harder question. The one Joan's work has always asked of me and the one I am asking of you now.

What happens when the story challenges everything you thought you already knew?

Knowing people who struggle is not the same as understanding what they are going through. Proximity is not expertise. And the gap between the two is where our worst assumptions live.

I had to learn that about myself.

Reading Joan's work, seeing people I knew reflected on the page with full complexity, I still had to confront how much I had been shielded from without knowing I was being shielded.

Who our parents are. What they instill in us. Where they brought us up. And what they chose to protect us from, without knowing what that protection would cost us in understanding.

My mother came back to the South after growing up in New Jersey, where she went to school alongside Jewish, Polish, and other ethnic groups of students in a way that felt ordinary to her. She arrived in a Chattanooga that was visibly and deliberately segregated. The shock of that never fully left her.

She told me not long ago that sometimes the luck of the draw is simply who your parents. Things entirely outside your control that shape the lens through which you see everything else for the rest of your life.

Joan's work taught me that. Conversations reinforced the lesson.

Good journalism does not let you off the hook. It hands you the mirror and it stands there quietly while you look.

In Chattanooga, that failure has a specific and familiar shape.

Crime in poor communities gets played up, amplified, repeated, made into a narrative that follows a neighborhood for decades. Crime in other communities arrives quietly, if it arrives at all. The action of one person becomes attributed to an entire zip code, an entire community, an entire way of life.

That is what happens when people are denied information and access. Somebody else writes their story for them. And that story is almost never the whole truth.

Joan does not tell you what to believe. She gives you Jimmy and the young social worker and the Harvard data on economic mobility and the mother in line before dawn and the power broker in the corner office and she puts them all on the same page and trusts you to sit in the tension.

Most people will not do that. Most outlets will not fund it.

Joan does it anyway. Because they are her people. And her people deserve the whole truth.

Near the end of our conversation she said something I keep turning over.

She encouraged me to keep my eyes on what Chattanooga is doing. To keep talking to people in the community.

From a Pulitzer finalist. To someone still like me who’s still has so much to learn.

Keep watching. Listen longer than feels comfortable. Show up even when the story is hard.

She was not being polite. She was passing something forward. This city's story is not finished, the people in it deserve to have it told honestly, and somebody needs to stay in the room long enough to get it right.

Joan gives the credit to the people who talked to her. She means it. Her humility is not performed. It is theological.

She believes that without love you are a clanging cymbal. That with it you persevere through nine months of court records and night rides and borrowed diaries and a city that would rather celebrate its comeback than reckon with who got left behind.

Love always protects. Love always trusts. Love always hopes. Love always perseveres.

She sat across from me and quoted that and meant every word.

The people make the story.

Joan McClane breaks it.

This city sees itself more clearly because she never stopped.

There was no Black college close enough.

That was the reality facing Chattanooga's African American community in 1947. Jim Crow was not a metaphor. It was infrastructure. It was policy. It was the reason a Black student graduating from Howard High School had to travel hours to Knoxville, Nashville, or Rogersville just to continue their education. It was the reason that by 1950, despite 273 Black students graduating Chattanooga high schools annually, a number that would nearly double within a decade, not one of them could earn a college degree in the city they called home.

So a white Highland Park Baptist Church opened its doors.

Inside those doors, in November 1948, Lee Roberson and a group of ministers officially opened the Zion Baptist Institute. A Bible school. A beginning. By 1949 it had a charter and a name. Zion College. Seventeen students enrolled. The wall that Jim Crow had built did not fall. But somebody found a door.

By 1953 Zion had its first graduate.

His name was Horace Traylor. A Howard High School alumnus, Traylor walked across that stage and into history. The Chattanooga Times noted it plainly on August 30, 1959. He was, the paper reported, "the first member of his race ever to receive a college diploma in Chattanooga."

Read that again.

Not the first from Zion. The first. In the entire city. In 1953. Six years before the lunch counter sit ins. One year before Brown v. Board of Education would shake the legal foundation of everything Jim Crow had built.

Traylor did not leave and never look back. He completed his bachelor's degree at Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta and then came home. In 1959 he became Zion's first Black president. The Chattanooga Times quoted his vision for the institution that August. Zion was, he said, "dedicated to producing men and women of strong faith, right convictions and courage. Men and women with poise and vision who will be living witnesses of the gospel in their various occupations."

That vision was tested immediately.

Zion never achieved full accreditation through the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. It downgraded from a four year institution to a junior college in 1958. Faculty of about twelve held degrees from Boston University, Columbia University, Clark College, Atlanta University, and Tennessee A&I State University. They were teaching in a college with three buildings on East 9th Street, dreaming of a new campus near Howard School, doing serious academic work inside a system designed to make that work invisible.

Then in January 1962 the main building burned to the ground.

Classes moved into local churches. The community responded in ways that complicated every easy narrative about this city and this era. White residents collected hundreds of books to replace what the library had lost. Faculty from the private University of Chattanooga, an institution allied with the city's elite class leadership, taught part time at Zion to keep it running. Wealthy families connected to the Coca Cola Company and Brock Candy Company provided support that helped Traylor connect with a class of patrons the college desperately needed.

The institution that had no right to survive kept surviving.

In July 1964, amid the long hot summer of the Civil Rights Movement, Zion College became Chattanooga City College. Federal funding followed. The Chattanooga Times reported on December 12, 1965 that some 100 students gathered for the dedication of the newly named college. Enrollment grew to 166 and then doubled. Dormitories were planned. A new library. A science building. For a moment it looked like the college might finally have room to breathe.

Then came the University of Tennessee.

When UT announced plans for a Chattanooga branch campus, the University of Chattanooga saw merger as its only path forward. Black leaders saw the same writing on the wall. Rather than be left outside of something that would reshape higher education in this city forever, President Traylor and others made a decision that was not surrender. It was strategy.

They chose to be part of it.

On July 1, 1969, Chattanooga City College joined the merger that created the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Its last class graduated that June. Twenty four students walked across a stage and received associate degrees from an institution that had defied every odd stacked against it for more than two decades.

Horace Traylor was named a special assistant to the UTC chancellor. He later distinguished himself at Miami Dade Community College in Florida.

Zion College became a footnote.

It should be a chapter.

The wall that existed in 1947 did not fall on its own. It fell because a community decided their children deserved a place to learn, and then they built one from almost nothing, watched it burn, rebuilt it inside church sanctuaries, and refused to let it disappear quietly into a city that was already very good at forgetting the people who built it.

Chattanooga is growing. New restaurants. New developments. New people moving in every month. But as the city changes, so does the way its stories get told.

This week we want to know where you stand.

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We talk a lot about being informed.

We scroll. We share. We react.

But there is a difference between consuming information and actually understanding the people behind it.

Love is not what most people think journalism is built on.

But maybe that is the problem.

Facts without love become weapons.

Stories without love become stereotypes.

Coverage without love becomes the very thing that divides us.

I am learning while putting into practice for each and every reader of this publication that the most radical thing a journalist can do right now is genuinely care about the people they cover.

Not the story.

The people.

— Marie