Thomas Fleming, the dean of Northern California's black journalists, died on November 21, 2006, the week before his 99th birthday. Fittingly, he was honored with a memorial service at San Francisco City Hall, located at 1 Dr. Carlton B. Goodlett Place; the address was renamed in 1999 for Goodlett, a prominent black physician who was Fleming's best friend. Together, for almost 50 years, they ran the Sun-Reporter, the city's oldest and largest black-owned newspaper.

It was Fleming who persuaded Goodlett to return to California from the East Coast in 1945 and establish his medical practice in San Francisco's Fillmore district, a thriving black neighborhood infused with war workers who migrated there during World War II. Fleming introduced Goodlett to the struggling newspaper and soon brought him on board as publisher. With the forum that the Sun-Reporter provided, Goodlett became one of Northern California's leading civil rights activists. Fleming worked in his shadow, but was a highly respected figure in his own right for his journalistic integrity, intolerance for racism, uncanny memory, and personal acquaintance with many of the greatest black Americans of the century.

Tom Fleming was history walking among us. Up until the end, he could vividly recall his grandmother, who was born during slavery days; Marcus Garvey riding in a parade through Harlem during World War I; and the San Francisco general strike of 1934, when he was almost killed while trying to work as a scab. He liked to tell of running from police while covering the student strike at San Francisco State University in 1968 (which led to the nation's first ethnic studies department), and the aftermath of the Jonestown tragedy of 1978, when he was the only reporter allowed inside the People's Temple following the mass suicide/murders.

He began his journalism career at the Spokesman, a radical black newspaper published in San Francisco from 1931-5. He was the founding editor of the Reporter, which later merged with the rival Sun to form the Sun-Reporter. He wrote for the paper for more than 61 years, retiring in December 2005. He often said that he would have liked to work for the daily press. But no daily newspaper in Northern California hired a black reporter until 1962, when Fleming was already in his mid-50s and considered too old to be given a chance. So he labored on for the black press, eventually becoming an elder statesman and role model for those who followed him in print journalism, radio and TV.

For the Sun-Reporter, Fleming covered nine national political conventions, met two presidents, and traveled to Africa, Asia and Latin America. He had the newsman's talent of being able to write fast, and if there was space to fill, the staff could always count on him to come up with something that fit.

Fleming had an uncanny memory and a streak of stubbornness coupled with dignity. Until 1997 he held court at the old Sun-Reporter office on Turk Street, where he spent most of the day reading newspapers, greeting visitors, and writing his three weekly columns -- an editorial, the Police Blotter, and the Weekly Report, a commentary on national and world events. He had a loud, high-pitched, highly inflective voice, often punctuated by raucous laughter which rang throughout the rambling two-story building.

He was like a human time machine: if someone mentioned a person they once both knew, he could go on almost forever with details about the person's life, family members, mutual acquaintances and personal history. He liked to tell his favorite stories over and over, especially about famous black people he had met. They included Martin Luther King Jr., W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Houston, Thurgood Marshall, Malcolm X, Paul Robeson, A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, Duke Ellington and Muhammad Ali.

He could be prickly. One time a woman came in, peered at him through the half-door that separated the lobby from the office, and asked politely, "Are you Thomas Fleming?" He said yes. She went on: "Is it Thomas or Tom?" He bellowed back: "It's Mister Fleming to you!"

A lifelong bachelor who lived alone until he was 98, Tom Fleming cooked for himself, typed all his columns on an old manual typewriter, and did not collect Social Security until his mid-70s, when it began arriving unsolicited. "I didn't need it," he said. "I was making a salary."

I got to know Tom in 1995, when I started working for the Sun-Reporter as a staff writer and copy editor. I was fascinated by his stories, and told him he should write a book about his experiences. He said that many people had made the same suggestion over the years, but that he couldn't be bothered to do it himself.

Tom's most widely read series of articles was "Reflections on Black History.” The series originated in February 1996 when TV station KQED Channel 9 in San Francisco aired an excellent half-hour documentary by Bill Jersey titled Crossroads: A Story of West Oakland. It told about Oakland's historic role as a railroad hub and a magnet for black Americans leaving the South. Tom saw it, and it triggered a flood of memories for him. The next week he began writing a new weekly column, "Reflections on Black History," which started with the story of his move to Oakland in 1926, when he tried to get a railroad job but was instead hired as a bellhop on a passenger ship. Combining personal experiences with historical facts, Tom told his life story with the underlying theme of a black man trying to make it in a white man's world. It appealed strongly to readers, and he wrote about 60 installments before ending it in the spring of 1997.

The pattern of Tom's life changed in June 1997 when the Sun-Reporter moved across town to an office at the top of a steep flight of stairs. Commuting was difficult, so he retired as the paper's executive editor, but he continued to write two articles a week from his home.

When I lost my job at the Sun-Reporter in August 1997, I contacted him to see if he would be interested in collaborating with me on his memoirs. He agreed. Over the next 18 months, I visited him about 100 times at his cluttered Fillmore Street apartment filled with history books and jazz recordings. Setting up the tape recorder between us, I went through his black history columns one paragraph at a time, asking him to fill in the details.

I transcribed the tapes, and with his permission I blended his previous columns with the new material to create a new column, also called "Reflections on Black History," which began with his childhood in Jacksonville, Florida. The National Newspaper Publishers Association, a wire service for the black press, agreed to distribute it, and soon the column was appearing in dozens of weekly papers nationwide. Then the Columbus Free Press in Ohio offered to feature it on their Web site, and created a separate page for Tom's columns.

Tom began to get dozens of e-mails a month, many of them containing valuable historical information that enhanced the project. Neither of us received any pay, but the positive feedback was thrilling for both of us.

One day Tom surprised me by handing me a long, unpublished manuscript that he had written in the 1970s about his earliest years. For me, it was like an archaeological treasure. Although it was too late to use in the columns, it was invaluable later in creating a rounded portrait of his boyhood.

His memory was legendary. At first I doubted whether he could remember distant events in such detail, and suspected that he had read about some of them in books. But my doubts ended when Tom wrote about his first railroad job, on a train ferry in upper San Francisco Bay in 1927. After the column appeared, a reader e-mailed me a photo of the ferry and identified it as the Ramon -- a name which Tom had never mentioned. That week, when I visited him, I showed him the photo and asked if he could identify it. He took one glance and said, "That's the Ramon." He had not seen it for more than 70 years.

I created each new column in his own words and began each of our recording sessions by giving him a copy before I sent it out. He studied it carefully, often grumbling at the way I'd rearranged his words, then told me the changes he required. Occasionally he got something wrong, and he bristled when I challenged him by showing him a book or article that conflicted with what he said. Each week, as the column's readership grew, our relationship became more strained.

In February 1999, for our 66th column, I handed him a heavily edited version of his story about Langston Hughes. Tom had met Hughes in the 1930s, and treasured his memories of the great black writer. To check Tom's accuracy, I consulted the exhaustive two-volume biography of Hughes by Arnold Rampersad, a professor of literature at Princeton University. The book confirmed most of what Tom had said about Hughes' sojourns in San Francisco, but contradicted some of his statements about Hughes' later life. For Tom, this was the last straw. Fiercely proud of his memory, he declared that he no longer wanted to continue the project.

I sent out the column anyway, but only to the Web site, not the wire service. The barrage of e-mail stopped. Tom didn't realize that I produced 20 more columns under his name. Maybe that was wrong, but I did what I felt was right at the time. My work ended only when the Columbus Free Press lost its webmaster and could no longer update the site. But it kept Tom's page posted, and over the following years, his writings attracted hundreds of new readers. His page still appears on the Internet at www.freepress.org/fleming/fleming.html.

We didn't speak again for almost a year. Then our friendship blossomed again, and I began visiting him quite often, especially to pick up his editorials and retype them for the Sun-Reporter on my computer. I never mentioned the black history project to him, but sent him copies of all the e-mails he continued to receive from the Web site. Through those e-mails, he was contacted by many old friends and made many new ones.

In 2001 I transcribed the rest of the tapes, combined the columns into one long narrative, spent weeks on research, added the information from Tom's manuscript about his earliest years, and wrote his story up to the end of World War II, which was as far as I got in our interviews. Then I sent it to some historians, professors and journalists for their feedback. The response was universally enthusiastic.

A San Francisco publisher read the book and offered to publish it. He printed several copies for review purposes, one of which I gave to Tom. But Tom didn't like it: he said it wasn't his work, and refused to allow it to be published. The book was about 95 percent Tom's words; the rest was factual corrections and my own words. Again, we parted company and the project was shelved. This time it lay dormant for five years. I soon renewed my friendship with Tom, but realized that the book would never appear in his lifetime.

In the summer of 2006 I edited the book once again. Thanks to the Internet, I was able to confirm many historical facts that had eluded me before. My biggest decision was what to do with Tom's writings about entertainment, which didn't fit neatly into the flow of the book. So I created a separate chapter for them at the end.

This book should have been much better than it is. I never completed all the interviews that I'd planned, and the sections on the Depression and World War II lack the fine details that would have brought them more fully to life. At one time I hoped to help Tom write a second volume covering his entire career with the Sun-Reporter. Those stories died with him.

But despite its omissions, this book is a unique document of a remarkable man who whose role as an eyewitness to California's black history may never be equaled. Above all, Tom was a writer who understood the power of the printed word. When he first arrived in California in 1919, he remembered seeing signs that read: "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." He explained: "We understood what they meant." He thought the best way to fight such words was to get his own words into print, any way he could. And he did: millions of them.

Tom never belonged to the past. Up to the end, he had many close friends of all ages, who constantly called him, visited him and took him places. He left no known blood relatives, but was virtually adopted by the Jeffrey family of Oakland, who treated him like a beloved uncle and watched over him in his later years. They had organized a 99th birthday party for him on November 25, 2006 and invited many guests. When he died unexpectedly of heart failure, they held the party anyway, as a celebration of his life. One of the most moving tributes was from Peter Magnani, who wrote:

"I worked for Tom Fleming at the Sun-Reporter for five years and learned so much from him. He had three qualities that made him a superb journalist: He was always skeptical, never accepting anything at face value and always alert to the motives of those who tried to influence him. He had a well-tuned sense of social justice and no mercy whatsoever for the bully or the oppressor. And he was an amazing story-teller.

"Tom was no fool. He could spot a fake a mile away. And he knew the world was full of people who would lie, cheat and steal to feather their own nests. But at the same time -- and this is what really defined Tom Fleming -- he had faith in his fellow man, and he believed in progress and in humanity's desire and ability to better itself. That faith made Tom a natural ally of young people. He was always there for them, to teach, encourage, and offer opportunities. It didn't matter who they were, as long as they were willing to learn and grow. Thanks to Tom Fleming, there are legions of people in the Bay Area and beyond who are doing their part to help make the world a better place. That's his legacy -- the legacy of an enlightened teacher."

Max Millard
San Francisco, Calif.
January 1, 2007