Glen Ford (journalist)
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Ford was born November 5, 1949, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His Irish American mother, Shirley (née Smith), was a civil rights activist from New Jersey; his father, Rudy “The Deuce” Rutherford, himself born in Richland, Georgia, was a Black Radio Hall of Fame inductee, the first Black man in the Deep South to host a non-gospel television program, Rocking with The Deuce. After his parents divorced, he spent parts of his childhood in both New Jersey and Georgia.
Ford died on July 28, 2021, at the age of 71, from cancer in Manhattan.
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Career
Ford began his radio career reading news wire copy at age 11. His first full-time position on-air was at a James Brown-owned radio station, WRDW in Augusta, Georgia. It was there that Brown shortened his name to 'Ford.'
After serving four years in the Army, he worked as a radio journalist in Georgia and Maryland, before taking a job in 1974 in Washington, D.C., with the Mutual Black Network.
Ford was highly critical of the candidacy and presidency of Barack Obama. During Obama's re-election campaign in 2012, in a discussion with sociologist Michael Eric Dyson, Ford said that "Obama is not the lesser of evils, but the more effective evil. And we base that on his record and also on his rhetoric at the convention."
Later in that debate he described Obama's foreign policy as imperialistic, pointing out that "this is one of the great historical legacies of the Obama administration. He has ignored international law, laws that have evolved over hundreds of years, ignored the sovereignty of nations."