Gary G. Yerkey

Class of 1966: Documenting history

Gary Glen Yerkey was born in Chicago, Illinois. At Ripon, he majored in philosophy and was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He has continued his affiliation with Ripon by serving as a Career Discovery Tour host and membership in Partners in the Legacy.

Yerkey served in the United States Air Force and is a former pilot. After working with voter registration in the South, he was employed as an advertising copywriter at Houghton Mifflin Co. in Boston. He then moved to Beirut, where he did post-graduate work in political philosophy at the American University of Beirut.

From 1975 to 1987, he served as The Christian Science Monitor’s Brussels-based correspondent. Since then, he has reported from some two dozen countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia for TIME-LIFE, ABC News, the International Herald Tribune and other U.S. news organizations and publications. He has also been a staff reporter for Bloomberg BNA news service in Washington, D.C., covering Congress and the Executive Branch and has spent time in Haiti covering the 2010 earthquake and its aftermath. He is currently a freelance writer and reporter based in Washington, D.C.

His book “Troublemakers: On the March for Civil Rights from Selma to Black Power” examines the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965, in which Yerkey, along with two other Ripon College students and the Rev. Herman Jerome “Jerry” Thompson, then-Ripon College chaplain, participated.

“Now, more than 50 years later, I am at a loss to satisfactorily explain what drew me to Rev. Thompson’s office that day in early March 1965, and from there to Selma,” Yerkey said. “It certainly had something to do with his inspiring passion for justice and for lifting up others. It was also the cause being pursued. … In Selma I had learned for the first time a real-life lesson in the importance of sometimes making (as the civil rights leader John Lewis said) ’good trouble, necessary trouble.’”

In 2015, he was among the “foot soldiers” of the civil rights movement who received a collective Congressional Gold Medal — the nation’s highest civilian award — for their participation in the Selma-to-Montgomery march.

Yerkey’s other books include “Still Time to Live: A Biography of Jack Belden”; “Dying for the News: Honoring Tom Treanor and the Other Reporters Killed Covering World War II”; “He’s Coming to Start Riots: On the Road to Black Power with ‘The Rev.’ Willie Ricks”; “A Pilot’s Pilot: Gen. Caleb V. Haynes and the Rise of American Air Power, 1917-1944”; “The Two Wars of Bruce C. Hopper: From WW I Bomber Pilot to WW II Spy”; and “When the Yanks Came to Sweden: How Thousands of American Airmen, Spies and Diplomats Changed a ‘Neutral’ Nation in World War II.”

Concerning his work as a writer, Yerkey said, “I think that most writers write, first and foremost, about what interests them — with the hope that it may also interest others. And I am no exception.” He said that for him, writing is about learning, “which is the main reason, I suppose, that I write at all and why I believe that books represent a source of, yes, enjoyment and diversion, but also of a way to help ensure an educated citizenry.”

In 2024, he was a recipient of Ripon’s Distinguished Alumni Citation.