The caller on Sunday told me he was so sorry that my editor’s husband just died.
“What?” I asked. “Who are you talking about?”
Michael Days, 72, retired top editor of the Philadelphia Daily News and Philadelphia Inquirer, died on Oct. 18. The suddenness of it shocked me and many others who knew him. Days was one of the top Black journalism figures in the country, particularly in the world of newspapering.
“I can’t process this,” said journalist Betty Winston Baye, of Louisville, Kentucky. “So many good times.”
“I cried all night,” recalled journalist Cheryl Devall, after she heard that Days and his wife, Angela Dodson, were leaving Louisville in the mid-1980s for newspaper jobs in New York and Philadelphia. “What would I do now that they were gone?” wondered the new arrival to the Louisville Courier-Journal.
“Michael and Angela radiated confidence in their right to be there. They made such a shining example for people like me,’ said Devall, reminiscing about her first post-graduate-school job. “They were proud yet not arrogant, helpful but not condescending. They welcomed me, Betty Baye, and Mary Ann French. They were fully present for us. I will always remember that.”
Journalist Karin Berry said, “In 1994, (Michael Days) hired me as an assistant news editor for the Philadelphia Daily News. He helped guide me through my career at the Daily News. I appreciated that he was always tactful and honest, never raised his voice or was mean, which had been my experience at previous newspapers. I think of him as a genuinely good person — also a rarity in journalism.”Angela Dodson, a former editor of the New York Times’ Style section, was my editor when I wrote for Black Issues Book Review from 2003 to 2007. The team of Dodson-Days comprised one of the most recognizable power couples among Black journalists. Scores of traveling friends, me included, nicknamed their colonial-style house in Trenton, two blocks from the Amtrak station (from which they insisted on picking us up), the”Underground Railroad” or “NABJ Bed & Breakfast,” a reference
to the National Association of Black Journalists— the parent organization to Black News & Views.
As executive editor of the Philadelphia Daily News, the tenacious tabloid known as the “People Paper,” Days supervised a 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning duo. He wrote the 2016 biography “Obama’s Legacy.” The following year, the National Association of Black Journalists inducted him into its Hall of Fame.
He retired from daily journalism in 2021 and devoted time to serve as president of Philadelphia’s rebranded NABJ affiliate chapter.
Days’ newspaper career was as varied as it was seasoned: dailies in Rochester, New York, Minneapolis, Louisville, The Wall Street Journal, and the Philadelphia Newspapers where he spent the lion’s share of his work life.
Perhaps Michael Days’ and Angela Dodson’s greatest life accomplishment was adopting four boys – siblings – in 1991 and guiding them to adulthood, independence, marriage and children.
Some people spend Sundays in church; Days and Dodson were Roman Catholics active in organizations including the fraternal order Knights of St. John and its Ladies’ Auxiliary. He was a proud alumnus of the College of the Holy Cross.
In recent years, the empty nesters traveled and collaborated. Last summer, Days and Dodson finished “We’ve Been Here Before: How Rebellion and Activism have Always Sustained America,” a book timed to coincide with the United States’ 250th anniversary in July 2026.
Even as arrangements are incomplete as I write, I anticipate a celebration of Michael Days’ life that includes hundreds of friends who felt blessed by his leadership, generosity, grace, and wry humor. May he rest in peace after a life well lived.
