🇺🇸 U.S. Badass: William Worthy

William Worthy was a journalist who believed his job was to go where the story was, regardless of whether the U.S. government had decided Americans weren't allowed to look there. When the State Department banned American travel to China and Cuba during the Cold War, Worthy went anyway, repeatedly, and reported what he found. The government's eventual response was to write a law specifically targeting him and prosecute him under it — a rare case of Congress passing legislation aimed at one particular journalist for the specific crime of committing journalism somewhere they'd been told not to.

Born in 1921 in Boston, Worthy became a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the country's most significant Black newspapers, at a time when Black journalists were almost entirely shut out of mainstream American press coverage of international affairs. He built his reputation traveling to and reporting from places the American press corps mostly avoided or was barred from — apartheid South Africa, Indonesia, and, most consequentially, the People's Republic of China in 1956 and Cuba repeatedly through the late 1950s and 1960s.

In 1956, Worthy became one of the first American journalists to enter Communist China after the U.S. imposed a travel ban following the Korean War. The State Department responded by refusing to renew his passport when he tried to travel again. He continued traveling anyway, arguing correctly that the government could not constitutionally prevent a citizen from traveling internationally simply because his reporting was inconvenient. He continued reporting from Cuba after Fidel Castro's revolution, providing coverage of the country that most of the American press, operating under the same travel restrictions, simply could not produce.

In 1962, having reentered the United States from Cuba without a valid passport, Worthy was arrested and prosecuted under a law that Congress had passed the previous year specifically criminalizing reentry to the United States without a passport by an American citizen — a law with essentially no other practical application, written and passed because the existing legal framework had failed to stop him. He was convicted, sentenced to three months, and the conviction was later overturned on appeal in 1964, with the court finding the prosecution had violated his constitutional right to return to his own country.

Worthy's case became a significant marker in the broader argument over whether the U.S. government could use passport control as a tool of political censorship — restricting not what journalists could say, but where they were physically permitted to go to find things out in the first place. He continued reporting internationally for decades afterward and became a journalism professor, spending his later career teaching the next generation of reporters that the job sometimes requires going exactly where you've been told not to.

Congress wrote a law with his name basically on it. He got it overturned and kept reporting from the places they didn't want Americans looking.

"If Cuba goes, if China goes, must every place go?"
— On the logic of Cold War travel restrictions, which he treated as the propaganda tool it was.

This week's U.S. Badass got a federal law written specifically to stop him, got prosecuted under it, got the conviction thrown out, and kept reporting from every place the government decided Americans shouldn't be allowed to see.