For more than two decades, Phillip Martin has been a leading investigative voice at GBH News. A multi-award-winning journalist and 2024 inductee into the Massachusetts Broadcasters Hall of Fame, his reporting has exposed hidden worlds and told powerful human stories. Just some of the groundbreaking series he’s led include The Underground Trade about human trafficking, Unseen: The boy victims of the sex trade, and The Gangs of Nantucket. He has covered everything from unsolved murders to the underbelly of illicit industries to the rise of extremism, and done so with remarkable compassion. He’s left a lasting mark on journalism in Boston and beyond, and now, after decades of work, Martin is retiring.
He joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to talk about his career and what comes next. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: I was trying not to get emotional because I love you, brother. You’ve done amazing work. And before we dive into the work with GBH, I gotta start off with, well, you and I first met at NPR DC in the ’90s, would have been 1998, I believe. And I was a production assistant ... but you were NPR’s first race correspondent. What was the title of the beat?
Phillip Martin: That’s right. It was a race relations correspondent, focused on race and ethnic conflict.
Rath: That’s right. I don’t know. We hit it off kind of right away. There weren’t a lot of people of color at NPR in the ’90s. And especially like the beat that you were on, it was kind of — I got to tip my hat to NPR, going back to 1998, for starting that beat like that at that time, because that was definitely ahead of its time.
Martin: It was ahead of its time. You had Sharon Ball, who was the editor, of course, at that time. And the idea was to explore race beyond the surface and to investigate, to look at ethnic conflict, to try to understand what was the underbelly of this country’s often unspoken policies in history and the impact on communities.
Rath: And it was right before that you’d done your Nieman work?
Martin: That’s right. I’d done the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard in ’98. Sometimes it’s amazing to think back that far, but it was ’97, ’98. I had just done the Nieman Fellowship, and right before that a U.S.-Japan fellowship, and spent three months in Japan looking at ethnic conflict there.
Rath: That’s brilliant. So just take us back to the late ’90s and the race beat for NPR with a sensibility towards now.
Martin: Well, you know, it’s pretty amazing, Arun. One of the stories I did was looking at a referendum in Alabama, and this was ’98. And that referendum asked should interracial marriage be allowed in Alabama? Because guess what? At that time, Alabama had not lifted its prohibition against miscegenation, the notion of people marrying outside of their race.
Rath: The Supreme Court only ruled that in the 1960s. It was not that long ago.
Martin: That’s right. And so, and there were all types of stories that we were looking at that time. Stories focused on Arab Americans, stories focused on antisemitism. So it wasn’t just a question of phenotypes, it was a question also of ethnic conflict and how do you resolve it? That was the idea for this beat that I stayed on, up until 9/11.
And right before 9/11, I was leaving a conference on race in South Africa, arrived in France, where you saw hundreds of gendarmes, guns in hand, at the airport. I kept thinking, “Why are there so many police officers here at the airport?” It was de Gaulle Airport. I called a friend in Paris and she said, “Look, they’re hearing chatter of some sort on these radios, and so they buttress their forces there.” And of course, two days later I was in Italy and it was 9/11. At that time, I had a chance to do another story with Sylvia Poggioli, looking at people who were lining up at phone booths, calling home, having heard about this horrible tragedy in New York.
And then right after that, Arun, I went and served as a senior editor at NPR West, looking, again, at a lot of these issues.
Rath: What would you say about the stories, I mean, and this can be a multi-part answer, the ones that have stayed with you the most?
Martin: There are so many. One was talking to farm workers in Fresno, California, who worked day and night to make a living and spent every Monday night at the library with their children to make sure that they learned. That has stuck with me for years because it talks about humanity and people’s dedication to their children, to their families, albeit all the hardships they were dealing with. Because one farm worker I was speaking with at that time, he had lost his leg in a farming accident and was still out there every day trying to make ends meet. And then would take time with his wife to go to the library on Monday nights to make sure that his children learned. That story has stuck with me.
Another story, of course, is a series here called Underground Trade, where we looked at human trafficking and the route of trafficking that goes from Flushing, New York, to Boston along I-95. And we brought listeners to Southeast Asia, where we saw how people boarded planes, arrived in Flushing, and soon found themselves in this horribly exploitative situation, being trafficked. It took a long time to convince some of my colleagues at GBH to do Underground Trade, but it turned into a major series — a national Edward R. Murrow Award series, and one that was also recognized by the United Nations.
Rath: Brilliantly profound and impactful. Thinking about a story like that, Phillip, and thinking about as a journalist, the stories you get, the tape you get, as we say in the business, you’ve got to build up a lot of trust to get that kind of tape from people. And whether it’s somebody in a precarious legal situation or in other cases where you might be talking to people on the far right or even the extreme right, who may not want to trust a public radio reporter, you’ve been doing that for ages. What would you say? Any advice to young people starting out? How do you establish trust with your subjects like that?
Martin: As always, you ask great questions. And that itself, you’re right, is a process, and listening is the bottom line. Listen, and actually listen, not being prepared to jump in immediately when the first sentence comes out of someone’s mouth, but having listened and saying, hmm. And sometimes you have to listen for 20, 30 minutes, sometimes three or four days, sometimes weeks, before someone trusts you. And you have to listen, engage, converse, whatever it takes in order to have that person understand that you’re not out to get them, that you want their story. Everyone has a story. You want this particular story. That became very important, of course, when you talk about something like human trafficking and the survivors of that underground trade.
Rath: Phillip, I gotta put in for one of your series that I’m really grateful for, the series you did about caste in India and in America. And I was so grateful that you brought me in as one of the reporters on this series, because just for me personally, it was a moment of personal growth as a reporter and as a person because it forced me to interrogate things about caste being a Brahmin extraction that I had never really thought about before.
Martin: You did a great job, visiting a street called Ambedkar, you know, in New Jersey. And it was one of those situations, Arun, where like, I referenced Ambedkar, the considered the father of Dalits, or people known as Untouchables, in India. And that story came about like a lot of stories, Arun. You’re listening. And I was at a conference and heard someone talk about that here in America, they still face caste discrimination. I heard someone say that. I had heard that years earlier, when I was at that conference I referenced in South Africa, where groups of people were advocating for the recognition of caste as a form of oppression, like racism, like classism and gender discrimination. And I was at this conference at Brandeis University, led by a professor there named Larry Simon. And he convened a conference every year — with Dalits primarily, but Indians across the caste spectrum. And I heard this one young man talked about the fact that he was experiencing caste discrimination in America. And that was the seed for the series that we did, Caste in America, which aired on GBH in 2019.
Rath: Brilliant. So you’re retiring from journalism, but you’re not going to stop working. Can you tell us what your plans are?
Martin: My plan is when I look around what’s happening in the country right now, I want to continue to be engaged. And so the broad outlines of the plan is the focus on reporting on anti-democracy efforts, but those who are, my focus is on those who are fighting to maintain democracy in big and small places across the United States and the world. From a village where I’ve visited, actually, in Brazil to a village I’ve visited near Boise, Idaho, to talking to people in New Hampshire who are fighting to keep schools open and to make sure books aren’t banned. And to guarantee those things that make us human are upheld. And that is freedom and personal liberties. That is the idea. And I’ve had a lot of encouragement from other people in journalism and journalism organizations to pursue a project rather than just a story. So stay tuned everyone, we will be talking about this. And likely on GBH in the not-so-distant future.
