Edward Hotaling, a former reporter for WRC in Washington, D.C., has died of a heart attack. Hotaling was best known for his interview with Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, a CBS Sports commentator who was fired from the network after the interview, according to the New York Times:
Mr. Hotaling (pronounced HO-tail-ing) was a television reporter at the NBC affiliate WRC-TV in Washington when he interviewed Mr. Snyder on Jan. 15, 1988, for a report commemorating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. Bumping into Mr. Snyder in a restaurant, Mr. Hotaling asked him to assess racial progress in professional sports.
Mr. Snyder’s reply careered into his theory that blacks were better athletes than whites because their slave ancestors had been “bred to be that way” and that soon “there’s not going to be anything left for the white people” in sports. The comment created a national stir and got him fired by CBS. He died in 1996.
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Hotaling was also known for his discovery of archival pay stubs that showed how much construction on the White House and the U.S. Capitol had been done by African-American slave laborers. He found the documentation in the Treasury Department archives while researching the 200th anniversary of both buildings in 2000.