Roy Howard Beck

Roy Howard Beck has written extensively since the 1960s about competing values and interests in key racial, environmental, and economic issues of American life — as a daily newspaper beat journalist, Washington Bureau Chief, religion reporter, roving national/international correspondent, and author of more than 20 books and monographs. The Encyclopedia Britannica chose one of his articles in the Atlantic Monthly for its Annals of America book series as one of the writings to best represent U.S. social and economic developments in the 1990s. He may be best-known for using thousands of colorful gumballs in a short TED-style video presentation on the global ethics of immigration policy that has been viewed more than 200 million times through viral postings by others. He founded the bipartisan NumbersUSA Education & Research Foundation after Barbara Jordan’s death in 1996 in large part to study and educate on her findings and recommendations as chair of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.