Gerald M. Boyd, the first black managing editor and metropolitan editor at The New York Times, died last week in Manhattan at the age of 56. Boyd, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1980-1981, was the youngest journalist to receive the fellowship at the time.

Boyd, who led Pulitzer prize winning coverage at The Times, resigned from his post as managing editor in 2003 in the wake of a plagiarism scandal surrounding Times reporter Jayson Blair.

Boyd was well-equipped to handle the pressures of being black in a largely white profession, said David Lamb, one of Boyd’s Nieman classmates who is now at the Los Angeles Times.

Boyd founded a newspaper for black students during his years at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and later helped to establish the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists.

“Gerald was smart,” Howard Shapiro, a member of Boyd’s Nieman class and current travel editor and theater critic of The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote in an e-mail.

“He had a drive and passion for reporting” and few of his Nieman classmates were surprised at his future success, Shapiro said.

Boyd worked for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before coming to Harvard, and in 1983, he joined The Times’ Washington Bureau, leading Pulitzer winning coverage for articles on the first World Trade Center bombing, and series on childhood poverty and race relations in the U.S.

As managing editor at The Times during the Sept. 11 attacks, he helped lead coverage that earned six Pulitzer prizes.

After his resignation, Boyd continued to be involved in the journalism world, working as a journalism consultant.

For all his talent as a journalist and leader, it is Boyd’s personality that stands at the forefront of Shapiro’s memory today: “What I remember most is his generous, enveloping smile.”