In 1957, Little Rock, Ark., was a city on the verge of a racial explosion. A federal judge ordered all-white Central High School to admit nine black students. Governor Orval Faubus sent the National Guard to keep them out. President Dwight Eisenhower took command away from the governor, and a tense standoff ensued between the troops and an angry white populace.

In the middle were nine brave but terrified black children.

A teenager named Ira Lipman was a friend of one of those nine students. Every night after school, he would go home and watch the news on NBC, which had sent its national reporter, John Chancellor, to cover the crisis.

Sixteen-year-old Lipman was upset by the daily display of bigotry and hate. He felt that, as he would later recall, "the world simply had to know the truth of what was going on inside Central High. I looked up to John Chancellor and knew that he was a fair man--a good man--and that through his reporting, he was certain to have a profound effect on the entire nation."

The press was not allowed inside the school. But young Mr. Lipman, although he attended another school, had easy access. Taking advantage of his position as editor of his school's yearbook, which was printed on Central High's presses, he became a "reliable source" for the NBC newsman and fed him daily information about the situation inside Central High.

Thus began a lifelong friendship between the two men. Now, almost four decades later, Mr. Lipman has decided to honor his hero permanently by endowing a new journalism award to be administered by Penn's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

The "John Chancellor Award for Excellence in Journalism," a $25,000 prize to be granted annually beginning in 1996, will recognize that reporter who has made the most important contribution to journalism in the past year. The establishment of the award will be officially announced Thursday at a black-tie dinner at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The dinner will honor Mr. Chancellor's 45 years of reporting and commentary and the standards of excellence that he set for the profession.

Mr. Chancellor came to NBC in 1950 after two years with the Chicago Sun-Times and spent all but two years of the rest of his career with the network and retired in 1993. From 1965 to 1967, he served as director of the Voice of America. As a national reporter, an international correspondent, and the senior national affairs correspondent for NBC News, he covered many of the signal events of our time, including school desegregation, the Cuban missile crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Persian Gulf War.

He has interviewed every U.S. president from Harry Truman to Bill Clinton, every British prime minister from Clement Attlee to Margaret Thatcher, and every Soviet head of state from Nikita Khruschev to Mikhail Gorbachev. From 1970 to 1982, he held the network's top on-air job as anchorman of the "NBC Nightly News." After stepping down from that post, he became a daily commentator on the program until his retirement.

The Providence Journal's Tom Mooney has called him one of "a few who stand as columns supporting the standards set by Edward R. Murrow." Robert MacNeil, who recently retired as co-host of PBS's "MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour," cited Mr. Chancellor as the broadcaster on whom he modeled his own reporting style.

Mr. MacNeil will be one of the featured speakers at Thursday's event, which will be moderated by former NBC News correspondent Sander Vanocur. Other speakers include syndicated Washington columnists Jules Witcover of the Baltimore Sun and Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News; journalist and author David Halberstam; writer George J.W. Goodman, also known as "Adam Smith"; former NBC News head Reuven Frank; and Tom Brokaw, who succeeded Mr. Chancellor as "NBC Nightly News" anchor.

Mr. Lipman, who is the chairman and president of Guardsmark, Inc., a privately owned, national security services firm, and a member of the Board of Overseers of the Wharton School, will serve on the award selection committee along with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, Mr. Chancellor himself, and two distinguished journalists, one from print and one from broadcasting, to be selected by the committee members.

Dean Jamieson characterized the award as a fitting tribute to one of the country's most distinguished journalists. "John Chancellor set a standard of journalistic excellence to which the profession ought to aspire," she said. "The award will honor individuals who have met that high standard and in the process will contribute to improving journalism. We at Penn and at the Annenberg School are proud to be associated with this award."

For Mr. Lipman, the award is a personal tribute to a man who made a deep and lasting impression on his life. "John Chancellor is my hero. He was my hero at age 16 in Little Rock, and he is my hero today, because he represents the truth. With this award, I am perpetuating my hero's name in the hopes that it will foster great journalism, which will bring light and truth to the people and make this a better world," Mr. Lipman said in explaining why he decided to endow the award.