Gerald M. Boyd, who began work as a teenage grocery bagger in St. Louis and rose to become managing editor of The New York Times, then was forced to resign in a newsroom revolt after a young reporter was exposed as a fabricator, died yesterday in Manhattan. He was 56 and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications from lung cancer, said his wife, Robin Stone. Mr. Boyd had kept his illness from most friends and colleagues.

Mr. Boyd’s career, which took him from the end of the civil rights era to the beginning of the Internet era, was built on competitiveness and a determination to get the story right. As he rose in prominence, he became a beacon of possibility for aspiring black journalists.

Giving a lecture in honor of one of his early editors in St. Louis a few years ago, he told the hometown audience, “Throughout my life I have enjoyed both the blessing and the burden of being the first black this and the first black that, and like many minorities and women who succeed, I’ve often felt alone.”

He was, in fact, the first black journalist to serve in many of the jobs he held at The Times, including metropolitan editor and managing editor. At 29, he was chosen for a prestigious Nieman fellowship at Harvard.

“He really did have a drive,” said Tom Morgan, a classmate at the University of Missouri and later a colleague at The New York Times. “Most people spend their college years trying to figure out what to do. Gerald always knew. There was no doubt.”

After covering the first Bush administration for The Times, Mr. Boyd was elevated to the editing ranks by Max Frankel, The Times’s executive editor in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He was given a variety of editing responsibilities before being named metropolitan editor.

Mr. Boyd went on to lead coverage that won the newspaper three Pulitzers: for articles about the first World Trade Center bombing, for a series on children of poverty, and for a series on the complexities of race relations in the United States. He also shared the leadership of The Times during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, coverage that earned six Pulitzer prizes.

During his steady advance up management ranks in the 1990s, he put some colleagues off with his occasional irascibility and brusqueness. But he won the respect of many others for his determination to beat the competition, both by publishing scoops and by providing comprehensive coverage.

“Gerald was always very demanding,” Mr. Morgan said. “He just had very definite ideas about how he thought things should be, and how they related to him. He always wanted to control things.”

The reversal of Mr. Boyd’s fortunes came in June 2003, when he and Howell Raines, the paper’s executive editor, resigned after revelations of fabrications and plagiarism by a young reporter, Jayson Blair, ignited a firestorm of newsroom criticism against their management.

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said in a statement: “Gerald was a newsman. He knew how to mobilize a reporting team and surround a story so that nothing important was missed. He knew how to motivate and inspire.

“And, tough and demanding as he could be, he had a huge heart. He left the paper under sad circumstances, but despite all of that he left behind a great reservoir of respect and affection.”

George Curry, a colleague of Mr. Boyd’s at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the 1970s, said, “When Gerald came out of college he always talked about being the editor of The New York Times. That was his single most important goal. To get the position and have it blow up was extremely disappointing. It was what he always wanted to do.”

Gerald Michael Boyd was born in St. Louis in 1950; his mother, who had sickle cell anemia, died when he was a small child. His father, a delivery truck driver and an alcoholic, moved to New York and played little role in his childhood.

Mr. Boyd and his older brother, Gary, were raised by their paternal grandmother, who was also raising their two cousins. Their younger sister, Ruth, was raised by their maternal grandmother in California.

In his unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I learned to survive by learning to rely on no one other than myself. Over time, I would travel further and rise further than I could ever have imagined as a child growing up poor in St. Louis. I would become as familiar with the powerful as I had always been with the powerless.”

Throughout high school, Mr. Boyd worked up to 40 hours a week after school and on weekends at Cooper’s, a grocery in his west St. Louis neighborhood.

In his 2000 speech in St. Louis, Mr. Boyd said he understood why people described him as having overcome poverty, but added, “I was rich in the ways that matter. You see, I had a grandmother who devoted her life to keeping me fed and clothed, even when it meant getting up before dawn to take care of me and three other boys. A strong-willed woman who led by example.”

He also had a newspaper-reading aunt who instilled the journalism bug, he said, and the support of his brother and cousins.

Mr. Boyd, whose work schedule prevented him from playing sports at Soldan High School, found time to write for the school newspaper and was encouraged by a teacher to apply for a scholarship for aspiring black journalists sponsored by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

“In his senior year he did apply, and to his surprise he won a full ride to the University of Missouri at Columbia, with a guaranteed job to follow at The Post-Dispatch,” Mr. Boyd’s brother, Gary Boyd, said.

Not long after he arrived at the university, he met Mr. Morgan.

“There weren’t very many black people on campus, period,” Mr. Morgan said. The two were friends, then colleagues on Blackout, a newspaper for black students that Mr. Boyd founded.

“He always had a drive to run a newspaper,” Mr. Morgan said. “That was his love.”

Mr. Boyd joined The Post-Dispatch after graduation, in 1973. His first story, he said during the 2000 speech, was about “owls mysteriously attacking city residents,” and it appeared on the front page, at least in the first edition. He was soon assigned to cover City Hall.

Mr. Curry, his colleague at The Post-Dispatch, added: “Gerald’s always been very aggressive — breathing, eating and sleeping journalism. He was like that coming out of school.”

He continued: “I don’t think it would cross Gerald’s mind that he would not beat someone competing against him. That’s part of his DNA.”

Together, Mr. Curry and Mr. Boyd founded the Greater St. Louis Association of Black Journalists in 1977, and one day, sitting in the Original, a soul food restaurant near City Hall, the two men sketched out a program to train black high school students in the basics of the business. Alumni of the program have gone on to organizations like The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Curry said.

Mr. Boyd joined The Post-Dispatch’s Washington bureau in 1978 and covered the 1980 presidential campaign and then Ronald Reagan’s White House.

In 1983, he joined The Times’s Washington bureau and its team of political reporters. Mr. Boyd covered Vice President George H. W. Bush during the 1984 campaign and continued to cover the White House during the Iran-contra scandal.

He then covered the 1988 presidential campaign, focusing on Vice President Bush’s pursuit of the presidency. After the election, Mr. Boyd wrote about the new administration, its appointees and its plans and programs.

The Times’s executive editor at the time, Mr. Frankel, discussed moving Mr. Boyd into an editing position. Mr. Frankel told Mr. Boyd that he would be put on a fast track — and that, like Jackie Robinson, he would face pressure and skepticism about his talents.

“I said if he could withstand the raised eyebrows and whatever pressures might attach to my putting him on the fast track, I would love to give him that opportunity,” Mr. Frankel said.

The decision to promote Mr. Boyd, who first worked as a special assistant to the managing editor as he toured the desks, set him on a path to the top ranks of the newsroom at The Times.

Mr. Boyd’s marriages to Sheila Rule, a hometown neighbor and later a colleague at The Times, and to Jacqueline Adams, a newscaster, ended in divorce. He met Robin Stone, a journalist, during a recruiting trip after he joined The Times’s management. They were married in 1996 and had a son, Zachary.

Besides Ms. Stone and their son, he is survived by his brother, Gary, of Gurnee, Ill., and sister, Ruth, of Oakland, Calif.

Mr. Boyd was selected by Mr. Raines to be managing editor in 2001. The following year, the National Association of Black Journalists honored him as its journalist of the year.

In his new post, he continued to be demanding, as he and Mr. Raines were faced almost immediately with the immense task of covering the news events of a generation: the Sept. 11 attacks and the war in Afghanistan.

But the revelation of Jayson Blair’s string of deceptions cut the foundation out from under Mr. Boyd and Mr. Raines. Newsroom complaints about the pair’s management style reached a peak, forcing their resignations.

In the years since his resignation, Mr. Boyd worked as a consultant in journalism and kept an office at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Two of his particular interests — the quality of journalism and race as the most fraught issue in America — were twinned in the summation of his speech in St. Louis in 2000.

“To be different in this society, even a little different, means additional pressures and responsibilities and hardships that really don’t change, no matter how high up you climb,” he said. “And no matter how much progress we’ve made where race and gender are concerned, we’re not close to being where we should be.”

He then concluded: “Many of you know I’ve spent my life trying to be a good journalist. But what matters more to me is whether I’ve been a good man and a decent man.”