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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

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I have read a lot on the civil rights struggle, including Taylor Branch's trilogy, and Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger, and have appreciated all the reading I have done on that momentous struggle. But this account of how newspapers and television chronicled the exciting events told me a lot I did not know or had not remembered. The book is carefully footnoted and has a 26 page bibliography, in addition to the footnotes (thus avoiding the unfortunate lapse of some books which are well-footnoted but omit a bibliography). The book not only tells of newsmen and media sometimes going to great, even heroic lengths, to tell the story of the events in the clash between aspring blacks and the status quo, but also tells of the media which sought to uphold segregation. As with other books on the struggle, when one is appalled by the violence and murders which marked the history, it is some comfort to realize that in the end right triumphs. This book is an astoundingly interesting survey of an important aspect of the civil rights efforts of the 1950s and 1960s.

Outstanding effort by legendary editor Gene Roberts, widely admired for turning around the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1980s and leading it to multiple prizes in journalism, revisits, with co-author Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, both their own work in civil rights reporting and the work of colleagues to pen this precise and most interesting study of what journalists were and weren't doing when segregation was legal in the U.S.

Highly readable and fascinating history.

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

-- Reviewed by Philip W. Henry
When the civil rights story began in the early 1960's, I was a freshman at a Northern College. So much was happening between 1963 and 1968 that it was possible to miss some of the real history unfolding outside "The Ivory Tower `while studying the past. Now, I'm trying to fill in some of the blanks in my education. "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation" is a good place to begin. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff were both intimately involved in covering the biggest stories of the South. Drawing on extensive interviews, and digging in previously unpublished documents and memoirs, they paint a fascinating portrait of the crisis of conscience and confidence that the civil rights story caused in the Southern Media Establishment.
The tensions developed in covering the race story were not just between White, Liberal, and often Jewish Northern News Organizations v. the Old South; but within the Southern Media as well. There were honest and decent Southern publishers and editors who decried the move toward Klan violence and barricaded school houses epitomized by Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. Ironically, many of the top editors of the supposed Yankee Press (especially The New York Times) were Southerners themselves. (Turner Catledge, one of the T imes's top editors, was from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were found murdered).
If anything propelled the Story of the South into the living rooms of the country it was TV News. The sight of Freedom Riders being beaten, firehosed and dragged away; and the four little girls in their church outfits killed in the cowardly KKK bombing of a Birmingham Church, inflamed the American conscience.

The Assassinations of Medgar Evers; the Birmingham Four; and the three young civil rights workers from the north and the refusal of local law enforcement to investigate the case added to the fray. The sheriff and his deputy were later indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in a case prosecuted by John Doar, the young Justice Department Lawyer who later gained fame in the Watergate Prosecution.

In one telling scene, Doar stands in front of a group of rebel yokels and confronts them. He could easily have been killed or lynched, but by the force of his conviction he prevailed. .

If there is some vindication out of all this, several cases believed to be so cold or so compromised that justice could never be served, have been solved. Medgar Evers's killing took thirty years to solve, but the failed fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith, who was spared by a hung jury earlier, paid a price thirty years later: (One Mississippi paper, unable to bring itself to claim De La Beckwith as one of "Ole Miss's Own," said: " Californian held in Murders." (He had spent his first five years in California)
"In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was finally convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001."

There are good guys and gremlins, of course. Robert Kennedy, never popular in the south, is portrayed as the loyal Attorney General to his brother, who never seemed to totally grasp the dimensions of the story. Justice Department Lawyer John Doar is a giant figure in the post-freedom riders killing trials. Moderate southern editors and publishers like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Hodding Carter of Greenville, Miss, where the three student volunteers were found murdered, kept their composure and focus despite financial and social pressure from conservatives. (Carter, in particular, began as a staunch segregationist but became more liberal).
"The Race Beat" is a valuable addition to the literature of Journalism and race relations in the United States.


There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage)There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (Vintage)

At its heart, The Race Beat is a thoroughly researched, well-written explanation of how democracy and justice cannot survive without a free, vigilant press.

Yet, the book is hardly a benediction of the American news media: One of the core conflicts throughout is how conservative Southern editors, publishers and station owners collaborated with segregationist politicians and white civic groups. While a few editors in the Deep South braved public backlash, canceled subscriptions and death threats to do the right thing, most did not.

Some, like The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, made it their mission to undo the civil rights movement. That paper, for instance, placed a photo of some litter found on a D.C. street the day after Martin Luther King's famous march on Washington, giving it the headline, "Washington Is Free From Trash." (It would be another two decades or so before The Clarion-Ledger would exorcise its racial demons.)

That's just one of many nauseating episodes described in The Race Beat in which many Southern media fought against justice instead of protecting it. And Roberts and Klibanoff do a tremendous job of telling the story of the storytellers, and bringing them to life, warts and all, across two pivotal decades, give or take.

If I have one criticism, it's that the last two chapters are a little rushed. The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marks the book's climax, and the subsequent tumult -- including race riots in the North and the assassination of Martin Luther King -- gets just two, relatively brief chapters. The book is about 450 pages if you don't count the extensive bibliography and acknowledgments. It wouldn't have hurt to give it another hundred pages.

But overall, The Race Beat is a remarkable achievement. It's an absolute must-read for every journalist and is highly-recommended for anyone else.

I read this book when it first came out and knew right away it was one of the very best I had ever read. Other reviewers have done an excellent job of pointing out many of the book's virtues, but I wish to call attention to one other. When Emmit Till's battered body was sent home, his mother demanded that his casket be open so that everyone could see the cruel mutilation he had suffered. More important--for historical purposes--she allowed his body to be photographed by JET and EBONY, the two black magazines with national circulation. The result was that for the first time white Americans had to look directly at a horrific truth they had been able until then to ignore. Ironically, it was at the trial of Emmit Till's accused murderers that the white press took over the civil rights story. Mrs. Till deserves more honor than she has received; her courage changed history.

I wish I could give the book ten stars.

The Civil Rights Movement of the `50s and `60s was a significant and well-known period of American history. But have you ever thought about why it is so well known, or even why it had so much success?

The Race Beat is a story, not only of the well-known players of the Civil Rights Movement, but also the men who covered it in the media. These men poured their hearts and souls into covering the stories that would make the people of the United States stand up and take notice of the injustices being done in the name of "separate but equal," "justice," and "liberty." Many of these men had battled against Hitler over his racial elitism. Once they came home, they were quick to jump into the front lines of our own battle for racial equality before we descended into the depravity that Hitler is known for.

This is a fascinating insider's look at how the civil rights battle was brought to the forefront of the United States' attention. Blending well-known events with the stories of the men who were there writing about it, you get a whole new perspective of what these men were feeling and fighting for. Not just as outside observers, but compatriots.

This book is well written and well researched, but it is slow to start. I picked it up expecting the jump into the civil rights movement, but found myself in the `40s as they laid the groundwork for what the journalists were to become. It is also heavily journalist-centric. That is to say, there are references the non-journalists among us won't understand. But all in all, it is a great read.

Armchair Interviews says: If you are looking for a new perspective on the civil rights movement, this book is for you.

As a child I lived through the racial and political drama of the 1950s and '60s, saw the photos and headlines and witnessed the rise of television news, but there was an element of only seeing the media forest and missing the reportorial trees. Later I read many histories of this country, the 20th century, the struggle for civil rights and the lives of both leaders and the people they led, but still didn't grasp the import of the writers who covered it all in real time. Still later I wrote a biography of a minister who claimed, without much basis in fact, to have been a leader in the civil rights movement and subsequently composed a short history of the African American community in Asheville, North Carolina, and still managed to miss the story behind the stories.

All that has changed with my reading of this book. If you have any interest in the media you will be both fascinated by this history and wonderfully informed about the rise and subsidence of black newspapers, the integration of news rooms and the way TV came of age in tandem with its coverage of desegregation and the battle for the soul of the South. Finally, if you are in any way connected to the news business you will swell with pride at the tireless bravery of the reporters who faced down racist terrorism, who were threatened, beaten, battered and bloodied but who kept on the story. As corporate owners now squeeze the life out of newspapers and TV news in pursuit of bigger bottom lines, it is well worthwhile to carefully consider the critical importance of the media they are killing.

Excellently researched and well-written, this serves as a great addition to the Civil Rights "oeuvre"... very interesting to read accounts of the major events during this time period from the reporters' perspectives.

This is another significant work on the Civil Rights era. Its' overriding theme is how the media (newsprint and T.V.) played an essential role in presenting to the general public the sordid racist state that existed in the Southern U.S. and by exposing this helped to bring progress to ameliorate the conditions. Without the media it is doubtful that the racial climate in the Southern U.S. would have improved - it certainly would have taken more time. John Lewis said that without the presence of the various news groups the civil rights workers felt they were struggling in isolation (for instance there was no coverage when many civil rights workers were sent to Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi).

It did take the media a long time to report this struggle. There had always been Civil Rights protests - starting with Frederick Douglas during the Civil War. It was only during the mid-fifties that the mainstream (white) media began to recognize the Civil Rights struggle. Why it started only during that period is another question - perhaps it was due to the rapid growth of media outlets during that era. It may also be due to persistence of people in power like Eleanor Roosevelt.

The reporters - following a principal similar to the physicist Heisenberg who states that the observer influences reaction - were becoming more and more involved in the Civil Rights struggle. As they observed the conflicts (and many of these conflicts were vociferously rabid and bloody) their reporting became less and less neutral. They recognized the justice and the inherent morality of the Civil Rights workers. They themselves were frequently assaulted by the white southerners. They were seen as trouble-makers on southern soil. The reporting - but more so the images - pictures and film - exposed to the world what was occurring. The bombings of churches, the beatings of Civil Rights protesters in restaurants and during peaceful marches - these made the front pages of major newspapers and the top story on the six o'clock news of the major networks. It also made it to the desks of the White House. When `The New York Times' (courtesy of Claude Sitton) published front page news of African Americans attempting to register to vote in Mississippi who were set upon by police dogs or pistol-whipped by law enforcement officials, the White House was forced to take action.

In a very real sense the reporters (many of them white southerners) took up the crusade for justice. They became convinced over time that the south had to change.

No matter how often one reads of accounts of Southern racism and brutality against their fellow country-men, it is always a shock to re-read this hatred. This book offers a new and fresh perspective from the reporting side.

In The Race Beat, the authors give us a history of how the press covered The Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. Television had a tremendous impact making it possible for just about everyone to see what was actually happening in Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma.

The book starts with the publication of Gunnar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma." Myrdal saw the importance of the press in making any change in race relations possible Before anyone outside the American South could protest segregation they needed to understand that it existed and the impact that it had on black people The book essentially concludes with the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It talks about the protests and riots of the late 1960s when blacks wanted not just equality but power, but this only accounts for a few pages.

We also get to see how often the press gets things wrong--most notably when John N. Popham, the New York Times correspondent in the South, assures his bosses that Southerners are distraught about the murder of Emmett Till and that race relations will work themselves out.

After the attempt to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, Mr Popham is proven wrong and almost every news organization has to cover demonstrations and protests differently Television, which allows everyone to see what's happening, comes into its own. One of the most arresting scenes in the book occurs when a young John Chancellor invites angry whites who are intimidating him to do whatever they like but also to keep in mind that what happens will be picked up by his microphone and go everywhere.

Admittedly, one of the reasons I liked this book so much is that I remember the scenes it describes: Bull Connor using dogs and high power water hoses to keep protesters at bay, the thousands of people at the March on Washington and Lyndon Johnson ending his speech urging the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with "We shall overcome."

It also makes one wistful for a time when reporters seemed better informed and more concerned with ideas than personalities