Review
“A masterpiece . . . The Race Beat is a riveting piece of social history that balances both its subjects brilliantly . . . There has never been a better study of the importance of a free press.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer“Fascinating. . . . Just when you think there's nothing left to say about the civil rights movement, [The Race Beat] pulls you back in.” —The Los Angeles Times“The Race Beat has good characters, good yarns and good thinking. Just as important, though, it’s got a good heart.” —Newsweek “Research for The Race Beat is meticulous, uncovering many facts that have gone unreported in other books about the movement . . . proves a necessary addition to anyone interested in learning more about the movement and the journalists whose work helped transform the South and, indeed, the nation.” —Chicago Sun-Times
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Richard Allen is a veteran performer, with credits that include Star Trek and Ragtime – The Musical. An Audiofile Earphones winner, Richard’s voice may be heard on several audiobooks including Futureland by Walter Mosley, Right as Rain and Hell to Pay, by George P. Pelecanos.
A native of Alabama, Hank Klibanoff is the managing editor for news at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He is a former metro reporter, national correspondent based in Chicago, business editor, and deputy managing editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he worked for twenty years. He was also a reporter for three years at The Boston Globe and six years in Mississippi for The Daily Herald, the South Mississippi Sun (now the Sun Herald) and the Delta Democrat-Times.
Gene Roberts is a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was a reporter with the Goldsboro News-Argus and The Virginian-Pilot, and a reporter and editor with The News & Observer and the Detroit Free Press before joining The New York Times in 1965, where until 1972 he served as chief southern and civil rights correspondent, chief war correspondent in South Vietnam, and national editor. During his eighteen years as executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, his staff won seventeen Pulitzer Prizes. He later became the managing editor of The New York Times.
From The Washington Post
A good case can be made that the period from the mid- 1950s to the mid-1970s was the Golden Age of the American press -- a period bracketed, roughly, by Edward R. Murrow's exposure of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's mendacity in the anti-communist cause in 1954 and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency two decades later following the disclosure, primarily in this newspaper, of the sordid details of the Watergate scandal. Between those signal events, the press covered the Vietnam War with a dogged insistence on uncovering the truth -- in sharp contrast to the tame acquiescence with which it reported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- as well as the extraordinary social and cultural changes that swept through the country during those years. Among those changes, none were more important than those initiated by the civil rights movement, and in no other story did the press distinguish itself so admirably and effectively. The reporters who fanned out through the South beginning in the mid-1950s were determined, resourceful and courageous. In print and on the air, they awakened the nation to the terrible conditions in which countless black Southerners lived and the daily denial of the most basic rights to which they were subjected. The best of their journalism -- and much of it was exceptionally good -- took no sides and preached no sermons but simply laid out the facts, which were all the country needed to begin the long, complicated and difficult task of fixing things.
No doubt I am prejudiced in this view of the press's performance in the civil rights era because I was an exceedingly minor participant in it, not as a reporter but as an editorial writer. During my junior and senior years at Chapel Hill, I was the editor of the student newspaper when the sit-ins began in 1960 in Greensboro, 55 miles to the west in the North Carolina Piedmont, and I wrote often about this and other forms of protest, including the student boycott of Chapel Hill's two segregated movie theaters. Then, in 1964, I moved to the Greensboro Daily News and spent a decade there writing editorials, often, again, on matters relating to civil rights ranging from protests to federal legislation.
In doing this work, I relied, daily, on facts and narratives supplied by the reporters out in the field. Their work provided the essential information on which the nation conducted its debate over how to assure the civil rights of African Americans. I say without embarrassment that these reporters were my heroes then, and that reading this history of their work by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff takes me back to my youth in vivid and intensely personal ways. It was at once one of the most terrible times in the nation's history and one of the most enthralling. On the one hand, ordinary American citizens were being jailed, beaten and even murdered for simply attempting to exercise their most basic rights as citizens; on the other hand, there was a pervasive, almost palpable sense of possibility, an understanding that the nation was at last beginning to live up to the promises in its Constitution and a hope that a better country might emerge at the end.
The stories of these men -- and with the notable exception of Hazel Brannon Smith, who owned a few small-town papers in Mississippi and wrote bravely against the racist White Citizens' Council, they all were men -- may seem inside baseball for journalists, but they are essential to the history of the civil rights movement and thus of broad interest. The authors are well qualified for the task. Roberts, who now teaches at the University of Maryland, had a long and distinguished career during which he often reported from the civil rights front lines; so, too, did Klibanoff, now the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who began his career working on three different small Mississippi papers. At times, their attention drifts away from the press and onto rehashes of familiar stories -- the murder of Emmett Till, the march in Selma, the mob violence at the University of Mississippi, the church bombing in Birmingham -- but these may be useful to younger readers for whom, alas, these events are ancient and perhaps unknown history.
The authors take their cue from Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish lawyer and political economist whose study of race in the United States, An American Dilemma, was the seminal book on its subject. Published in 1944, it painted a grim picture of the lives of black Americans and argued, passionately, as Roberts and Klibanoff put it, "that if the mainstream press told the southern racial story, the rest of the nation would be 'shocked and shaken' and demand sweeping changes." No one in the press deliberately or consciously set out to publicize the plight of African Americans, but events forced the media's hands, and ultimately exactly what Myrdal had urged came to pass.
It started slowly and uncertainly. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the South was terra incognita to the rest of the country. Newspapers did not cover events there -- the New York Times, usually the leader in such matters, did not appoint its first full-time Southern correspondent until 1947 -- and if white Americans thought about the South at all, they thought about "Gone With the Wind." Not until the murder of Till in Mississippi in August 1955 -- a 16-year-old visiting from Chicago, he was killed and thrown into a river by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman -- did the mainstream press begin to discover what was going on down South. The killing aroused intense interest in the Northern black press, and eventually the rest of the press caught on to the story as well. The acquittal of his killers was so obviously a perversion of justice that it called into question the entire judicial system of the South and left no doubt about the injustices to which it subjected blacks.
One of the white journalists who covered the trial was a white man from Alabama named William Bradford Huie, a freelance writer and occasional novelist of uncommon resourcefulness and guts. After the acquittal, he persuaded the killers to tell him their story -- what he persuaded them with was money -- then sold it to Look magazine, which published it in January 1956. It "was a detailed, narrative reenactment showing how [the killers] had beaten, tortured, killed, and submerged Till," and it shocked the nation. After this there was no turning back; the civil rights movement rose to the forefront and stayed there for years.
Some of the journalists who kept it there were Southern-born editors who defied local majority opinion among whites and wrote forthrightly, sometimes passionately, about the race question: Ralph McGill in Atlanta, Hodding Carter and P.D. East and Hazel Brannon Smith in Mississippi, Buford Boone in Alabama, Lenoir Chambers in Norfolk, Va., and, at the head of the class, Harry Ashmore in Little Rock. Few now remember their names except as they appear in histories of journalism. Ditto for the reporters: Claude Sitton and John Herbers of the New York Times, Robert E. Lee Baker of The Washington Post, John Chancellor and Sander Vanocur of NBC News, Joe Cumming of Newsweek, Simeon Booker of Ebony and Jet magazines, Carl Rowan of the Minneapolis Tribune, Howard K. Smith of CBS News, Ted Poston of the New York Post, Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times.
The most important of these was Sitton. He was 32 years old when, in 1958, the managing editor of the Times, a native of Mississippi named Turner Catledge, pulled him off the copy desk and sent him to Atlanta to cover the South: "The civil rights story needed a reporter who knew the region well, had the right accent, abided by all the rules, wouldn't get emotionally involved, wouldn't argue with anyone, wouldn't become the news, who would just write what he saw, wouldn't get beat, wouldn't get snookered, and was willing to give up his family, perhaps his life, for the story." Sitton was all that and more. He "set into motion a level of reporting that would establish the national standard for two decades." He was little known among readers, except those who remember bylines, but his fellow journalists were in awe of his tenacity, thoroughness and quiet, intense courage. For six years (he became national news director of the Times in 1964), he was the best reporter in the country; to me, in my early 20s, he was the exemplar nonpareil, the best that a journalist can hope to be.
There were un-Sittons, too. Thomas R. Waring Jr. of the Charleston News and Courier was "as forceful a spokesman for segregation as there was in the South"; Harry Ashmore said that "the News and Courier feels that what's wrong with this country is democracy." Both newspapers in Jackson, Miss., owned by the Hederman family, were "fervently segregationist." Grover Hall of the Montgomery Advertiser took a moderate tack at first but eventually aligned himself with George Wallace. In Richmond, James Jackson Kilpatrick of the News-Leader embraced the sham doctrine of interposition -- it held that the individual states could nullify federal laws they believed to be unconstitutional -- and egged Virginia on toward the "massive resistance" that left a lasting stain on the state.
Mostly, though, the journalists stuck to the facts, reporting and interpreting them thoroughly, fairly and honestly. As the years passed many of them became more and more sympathetic to the protesters whom they covered, but they kept their opinions and emotions to themselves unless they were commentators rather than reporters. They did us all -- their fellow journalists and their fellow Americans -- proud.
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
An American Dilemma:
“An Astonishing Ignorance . . .”
The winter of 1940 was a cruel one for Gunnar Myrdal, and spring was shaping up even worse. He was in the United States, finishing the research on the most comprehensive study yet of race relations and the condition of Negroes in America. But he was having trouble reaching conclusions, and he struggled to outline and conceptualize the writing. “The whole plan is now in danger of breaking down,” he wrote the Carnegie Foundation, which was underwriting his project.
What’s more, the gathering crisis in Europe had thrown him into a depression; he feared for the very existence of his native Sweden. In April, Nazi Germany had invaded Denmark and Norway. Myrdal believed Sweden would be next. He put aside more than two years of work by 125 researchers and began arranging passage home for himself, his wife, Alva, and their three children. He and Alva wanted to fight alongside their countrymen if the worst should come. The boat he found, the Mathilda Thorden, a Finnish freighter, was laden with explosives, and the captain tried to dissuade the Myrdals from boarding the dangerous ship. When this failed, the captain jokingly urged Myrdal to look on the bright side. He would not have to worry about his family freezing to death in icy waters. If German U-boats attacked, the resulting explosion would almost certainly kill everyone instantly.
The U-boats did not attack, and the Myrdals arrived in Sweden only to be appalled by what was happening there. Rather than preparing for war with Germany, the Swedish government was seeking an accommodation with the Nazis.
Knowing that Germany was monitoring the Swedish press for anti-German sentiment, the government first confiscated copies of anti-Nazi newspapers; then, emboldened, it interfered with the distribution of one of the nation’s most important dailies, Göteborgs Handelstidning. This, Myrdal believed, could not happen in America. He was outraged. “The press is strangled,” he wrote to a Swedish friend in the United States. “Nothing gets written about Germany. News is suppressed.”1
There and then, Myrdal’s understanding of America and its race relations became crystallized. In a book that quickly took precedence over his Carnegie project, then became its seed, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal wrote Kontakt med Amerika (Contact with America), which was crafted largely to rally Swedish resistance against Hitler. In Kontakt, published in 1941, the Myrdals argued that Swedes had much to learn from America about democracy, dialogue, and self-criticism. “The secret,” they wrote, “is that America, ahead of every other country in the whole Western world, large or small, has a living system of expressed ideals for human cooperation which is unified, stable and clearly formulated.”2 The Carnegie project, they added, was evidence of America’s willingness to sanction a sweeping examination and discussion of a national problem.
Almost all of America’s citizens, the Myrdals said, believed in free speech and a free press. Americans respected other viewpoints even when they strongly disagreed. As a result, diverse ethnic groups were living with one another in peace while Europe was tearing itself apart.
Before writing Kontakt, Myrdal didn’t have the insight or context he needed for his weightier book on race in America. Nor did he have the words he felt would serve as the road map to change. Three years earlier, in 1938, he had reached the South, the dark side of the moon. There, he had found an enigmatic, sometimes exotic, always deeply divided and repressive society whose behavior was known to, but overlooked by, the world beyond. In pursuit of an understanding and insight that was still beyond his grasp, his immersion had been total, the details of his discoveries had been staggering, and he had come to a point where he was no longer horrified by the pathology of racism or stunned by the cruelty and pervasiveness of discrimination. He had found himself fascinated by the way an entire social order had been built, and rationalized, around race.
By early 1940, Myrdal frequently found himself feeling oddly optimistic about attitudes he found despicable, and he was moving, somewhat unwittingly, toward the conclusion that would become the core definition of his landmark work, An American Dilemma: that Americans, for all their differences, for all their warring and rivalries, were bound by a distinct “American creed,” a common set of values that embodied such concepts as fair play and an equal chance for everyone. He was coming to that view in the unlikeliest of settings. He had been able to sit with the rapaciously racist U.S. senator from Mississippi Theodore Bilbo, listen to his proposal for shipping Negroes back to Africa, ask why he hadn’t proposed instead that they be sterilized, and come away uplifted by Bilbo’s answer. “American opinion would never allow it,” Bilbo had told him. “It goes against all our ideals and the sentiments of the people.”3
But for all his excitement, information, and knowledge, Myrdal remained mystified. How had the South’s certifiable, pathological inhumanity toward Negroes been allowed to exist for so long into the twentieth century? Why didn’t anyone outside the South know? If they did know, why didn’t they do something about it? Who could do something about it? Who would? Where would the leadership for change come from?
Myrdal returned to the United States and his racial study in 1941, brimming with the insights he would need for An American Dilemma to have an impact on the country.4 Seeing his homeland’s willingness to trade freedoms for security of another kind, Myrdal came to appreciate the vital role the American press could play in challenging the status quo of race relations.
In Sweden, newspapers wanted to report the news but were blocked by the government. In America, the First Amendment kept the government in check, but the press, other than black newspapers and a handful of liberal southern editors, simply didn’t recognize racism in America as a story. The segregation of the Negro in America, by law in the South and by neighborhood and social and economic stratification in the North, had engulfed the press as well as America’s citizens. The mainstream American press wrote about whites but seldom about Negro Americans or discrimination against them; that was left to the Negro press.
Myrdal had a clear understanding of the Negro press’s role in fostering positive discontent. He saw the essential leadership role that southern moderate and liberal white editors were playing by speaking out against institutionalized race discrimination, yet he was aware of the anguish they felt as the pressure to conform intensified. There was also the segregationist press in the South that dehumanized Negroes in print and suppressed the biggest story in their midst. And he came to see the northern press—and the national press, such as it was—as the best hope for force-feeding the rest of the nation a diet so loaded with stories about the cruelty of racism that it would have to rise up in protest.
“The Northerner does not have his social conscience and all his political thinking permeated with the Negro problem as the Southerner does,” Myrdal wrote in the second chapter of An American Dilemma. “Rather, he succeeds in forgetting about it most of the time. The Northern newspapers help him by minimizing all Negro news, except crime news. The Northerners want to hear as little as possible about the Negroes, both in the South and in the North, and they have, of course, good reasons for that.
“The result is an astonishing ignorance about the Negro on the part of the white public in the North. White Southerners, too, are ignorant of many phases of the Negro’s life, but their ignorance has not such a simple and unemotional character as that in the North. There are many educated Northerners who are well informed about foreign problems but almost absolutely ignorant about Negro conditions both in their own city and in the nation as a whole.”5
Left to their own devices, white people in America would want to keep it that way, Myrdal wrote. They’d prefer to be able to accept the stereotype that Negroes “are criminal and of disgustingly, but somewhat enticingly, loose sexual morals; that they are religious and have a gift for dancing and singing; and that they are the happy-go- lucky children of nature who get a kick out of life which white people are too civilized to get.”6
Myrdal concluded that there was one barrier between the white northerner’s ignorance and his sense of outrage that the creed was being poisoned. That barrier was knowledge, incontrovertible information that was strong enough, graphic enough, and constant enough to overcome “the opportunistic desire of the whites for ignorance.”
“A great many Northerners, perhaps the majority, get shocked and shaken in their conscience when they learn the facts,” Myrdal wrote. “The average Northerner does not understand the reality and the effects of such discriminations as those in which he himself is taking part in his routine of life.”
Then, underscoring his point in italics, Myrdal reached the conclusion that would prove to be uncannily prescient. Even before he got to the fiftieth page of his tome, he wrote, “To get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people.”
He added, “There is no doubt, in the writer’s opinion, that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.”7
The future of race relations, Myrdal believed, rested largely in the hands of the American press.
An American Dilemma was both a portrait of segregation and a mirror in which an emerging generation of southerners would measure themselves. In a few short years, the book would have a personal impact on a core group of journalists, judges, lawyers, and academicians, who, in turn, would exercise influence on race relations in the South over the next two decades. The book would become a cornerstone of the Supreme Court’s landmark verdict against school segregation a full decade later, and it would become a touchstone by which progressive journalists, both southern and northern, would measure how far the South had come, how far it had to go, and the extent of their roles and responsibilities.
The Myrdal investigation was so incisive and comprehensive—monumental, even—that it would for many years remain a mandatory starting point for anyone seriously studying race in the United States. Its timing was perfect. Most of its fieldwork occurred in the three years before the United States entered World War II, a period in which segregation in the South was as rigid as it ever got. The book ran 1,483 pages long yet was a distillation of a raw product that included 44 monographs totaling 15,000 pages.8
More remarkable than the study’s impact was its foresight. The coming years would prove, time and again, the extraordinary connection between news coverage of race discrimination—publicity, as Myrdal called it—and the emerging protest against discrimination—the civil rights movement, as it became known. That movement grew to be the most dynamic American news story of the last half of the twentieth century.
At no other time in U.S. history were the news media—another phrase that did not exist at the time—more influential than they were in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. From the news coverage came significant and enduring changes not only in the civil rights movement but also in the way the print and television media did their jobs. There is little in American society that was not altered by the civil rights movement. There is little in the civil rights movement that was not changed by the news coverage of it. And there is little in the way the news media operate that was not influenced by their coverage of the movement.
An American Dilemma began with a decision by the Carnegie Corporation to conduct a comprehensive study of race in America, and especially of segregation and white supremacy in the South. Recalling the contribution of Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman, in his book Democracy in America, the foundation decided its racial study should be headed by a non-American scholar from a country with no history of colonialism or racial domination.
In the beginning, Myrdal declined the Carnegie offer. He was, after all, a member of the House of the Swedish Parliament, the rough equivalent of the U.S. Senate. He was also a director of the national bank at a moment when Sweden was hobbled by economic depression. He would have to resign both positions and take leave from a prestigious chair in economics at the University of Stockholm, where he was considered one of the nation’s most brilliant academics. What’s more, the Myrdals had recently found an ideological home and leadership positions in the reform policies of the Social Democratic Party, which favored social engineering and economic planning.
He was fluent in English and no stranger to the United States. He and Alva, a psychologist, had been fellows in the Rockefeller Foundation’s social science program in 1929–30. He had refused the Rockefeller Foundation traveling fellowship for himself until the foundation agreed to make Alva a fellow as well.9 No one at the foundation had reason to regret the deal. Indeed, officials of the Rockefeller Foundation regarded Gunnar Myrdal as one of the program’s great successes and recommended him with enthusiasm to Frederick P. Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation.
After saying no, Myrdal changed his mind, but only on the condition that he have complete control over planning the study. The foundation agreed. Myrdal became enthusiastic. “I shall work on the Negro—I will do nothing else,” he wrote. “I shall think and dream of the Negro 24 hours a day. . . .”10
He began work in September 1938, almost immediately on his arrival, and plunged into it with confidence; he viewed himself as “born abnormally curious” and specially suited to the investigation of a complicated social problem.11
On his first field trip, Myrdal was accompanied by his primary researcher and writer, Ralph Bunche, a UCLA- and Harvard-educated Negro whose urbane presence was more jarring than Myrdal’s in some parts of the South. Myrdal was stunned by what he saw. Though prepared for the worst, the Swedish economist had not anticipated anything like this. “I didn’t realize,” he promptly wrote his sponsor, Keppel, “what a terrible problem you have put me into. I mean we are horrified.”12
To get an understanding of segregation, the talkative Myrdal and his team moved through the southern states, absorbing experiences, data, impressions, previous studies, and viewpoints.13 The South they discovered was but a single lifetime, fifty-six years, removed from the end of Reconstruction.
As an economist, he was staggered by the material plight of Negroes. It was so grindingly desperate that only one word seemed to describe it: pathological. For southern Negroes, poverty had become a disease of epidemic proportions. “Except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle class status, the masses of American Negroes, in the rural south and in the segregated slum quarters in southern cities, are destitute,” Myrdal wrote. “They own little property; even their household goods are mostly inadequate and dilapidated. Their incomes are not only low but irregular. They thus live day to day and have scant security for the future.”14
This book explores how America's mainstream media awakened to the nation's racial issues and how they helped transform the U.S. during the Civil Rights era. The authors set the stage by briefly recounting the history of America's black newspapers and showing how WWII set the stage for the social changes of the 1950s and 1960s. Richard Allen is an able reader who offers a blend of gravitas and lightheartedness. He effectively varies his tone, depending on the material. One small problem with his reading, however, is that he occasionally pauses at awkward moments within a sentence, almost as if he were turning the pages of the book. R.C.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
