30 May 2007
Prize-winning Book Recounts Press Role in Civil Rights Era
The Race Beat shows importance of free, independent media, co-author says
Washington -- The success of the U.S. civil rights movement depended largely on national media coverage, the presence of a vibrant black press and a small band of liberal white Southern editors, say Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, both veteran journalists.
Their book, The Race Beat, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for history for its account of the civil rights struggle in the United States from the point of view of the journalists and editors who covered the events as they unfolded, often risking their lives to do so.
In The Race Beat, Roberts and Klibanoff describe how the glare of publicity in the 1950s and 1960s awakened the nation’s conscience to the injustice of state-sanctioned discrimination in the American South, leading eventually to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
The book begins by citing the classic 1944 study of race in the United States, An American Dilemma, by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. Myrdal predicted that the future of race relations depended on the American press. He suggested that, even though Americans were bound by common values such as equal opportunity and fair play, whites outside the South largely were unaware of the evils of institutionalized racial discrimination. “Myrdal said all you have to do is tell people what’s going on – tell Northerners what’s going on, he was saying more specifically - and they will be shocked and shaken. And that’s exactly what happened,” Klibanoff said.
When the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 that separate schools for different races were inherently unequal and that schools must desegregate, most Americans knew little about conditions in the South because race was not considered newsworthy. Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 became the first black baseball player to play in the major leagues, was the first continuing race story that was not about crime, Klibanoff told America.gov.
Each co-author brought his own interests to bear on the book. Roberts, the Southern correspondent for The New York Times in the mid-1960s and later the paper’s managing editor, long had been interested in the role played by the progressive editors in the South. Klibanoff, who is currently managing editor of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, was interested in what was going on in the minds of the segregationist editors.
The authors examine coverage of and commentary about the civil rights period by black reporters from the minority press, white reporters and photographers from the national press, liberal Southern editors, segregationist Southern editors and the national broadcast media. They discuss a number of critical events in detail such as the Emmet Till murder trial; the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott; the court-ordered integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; sit-ins at lunch counters in North Carolina; and the Freedom Riders, who sought to desegregate bus seating and facilities at bus terminals.
The problem during the civil rights era was not simply racism; it was state-sanctioned racism written into the laws in such a way as to require discrimination against blacks, said Klibanoff. “That much has changed, and you cannot overestimate how important that change is.”
“What made the civil rights struggle so dramatic for people was that there truly was a right and a wrong when it came to whether or not people were going to have their human rights,” he said.
Among the many heroes in the book, the liberal southern editors stand out. “It was their job to express their opinion, and because they did, the nation at large felt there was opportunity in the South for a progressive voice to survive,” Klibanoff said. The black press also played both a critical advocacy role and offered a “sort of front row view on the civil rights struggle that led them to get great stories that the white press didn’t get.”
Reporters for the mainstream press of the time made their greatest impact when they hewed to professional standards of objectivity and fairness. “It was straightforward stenographic reporting that moved the nation,” he said. “The same thing with television: there was no doctoring television film to make it look dramatic; it was dramatic.”
Klibanoff said that, as a contemporary editor, writing the book offered “lots of lessons,” including confirmation of the fact that “a free and independent press is essential not just to a well-functioning government but a government that operates with integrity and with the interests of its people at heart.”
“Some people would say newspapers shouldn’t crusade. I do think newspapers have a responsibility in this democratic society to play that role,” he said.
“If you look through the stories in The Race Beat, and you go from town to town and city to city and look where there was and was not trouble, you will find the difference between those [towns] that had trouble and those that didn’t was whether they had a strong newspaper and strong political leadership.”
For more information, see “An Unfettered Press: Minorities in Journalism.”
See “U.S. Marks 50th Anniversary of Montgomery Bus Boycott” and Diversity-Black History Month.
