Journalism and the Civil Rights Movement in America

America, home of democracy. A place where every citizen has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as outlined by the United States’ Constitution. These are the principles that the country was founded on however, for millions of African Americans, this had never been the case since the country’s founding. In 1865, African Americans were finally given their freedom from slavery, but the road to true equality has been one of many struggles, setbacks, and triumphs. The period of this journey has been called the Civil Rights Movement by historians. This movement was possibly one of the most dramatic events in U.S. history and is known and respected all over the world. However, because of the tenacity of the American people, this movement was successful in furthering the cause of African Americans out of slavery. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, published in 2006, journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff discuss the American Civil Rights Movement through the eyes of journalists’ especially black journalism outlets covering the movement. The following is a review and discussion of this text.

Roberts and Klibanoff (2006) begin making the point that journalists had a major role in documenting the movement that was going on in the United States. The authors opens the text talking about Swedish economist, sociologist, and politician Gunnar Myrdal, who in 1944 published the landmark study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, a text that was intended to give an outsider, and unbiased view of the African American struggle for greater equality in America. Roberts found that Myrdal believed that the Northern press, who was somewhat outside the Civil Rights Movement, which was predominately in the Southern United States, tended to shed light on the problem in the South, but ignored the racial issues in the North. They point out that Myrdal thought “what would it take for Northern press to see that race in America was an ongoing story of massive importance? When would a turning point come? Would the change in the press be evolutionary? What would precipitate it? Would it come at all?” (Roberts & Klibanoff, p.11). This idea sets the premise of the text.

The book follows as a chronology of the Civil rights Movements from a journalistic perspective. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 talks about the Southern journalists take on the early Civil Rights Movement in contrast to African American newspapers at the times. The text shows that these two entities had diverging views of the country. The text states that Myrdal noted that “white newspapers were written for whites and Negro newspapers were written for Negros” (Roberts & Klibanoff, p.12). Through Myrdal’s experiences, Roberts and Klibanoff point out there was an unfair advantage that whites had over the national media. “Negros were most likely to only appear in white newspapers if they had committed a crime against a white, and that Negro institutions and organizations were seldom covered” (Roberts & Klibanoff, p.13). These chapters cover the divergent media outlets and their views of the Civil Rights Movement, further emphasizing Northern media should have gotten involved earlier.

Chapters 6 and 7 set up the foundation of the connection that finally brought the Civil Rights Movement to the attention of Northern journalists, and therefore to national attention: what was going on in Mississippi, and the death of Emmitt Till. This incident connected the North and the South because Till was a black youth from Chicago murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman while visiting his family in Mississippi. From Chapters 7, and the Till Trial to Chapter 22, the authors cover the media’s perspective of many of the Civil Rights Movements major moments: the integration of the University of Alabama, the Little Rock Nine, the Freedom Rider movement, and the integration of Old Miss. The book takes a high point or climactic turn in Chapter 23 with Bloody Sunday on the march from Selma. IT was at this moment that the book shows that the Civil Rights Movement went from local and national press to a global stage because of the television news.

The text is a very detailed study of how journalism looked at the Civil Rights Movement. Roberts and Klibanoff (2006) make it clear that for the longest time African American news media was the predominant transmitters of the Civil Rights Movement for many years. Neither Southern white media nor Northern media seemed interested. The authors suggest that the murder and Trial of Emmitt Till woke the consciousness of the Northern media, and the Bloody Sunday opened the scope globally The time period of the book covers in detail from 1920 to Bloody Sunday and then in the final chapter summarizes what has occurred since 1965. It appears the authors understood this, and they left the ending open for a continuation of this text.

Reference

Roberts, G., and Klibanoff, H. (2006). The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Random House.