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

by Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times , Newsweek , NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Journalism, Race, American History, Politics, African American

528 pages, Hardcover

First published October 31, 2006

Reviews

[Brina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the course of the last year, my reading has taken a bent toward civil rights. Part of this was intentional as I chose to honor the 100th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s birth. My other reason for updating myself on civil rights is because I realized that history books merely gloss over the subject. We hear and read about names and dates, primarily Dr King and the 1963 March on Washington and the 1964-65 civil rights acts that followed. Other names such as Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks, and the Selma to Montgomery march receive only obligatory few sentences in history books. Between 1947 and 1964, the nation was awakened to civil rights, and the role of the media: newspaper, radio, and later television played a large part in informing American citizens of the plight of African Americans. Gene Roberts, a veteran reporter who covered civil rights, and Hank Klibanoff, a native of Alabama, undertook a project to define the role of the press corps in what they refer to as awakening the nation to civil rights. The result is The Race Beat, the 2007 Pulitzer winner for history and my choice as top book read in February 2020.

In the 1940s, Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal toured the southern United States and gathered information in what would become his ground breaking book An American Dilemma. He saw firsthand how Jim Crow laws ruled the South, and that African Americans were enslaved in all but name. After seeing how the Nazis had taken over his native Sweden and controlled the press in his country, Myrdal warned Americans that if the press would just report on the plight of African Americans, that the nation would wake up and realize the atrocities facing their fellow citizens. What Myrdal, as Roberts and Klibanoff formulate, failed to realize, however, were divisions in the southern press that reported the news to the rest of the country. Any respected white southerner, no matter how liberal his view was, could not come across as pro-African American or he would be branded a liberal and a traitor. There was a fine line in reporting on Jim Crow and relating to the public the extent of its hold on the south. With white supremacy and segregation being the law of the south, many white northerners believed that this was just the realities of life. They did not hear about the lynchings, the horrid conditions of African American schools, homes, and lack of jobs to pull them out of poverty. This was to be the role of the liberal press corps that slowly changed their slant on segregation in the generation following World War II.

When Jackie Robinson integrated baseball in 1947, Pittsburgh Courier reporter Wendell Smith had been assigned to follow him. The Negro papers such as the Courier, Chicago Defender, and Atlanta World had readership in the high hundred thousands and notified Negroes of events important to them in all facets of society. Top reporters and photographers as Moses Newsom and Ernest Withers were lauded by the black press for the delivering the news like it was. The Jim Crow south was reluctant to change, yet a new generation of editorialists and reporters emerged, with the 1957 Little Rock Central High School integration being their watershed moment. Little Rock Gazette publisher Harry Ashmore took a liberal slant of the news. His mentor had been Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who along with Hodding Carter, Jr of the Greenville Press, would report the news unbiasedly. All reporters assigned to cover the Little Rock ground breaking story first came to Ashmore’s office where they would receive the lay of the land firsthand, foremost being Claude Sitton, the southern bureau chief for the New York Times. Sitton would emerge on the other side of the civil rights era as a top publisher for the Times, yet in 1957, Sitton along with Newsweek’s Karl Fleming represented white reporters who would tell stories as they were, not necessarily on the side of southern white holdouts to Jim Crow. These reporters called these articles “race stories. The newsmen dispatched to cover race stories called themselves race reporters. They called their assignment the race beat.”

Following Little Rock as the civil rights movement picked up steam and life in the south became more violent, southern holdout newspapers would cling to their way of life and threaten the court system that northern reporters did not present an unbiased view of the news. These holdouts led by Tom Waring in South Carolina, the Hederman family in Jackson, Mississippi, and the majority of the press in Alabama did not want northerners exposing their way of life to America. They believed whites to be superior to negros and even sued the New York Times for libel for publishing stories that denounced a Jim Crow society. Sitton, well regarded as a top race reporter, was not allowed to enter the state of Alabama for three years as the Times case made its way to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, television began to replace newspapers as the top medium for relating the news of the day to the American public on a daily basis. Reporters faced war like environments in exchange for maybe one to three minutes of air time. Yet, it was the warlike atmosphere in Alabama and Mississippi as African Americans attempted to integrate their society peacefully that woke up the north to what was going on in the Deep South. These events would be reported on television and the nation began to notice the plight of African Americans, just as Gunnar Myrdal had foreseen.

Gene Roberts was a young reporter for the New York Times during the Freedom Rides and Selma to Montgomery marches during the 1960s. He saw firsthand how African Americans ascribed to the nonviolence preached by Dr King and peacefully demonstrated at sit-ins and through marches. The most telling passages of this book include a Pulitzer winning editorial by Atlanta writer Gene Patterson following the murder of the four girls at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Patterson formulated that the south murdered these girls, and Caucasian America woke up to the fact that their African American brethren would demonstrate peacefully whereas whites in ducktail haircuts would throw bombs and use tear gas to gain an upper hand. Segregationists like Bull Conner and the Ku Klux Klan were denounced by the press rather than lauded and only holdouts like the Hedermans continued to believe in white supremacy. During the Selma to Montgomery March, seen on television across the nation, Americans of all colors would come to the aid of southern negros’ plight. Roberts believes, at least in my opinion, that Selma woke up the nation to the atrocities of Jim Crow and lead to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Following Selma, Roberts and Klibanoff sum up their findings with what happened next. Stokeley Carmichael took over the movement following the assassination of Dr King, and his proclaiming “black power” was broadcast over the air waves. A new wave of protests across the north lead to violence and riots in northern cities, and many liberal reporters who had access to civil rights events in the south, were viewed as outsiders in riots in the north. The slant of coverage changed toward that of the African American of the urban ghetto rather than a unified movement peacefully demanding basic rights as American citizens. The Vietnam War disrupted civil rights coverage as atrocities abroad were broadcast on the nightly news. Civil rights has never gone away. Reading stories from conservative, liberal, and neutral stances today shows that the rights of various ethnic groups in the United States remains on the forefront of society. The issue will become even more prevalent as the population becomes a plurality rather than a Caucasian majority in the next decade. How the news reports civil rights events across all media platforms will remain a hot button issue for as long as society exists.

As one who learned to read by reading the sports section of the newspaper, I found this account of the press covering the news to be fascinating. News reporters are often sent to war zones such as the American south of the 1960s in order to relay the news to the rest of the public. Theodore Roosevelt coined the term bully pulpit to describe his relationship with newsmen, and he had the press in his corner throughout his presidency. The civil rights movement was no different as reporters from liberal and conservative slants brought the Jim Crow reality of life in the south to the forefront of the psyche of the American public. News editors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff spent years researching the race beat and its role in the civil rights movement and were deservingly award a Pulitzer Prize for their efforts. The Race Beat is the first Pulitzer winner I have read in 2020 and a worthy edition to my African American history month lineup. This book was enlightening and easily my top choice as I tackled tough issues over the course of the month. I highly recommend this to all.

5 stars

Top 5 books of 2020

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

In American Dilemma, his highly influential 1940s racial study of America, which this book discusses, Gunnar Myrdal, member of the House of the Swedish Parliament (the rough equivalent of the U.S. Senate) and director of the national bank of Sweden, observed that the segregation of African-Americans in the States, by law in the South and by neighborhood and social and economic disparity in the North, had engulfed the press as well as U.S citizens. The mainstream American press wrote about white but seldom about black Americans or discrimination against them. That was left to the African-American press, and indeed the black press, together with southern moderate and liberal white editors, was playing an important role in fostering positive discontent and speaking out against institutionalized race discrimination. Yet, as Myrdal wrote further, the segregationist press in the South did everything possible to dehumanize black people in print. Finally, he came to see the northern press – and the national press – 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."

As he observed in American Dilemma, the Northerner succeeded in forgetting about the "Negro problem" most of the time, and the Northern newspapers helped him do this by minimizing all African-American news, except crime news. The Northerners wanted to hear as little as possible about the black people, both in the South and in the North, which resulted in "an astonishing ignorance about the Negro on the part of the white public in the North." White Southerners, too, were ignorant of many phases of the African-American life, but their ignorance didn't have the unemotional character it had in the North. "There are many educated Northerners ," commented Myrdal, "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." The only way to change this, to arise the American people's outrage, was to provide knowledge, indisputable information, that was strong enough, graphic enough, and constant enough to overcome “the opportunistic desire of the whites for ignorance.”

Gunnar Myrdal, a foreigner, saw clearly what most Americans saw only dimly. As an economist, he was shocked by the material plight of the black people. For southern African-Americans, poverty had become a disease of epidemic proportions: except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle class status, the masses of black Americans, in the rural south and in the segregated slum quarters in southern cities, were destitute. They owned little property; their household goods were mostly inadequate and dilapidated, their incomes not only low but also irregular.
As bad as the economic conditions were, the treatment of African-Americans in the courts was worse. Whites tended to respect the justice system – blacks were terrified of it. The judges, the jurors, the bailiffs, the court clerks, the stenographers, the arresting officers, and the jailers were all white. "Only the instruments of execution – the electric chair and the gas chamber – were desegregated, used for whites and Negroes alike."
Myrdal also found no weakening in the resolve of southern whites to deprive
black people of equal educational opportunities. Government spending almost everywhere in the South was significantly less for African-American education than for white schooling. For instance, in segregated states as a whole in 1933-34, black elementary teachers struggled with 26 percent more pupils in their classrooms than white teachers and with considerably less pay for doing so. (African-American teachers' pay was $510 a year, while white teachers received $833.)
Despite this obstacles, a black middle class had emerged, and from it came the teachers for the segregated schools, the ministers for the churches – and, especially significant, the African-Americans who ran their own newspapers. The black press was at the center of a developing African-American protest in the United States. But that protest could not succeed unless the mainstream press – the white press – discovered racial discrimination and wrote about it so truthfully and so repeatedly that white Americans outside the South could no longer ignore the issue. Only then would Northerners finally see white supremacy as being at odds with American conscience and insist on change.

It was indeed surprising that Myrdal had come to believe that the best hope for African-Americans was to attract national attention – "publicity" – because not one major publication had a news bureau in the South. Even The New York Times wrote about antisegregationist leaders and organizations almost entirely on the inside pages, ( when it reported on them at all.) Only once between 1935 and 1940, in a story involving A. Philip Randolph, the black labor leader, did the Times run a front-page story, mentioning the name of any of the country's leading African-American racial reformists. But such a prominent figure as Walter White, executive secretary of NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), didn't make it onto the Times during this five year period.

The most remarkable aspect of Myrdal's study, which was finished three years before the United States entered World War II, was its foresight, argue the authors. The coming years would prove the extraordinary connection between news coverage of race discrimination and the emerging protest against discrimination – the civil rights movement. According to Roberts and Klibanoff, that movement grew to be the most dynamic American news story of the last half of the twentieth century, and at no time was the press as influential as in the 1950s and 1960s, "sometimes for better, sometimes for worse." As the two authors show in their outstanding book, there is little in American society that was not altered by the civil rights movement, and there is little in the civil rights movement that was not changed by its news coverage.

What Gunnar Myrdal could not foretell, however, was how protracted the struggle within the press would be, how strongly the northern publications would be loathed by most southern newspapers, and how only a small group of liberal white southern editors would become their whole region's conscience. He also did not anticipate how the northern press would overcome a preference for local news in order to exploit the southern racial story. He did not anticipate how all of this would occur while many southern journalists, and virtually all of the region's politicians, condemned the northern press for hiding its own racial problems while exposing the South's.
What would it take for the northern press to see that race in America was an ongoing story of massive importance? When would a turning point come, if it would come at all? Would have the civil rights movement succeed without press coverage? THE RACE BEAT, a brilliant social history that effectively underscores the importance of free press, gives compelling, well-researched answers to these questions. Highly recommendable for all civil rights buffs.

[Alisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it does it still make a sound?" The age old philosophical question to verify the existence of an event resonates loudly through the theme of this book. If not for the reporters, editors, and photographers, would the realities of the civil rights movement have entered the consciousness of anyone outside the south? It arguably would have taken a different path. Enlightening in-depth analysis of how newspaper, and later, television journalism narrated the story of the critical events of the civil rights movement starting with post-WWII life through the Watts riots. The bulk of this book focused on the battle over desegregation in public education in the 1950's through the march on Selma for voting rights in the 1960's. Direct and detailed account although at times the players were hard to follow and the narration wandered at times. Still, a lot to digest here and an important and well done body of work. The details are not for the faint of heart and the racial hate rhetoric espoused by the rabid segregationists is alarmingly similar to the dog whistle verbiage embraced by the modern day hard right. Have we not learned anything or evolved from the past?

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The final quote of the book sums it up well: "If it hadn't been for the media - the print media and television - the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song." The book is amazing - many viewpoints are explored, as well as key events, the roles of the president, Supreme Court, the states, governors, law enforcement, marshals, FBI, preachers, editors, reporters, photographers, students, Martin Luther King, the Ku Klux Klan - it's all here. The nonviolence King preached and how he worked hard to get the press to cover rallies, sit-ins, the Freedom bus ride, black students integrating into schools and colleges, and any other event where nonviolent black protesters were met with violent law enforcement who used dogs, fire hoses, tear gas and clubs to beat anyone who got in their way. I was stunned at the number of murders not just white racists, but also police (sheriffs and deputies) got away with - even in court, even after white witnesses testified to the murderer's guilt. I also didn't realize the extent of the danger to the reporters and photographers covering all of these events, as well. Many of them were brutally beaten and their cameras (and film) destroyed. An in-depth, eye-opening and deeply moving book.

[Jan Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mainstream press and the civil rights era
When people imagine the past, they do so with benefit of hindsight, according to which the past had a good side and a bad side, and some people out of habit, obstinacy, selfishness, or sheer badness, took the bad side. Others were on the side of good by virtue of their suffering or their care for the sufferers. Actually, though, the past was full of noise, confusion, mixed messages, and various assumptions, just like the present, and lacked the perspective of the present. The outcome wasn't set in advance, as it can seem in retrospect. There was no guarantee that civil rights would emerge the winner.

What made the difference?

In the '40s, Gunnar Myrdal had the vision that the white press was the missing link in bringing about change in American race relations. Well, his vision, first, was that something was wrong and change was needed. The black press was full of the dilemma, but of course the majority populace didn't read the black press. The majority populace was at home in the status quo. The issue of segregation was under their radar. When it came to racial issues, the white press was silent. The contingent of liberal editors and reporters who eventually would become the conduit for change over the next several decades often started out as gradualists or accomodationists who thought the South wasn't ready for change and who looked negatively at outside interference. How they themselves changed was part of the process.

Gunnar Myrdal had believed that if the facts got out, people would change. How, though, to get the white press writing that separate was not equal and about the conditions under which people on the other side of the color line were having to live?

One of the reasons for the successes of the Civil Rights era, then, must be that silence on the subject of race came to an end--silence within the majority community, that is.

Misinformation and twisted news in the service of the status quo had to be overcome, for example, the meme that the desire for equality among black people was somehow communistic. That got started around the time of the first World War when Negroes were expected to put their desire for equality on the back burner in order to defend the country.

This book describes numerous reporters and editors, often from the South, and highlights some of the most influential. One of the early ones was Harry Ashmore, who, in the '40s, taking a cue from Myrdal, eventually spearheaded the writing of a book and a sort of targeted news service, the Southern Education Reporting Services, to make sure facts were available to the press.

We sometimes think that twisting the truth and turning it upside down is specific to the Trump era. But it went on during the civil rights era too. A segregationist editor wrote that the Citizens' Councils formed in '55 to resist Supreme Court school desegregation orders were mobilizing to guard whites and Negroes and "protect the rank and file of Negroes from the wrath of ruffian white people who may resort to violence." Later when the boycotts began, there was the implication that black goons were forcing docile Negroes to participate. And so forth, on into the early '60s, when segregationist writers made heroes of resisters and ridiculed those who wanted change--or threatened and harassed them. George Wallace was a natural on TV, portraying the press as the victimizer and himself as the victim. Elsewhere there also were efforts to censor the news and limit what was put on the air. But mistakes were made; those attempts to censor and suppress the news sometimes backfired.

So, somehow coming to terms with censorship of the news and with twisted news is part of the winning formula.

In the early days, no "Civil Rights movement" could be discerned. In the journalism trade, the stories about racial situations were called "race stories;" hence, being on that beat became "the race beat." First there were the sit-ins, the Emmet Till killing and trial, Little Rock.... Things had to get worse before they could get better, it seemed. And silence had to end; the stories had to be talked about and reported. Around this time the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr entered the picture.

In reading this book I thought that we are talking about more here than facts and reporting them. In order to overcome the fake and twisted defensive news, the facts had to be presented in a certain way. Moreover, the right facts--or right approach to the facts--had to occur. Hence the importance of nonviolence, hence the discipline and dignity of the protesters in their various settings, which permitted the appropriate contrast with the violent attackers. MLK Jr knew this too: despite that, when interviewed on his opinion about press coverage, he decried their focus on violence, he relied on the explosive violence of sheriffs and police chiefs. Without those galvanizing reactions, the press wouldn't be there, the pipeline to the public would be absent, and there would be no change in public opinion.

Ralph McGill, writing in Atlanta, took his editorials beyond law and order and into morality. Blowing up churches and businesses did not play well.

TV news, just coming into its own, added its immeasurable impact. Now what happened could be watched, so couldn't be so easily given a false spin as to who was brutal and who was polite. A key example was when ABC, then the littlest network, interrupted the ongoing program to present footage of the events of Bloody Sunday in March 7, 1965, as marchers attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way into Selma and were attacked by battle-ready troops while whites lining the highway laughed and cheered. It so happens that the program interrupted was Judgment at Nuremberg, about how Germans had ignored or joined up with Nazism. That fortuitous juxtaposition spread the movement geographically plus brought in religious and civic leaders from all over.

I have read that the printing press was a key reason for the occurrence of the Reformation, and that radio was central to Winston Churchill's impact. Could TV, the new media during the Civil Rights era, have had a similar role?

Once the focus changed to urban violence, the era was over. Stokely Carmichael would blame the press when it reported on urban rioting. He said the press was white, so was unable to interpret him. Reporters who, in the South, had been protected from violent segregationists by black people, were now being attacked by black rioters in the north and west of the country. To the rioters, a journalist was just another white man.

But before that, the focus had not been on blame. During the era, the focus was on the good people who were silent. For example, King, after his Nobel peace prize, spoke about those good people:

If the people of goodwill of the white South fail to act now, history will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition as not the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and indifference of the good people.

So, the existence of those good (but, so far, silent) people could be part of MLK's dream. Was that aspect of his vision a key to the outcome?

...Although...surely goodness doesn't necessarily reside in a certain individual or group or side, always and forever, just because of who they are. There are errors enough so that no one is always "the good one."

I read this book after being disturbed by the perspective of the novel Darktown. I had read that author was inspired by this book. By reading it I also got to go back through parts of events I missed out on in my youth. The book is full of information and history that reflects on the events of today, especially the blaming of the press.

Gunnar Myrdal was acutely aware of the value Americans placed on freedom of the press, yet nowadays the press can serve as whipping boy for all sides of the political spectrum. I find myself thinking about the press a good bit, which is another reason I was glad to read this book. I have not been comfortable with the ubiquitous blaming of the press. It seems to me that we're inclined to blame it when it's reflecting us and we don't like what we see, in other words, "Mirror mirror on the wall...." Even when the press is falling into moral equivalence (which journalists during the Civil Rights era were getting at by reference to a "cult of objectivity"), I think the press is giving us a reflection of where society is stuck, not the cause. (Society these days just loves to assign blame and in so doing to distance itself from its failings--but that is a subject for the review of another book I'm reading, So You've Been Publicly Shamed).

Leonard Pitts, in his January 16, 2018, column, says all journalists can do is give the reader accurate facts. But I think sometimes the news has to stray into the territory of right and wrong, or otherwise, as this book says, they are saying the truth is at some point half-way between the segregationists and the civil rights proponents. http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op...

As a society we often come down hard on the press, but where would we be without it? Here are some cases of persecution of the media in other countries that I came across while reading this book or subsequently:

http://www.thestate.com/news/business...

http://www.thestate.com/news/nation-w...

https://www.apnews.com/e79e1c0d23cb4d...

We are fortunate to have our much maligned media.

I also found this PolitiFact article supporting that Trump's "fake news" delegitimization strategy is inspiring dictators around the world. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-met...


The Race Beat won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History.

[Susan O · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If it hadn't been for the media - the print media and television - the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song." ~ John Lewis

The Race Beat is an excellent recounting of the experiences of the media in the South as the civil rights movement grew and reporters and editors discovered the importance of "the race beat". There were many names, few of which I had heard of in other books on the civil rights movement. The book covered journalists from segregationist papers in the South who attempted to ignore events, to liberal Southern editors and reporters who faced great risk by reporting the truth, to mainstream national papers who struggled to cover a part of the country that they had previously ignored, both black and white newspapers and reporters. During the main time period covered, from 1954 to 1964, television moved from 15 minute news broadcasts to 30 minutes with additional documentary coverage and finally to breaking news as it was possible.

One added benefit to reading the book was it added significant depth to my understanding of many of the main events in the movement that I knew of from other books. I highly recommend it, especially if you have read about the civil rights movement. The Race Beat will add a dimension to your understanding.

[spoko · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great piece of writing about our recent national history. It significantly filled in my knowledge & understanding of the period, especially the birth of the Civil Rights movement itself. And obviously not least, it strongly illuminated the importance and difficulty of the press’ role in the period. I had never given enough thought to the wide array of viewpoints contained within the press corps broadly, and I certainly had not fully considered the risks that journalists took in trying both to understand and to report these stories. It’s an impressive narrative, and I’m glad to have read it.

[Helga Cohen · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this Pulitzer Prize winning book on race and the media, the final quote sums up the premise well: "If it hadn't been for the media - the print media and television - the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song."

Many viewpoints and key events are explored in The Race Beat. We understand the roles of the President, Supreme Court, Governors of states, law enforcement, Marshalls, the FBI, preachers, editors, reporters, photographers, students, the Ku Klux Klan, Martin Luther King, John Lewis and many others. King preached nonviolence and encouraged and participated in sit-ins, marches, and Freedom Rides and worked tirelessly to get the press to cover it all. Integration started slowly and with resistance of the southern states with Brown vs the Board of Education Case in which the Court declared state laws establishing separate schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. This paved the way for the Civil Rights movement and national desegregation. But it wasn’t easy. The nonviolent protests were met with violent law enforcement who used dogs, firehoses, tear gas and clubs to beat anyone in their way. It was stunning and horrendous to read about the numerous murders that they got away with. And the danger to the reporters and photographers covering these events.

John Lewis, a congressman representing King’s birthplace, Atlanta, reflects about this time period, and on how he survived and the movement kept going. He thinks about how the segregationists worked to keep the prying eyes of the press away. He called these reporters “sympathetic referees” and felt safer. His greatest fear, and his greatest understanding of the press was when officers hauled Freedom Riders away from reporters and hauled them to prison and the guard’s sneered, “Ain’t no newspapermen out here”. But Selma was the catalytic moment in the relationship between civil rights movement and the news media. The media was prepared to write the words and take pictures and capture the sound and spread the news and change the south and the nation.

This is a significant work on the civil rights era. The media was in the middle of it and in many ways took up the struggle as a crusade for justice. They knew and tried to convey that the racist south had to change. No matter how many times I read accounts about Southern racism and the brutality against our fellow human beings, it is always a shock to re-read this hatred. This was a very in depth, eye-opening book and is recommended reading about this era.

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an expansive, wide-ranging telling of how journalists told the stories of civil rights crimes and the civil rights movements. Disclosure of bias: my mother's father was a print journalist and editor who knew most all of the journalists of this generation. He does not appear, though you get a healthy dose of his peers Harry Ashmore, Ralph McGill, et. al. The cast is large, and it is fair to say the emphasis here is on the messengers - and their coverage - more than the civil rights message. I paused after the Little Rock chapters, then returned to a familiar retelling of 1960s events. There is a lot here, a lot of personal and archival narrative, and I want to follow up with a reading of Doug Cumming's related book, The Southern Press: Literary Legacies and the Challenge of Modernity . As we lose some journalists to a changing economy, it's useful to look at how we got to now. More, there is nuance and courage and shading: we get some of the black press, some of the segregationist press, and a whole lot of deeply researched stories. Interestingly, the book chooses a beginning point with Gunnar Myrdal rather than, say, W.E.B. DuBois. End of 60s is telescoped and feels rushed, but those were the times, and the book is compelling.
Also compelling is the Peabody Award-winnning podcast Buried Truths from author Klibanoff, of Emory University and WABE-FM, found online at https://www.wabe.org/shows/buried-tru...
Recently, I read about author Roberts covering the Battle of Hue in 1968 Vietnam in Huế 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam
I plan to reread Race Beat, too. Highly recommended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have to read this for a class or otherwise study this book, don't try to beat the system by listening to the audiobook instead, because bewilderingly long lists of people and newspapers go whizzing by fairly frequently. They're hard to keep track of.

But for personal edification while driving, cooking, or exercising, this audiobook is first-rate. However, vivid descriptions of beatings and other assorted violent mayhem are wince-inducing, which might draw odd looks from the person on the next exercise bicycle.

But seriously: It's also important in our age to have a vivid reminder of the cruelty perpetuated under the protective fig leaf of “states' rights”. You can't do anything to change the way things were, but you can honor the brave people who fought for the right thing by reading about them, listening to their stories, and remembering them. Even while driving, cooking, or exercising.

[Kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

This audiobook took me a while but it was well worth the journey. This is an incredibly well-researched and expansive history of journalism during the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s. Journalism was incredibly important during the struggle and fight and also incredibly dangerous. Many were beaten to death and the attackers never prosecuted. It is a shameful part of our history and sadly still happening today. America calls itself the land of the free, but it is conditional it seems.

This history follows the struggle through the lunch counters, the bus boycotts, the desegregation of schools, all through the prism of the newspapers, the radio stations, the tv broadcasts. A very important book and well worth the Pulitzer it received.

[Porter Broyles · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are looking for a book on the Civil Rights, then this probably is not the book for you. This book is about the media coverage of the Civil Rights. In order to do that, the book covers the major milestones/events of the Civil Rights campaign, but it does not delve too deeply into the motives, strategies, rationales of the characters involved.

The book is about the media. The newspapers, TV stations, journalist, and cameramen who covered the movement are the featured characters.

To this, the book provides a fascinating perspective of the Civil Rights era that is often overlooked.

I enjoy history of the press for several reasons:

1) Prior to the advent of Social Media, the press was the first to report on events. What and how the media covers a subject often affects how the issue is perceived in the short term and longer term.
2) Media sources are often one of the few contemporary sources of information for historians.
3) How and what the media covers often reflects the views/moods of the medias audience. The media is a reflection of the culture.

The book talks about how the media covered the Civil Right campaigns---and sometimes crossed the line between coverage and becoming part of the story. The book starts out talking primarily about black newspapers (they were the only people covering the subject initially). The early chapters were some of the weaker chapters as it felt as if there too many different papers being thrown at the reader with minimal discussion or context.

As the Civil Rights movement grew, so too did the coverage. Northern papers (particularly the NY Times) started covering the Civil Rights movements---which lead to numerous legal suits wherein Southern politicians and prominent Southerners sued the Times for millions of dollars. These legal suits were taken to the Supreme Court because rulings against the NYT could have had a chilling effect on the press. The authors discusses how numerous papers (including segregationalist papers) submitted amicus briefs in defense of the NYT because of the potential threat to the freedom of the press.

Northern papers (some more open to Civil Rights than others) had to consider how they covered the subject.

The book discussed how the camera affected (particularly television camera) the movement. Early on segregationist were proud to be filmed and often encourage the press to take pictures. When it became clear that the pictures were capturing the inhumanity of segregation, it became dangerous to carry a camera. While many cameramen won Pulitzers for their work, many were beaten or killed. This lead to some creativity on behalf of the cameramen and journalist.

One of the things that made the book particularly interesting was the discussion of pro-Southern news outlets. Apparently at one point a group of editors tried to start a group “Southern Association of Fighting Editors” (SAFE). SAFE intended to send provocateurs into Northern cities to create controversy. The Southern editors would then fuel the flames in Southern papers. They intended to do to the North, what they believed the North was doing in the South with Civil Rights.

[Teri · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Pulitzer Prize winning book examines the role that the media had on the modern Civil Rights movement. In the late 40s and into the 50s, little coverage in newsprint was given to the issues of African Americans in the southern United States. The stories of beatings, lynchings, and mistreatment were detailed in segregationist newspapers printed for and sold to southern Black Americans. As key figures like Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Malcolm X began to gain national attention, media sources picked up the stories. In print and eventually in television and radio, the Civil Rights movement garnered headline news and breaking stories. The role of the media during this time should not be overlooked. Indeed, the media brought these issues to the forefront of the nation's mind and helped in the fight to bring about much needed legistlation, such as the Voting Rights Act.

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff recount the events of the civil rights struggle from Brown V. BOE to Selma and beyond through the eyes of the journalists, photographers, and newscasters, both black and white. These were the people working what came to be known as the Race Beat. Many put themselves in harm's way to get the stories that needed to be told to the nation and it is these stories that helped give a voice to civil rights issues in America.

"If it hadn't been for the media - the print media and television - the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song." - John Lewis

[Annie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a must-read book. It's entertaining, insightful, and still relevant in 2014. I started reading this book before any of the Ferguson protests started, then took a break. The book is not a light read. I found myself going back to the book in the midst of the protests and found many parallels between pre-1968 America and 2014. The coverage of race issues in 2014 is drastically improved, but many of the problems are the same.

[Mehrsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great history of how the black (and white press) covered the civil rights movement. It was a hard book for me to get through because there isn't too much new information here. It's a useful and great history for what it is (which is the history of a movement through a specific lens), but it's sort of just a history of events as opposed to much analysis.

[Patrick Sprunger · Rating 5 out of 5]

The subtitle of The Race Beat reads: "The press, the civil rights struggle, and the awakening of a nation."

The genius of Jim Crow (and key to its longevity) was its ability to operate undetected. Many of the defenders of the fortress segregation of the South lent support without ever knowing the true shape of the institution. Most Southerners were like people with their noses pushed up to the edge of an iceberg. From their vantage point, they had no way of knowing the hulk's true size and shape. This does not absolve them from all complicity, but it does explain how good people can balance a great evil in their collective heart. In short, a great many people didn't actually see how bad segregation was.

Likewise with people living outside the South.

One of the first tactics of the civil rights movement was to gain a high visibility in the media. Unfortunately, fortress segregation was not going to be changed from within. The stormtroopers of segregation lacked the foot soldiers' ambivalence and took a more aggressive role in advancing their cause of white supremacy. Without publicity, all those clashes in the cities of the former Confederacy would have resulted in nothing more than bloodshed and broken bones. It was important that the scenes be published to audiences elsewhere in the country. Only then, only through top-down legislation and federal protection would Jim Crow be spun out.

Whether the scenes portrayed were the contents of condiment bottles being emptied onto the heads of students waiting for service at a lunch counter, children marching past pickets to attend school in Little Rock, churchgoers pinned to the wall by high pressure fire hoses in Birmingham, or the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, the documentary evidence of segregation galvanized the decency of the country.

To do so placed organizers like the NAACP and SCLC in harm's way. Fortunately, there was another important corps of news men and women who braved physical violence to report a story of great moral and national importance. This, more than the actual narrative, is the point of the authors' work in The Race Beat.

In many ways, the generations to come of age after 1965 are as ambivalent and misunderstanding about fortress segregation as those Southerners who lived in its huge lee. Though I have since studied the civil rights era and Southern politics, I grew up one of those people. I found The Race Beat a startling lens back to a generation we are in danger of forgetting.

[Alice · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Race Beat tells the story of the press, its coverage of the civil rights movement, and its importance in effecting change by bringing to the nation's attention the wrongs of segregation. The argument was compelling, exciting, not too I'm-banging-you-over-the-head, and ... it made an important point about the importance of the press.

The writing was easy to read, elegant, but nothing extraordinary. It was the content that hooked me. The stories within the larger story were fascinating.

Just a few highlights:
* the Emmett Till trial
* the [attempted] enrollments of Autherine Lucy and J. Meredith
* coverage of the Little Rock Nine
* the role of the press in protecting riders in the Freedom Rides
* the Alabama libel suit against Salisbury and the New York Times (which threatened freedom of the press)
* reporter Chancellor fending off a bunch of thugs with the threat that the whole nation would know about it
* coverage of the Selma to Montgomery march

Really, I could go on. The book is chock full of stories of amazing courage - of people standing up to mobs, and reporters who broadcast their stories to the world.

For me, the only drawback of the book was that the authors named a LOT of names and a LOT of newspapers. In spite of their best efforts to provide interesting personal details about each editor/reporter/photographer named, and backstory on each paper or magazine, I couldn't for the life of me remember who Emory Jackson, or Virginius Dabney, or Lenoir Chambers was. And what's the difference between the Clarion-Ledger and the Atlanta Constitution again, and what's their position on the race issue...?

(A few colorful characters did emerge from the rest of the pack, though, including interposition-theorist Kilpatrick, segregationist Waring, NYT reporter Sitton, hot-headed Bull Connor, and stubborn politician George Wallace. Look for them especially.)

All in all, a worthy and important read about a fascinating time period in American history.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent telling of the role of journalists covering the fight for racial equality in the mid 20th century United States this is a must-read for those wanting a fuller presentation on that fight. Beginning with coverage exclusively by what was then termed the Negro Press, Black-owned and operated news organizations, I was surprised by how long it took for major (i.e. white) news outlets to even begin noticing, let alone to actually assign reporters to be there to cover it. Seeing the turmoil of that time not from the perspective of the racial equality movement leaders but from the experiences of the reporters who covered it brought a boader perspective of understanding for me.

[Sher · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting story about the press, media, and civil rights. Important reporters and editors and their experiences especially during the turbulent 60s are highlighted plus Martin Luther King's brilliance when it came to understanding how to utilize the press to further the civil rights movement along. I particularly enjoy the detailed coverage of the MLK years.

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Staggeringly good (I know, they don't give out Pulitzers for nothing). Tells many now-familiar stories of the civil rights movement, but from a totally new perspective, weaving them together with stories of the men who covered them -- their backgrounds, their personalities, their struggles with the movement and what it meant to them and to the nation as a whole. And, mixed in with all that is consistently pointed media analysis, from illumination of the changing role of the African-American press as the mainstream white press began to pay attention, to the various attitudes of dozens of southern papers. Just an astonishingly accomplished piece of work

[Cari Griffith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whew - this book was a journey. It's dense, it's long, and it's an information overload at times, but I wish it could be required reading. Seeing the Civil Rights Movement from the side of the press gives such a harrowing insight into the truly unbelievable amount of aggression and violence against non-violent protests that it took to finally stir up empathy. The organization, courage, and determination in the fight for equity, voting rights, and de-segregation will never cease to amaze me. Grateful for the brave photographers and journalists who helped us see.

[Katie Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I liked so much about this book is not only its unique perspective, but also that it tells the story of the civil right movement as a page turner. Even though we know how history turned out, at each chapter's end I was ready to read the next to see what happened. I teach Mass Communications Law and I use this book to put the New York Times v. Sullivan decision in historical context for the students.

[Greg Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pretty great! Roberts and Klibanoff use the journalists working the South as a through-line for telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement, and the book's narrative is clear and filled with plenty of insightful and compelling detail. Avoids most of the pitfalls that could happen to a book like this, though there is minimal coverage of events outside the South or more radical leaders like Malcolm X or Rustin.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for "The Race Beat" which documents the critical role the press played, both print media and television, in bringing the civil rights struggle into the homes of America in the 1950's and 60's. The brave Reporters and Photographers (both black and white) who covered what was called "The Race Beat" showed Americans what was really happening with regards to school desegregation, voter suppression, job and pay disparity, police brutality, intimidation and open discrimination. Also, it is interesting to learn how brave and determined the civil rights leaders and young black students were in the school desegregation, lunch counter sit-ins and voting rights movements. The writing in this book is Pulitzer Prize worthy and vividly takes you through this civil rights transformation in our nation's history from 1954 through 1968. I give this book 5 stars.

[Onur Kucuktas · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have lived in Atlanta and routinely driven on Ralph McGill Blvd and John Lewis Freedom Parkway while knowing very little about either name other than a cursory knowledge of their involvement in the Civil Rights movement. This book filled in those gaps in my knowledge.

This book gives an educational outline of the civil rights movement’s big flashpoints, main characters, and motivations while keeping a focus on how the press coverage of it evolved and impacted the movement itself. Civil rights leaders are rightly lauded for their courage and tenacity, but I had little notion of the types of dangers reporters faced while covering the issue. This book was a great coverage of the South’s racial trauma, full of shameful episodes of mobs of people turning up with violent intent in the face of integration efforts as well as well as inspiring accounts of nonviolent resistance against seemingly immense odds.

[Sushicat · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book as part of a challenge to read 6 nonfiction Pulitzer winners this year and joined a group read. I originally had not intended to read the book, since I (rightly) expected it to be written for the American readers, who would have a reasonable knowledge of events and their chronology. But I read Darktown last month, which is a fictional take on the first black policemen in Atlanta 1948. This made me realize I have a huge gap in knowledge about how things developed after the civil war. So I decided to join anyway. And I found my expectations confirmed that the strong focus on the media leaves out a lot about the underlying history that I (not being American) know too little about. At the beginning I struggled a bit to get into the book, but once I picked up March to add a bit more detail to the history of the civil rights, I also started appreciating the focus on the journalists and editors and how their choices of what to cover and comment on shaped the opinions and actors in struggle (mis)used the media to their ends, especially the local papers that were sometimes little more than a hobby for a strongly opinionated person to dispense their view of facts or even made up events. Interesting to see the change in the industry towards more professional newspapers with a code of conduct that separates facts from opinions as well as the introduction of television coverage. What struck me as perhaps a weakness is the low level of inclusion of black journalism.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has two important utilities. The first and more shocking is a as a new look at the brutal violence and racism of the deep South in the United States in the mid-century. Though much of this might be just a rehash for some readers with a firm knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, many of the anecdotes and events were new to me. The details of the Emmett Till trial were never clear to me before this. The authors render the court room so clearly, through first hand accounts from activists and reporters, that I felt I was reading a long lost Harper Lee story.

School desegregation plays a large part in this narrative. Before Little Rock, there were intensely violent standoffs on the campuses of Southern Universities. Autherine Lucy stands out as a brave woman, far ahead of her time, pushing herself and her country. Many of the governors in the South come off as caricatures of intolerance and brashness. Faubus sounds like a comic character out of Voltaire.

All the sheriff's deputies with their 2nd grade education, driving the black journalists out to the state line, telling them they got five minutes to cross that border. They all crop up, time and time again in the two decades of the major events of the Civil Rights Movement. Whether they're beating down black students, or knocking out white journalists, a vast network of people in Alabama and Mississippi showed themselves to be ignorant and intolerant on a personal and institutional scale that still troubles us today.

The other strain, the focus of the book really, is the story of the journalists, North and South, black and white, who followed the Civil Rights Movement. Klibanoff and Roberts set this amazing story as a narrative that starts with a Swedish scholar, Gunnar Myrdal, who lived in the South for years and chronicled the conditions of its black citizens. Myrdal knew that if the treatment of the black by Southern whites ever got the "publicity" - his word - it needed that the mass of Americans, those Americans who in the 30s and 40s had no idea of the extreme injustice of the South, would be forced out of their complacency, their ambivalence. Myrdal was right, but it would take far too long for that publicity to reach the critical mass necessary to motivate a substantial number of Americans.

Harry Ashmore and Ralph McGill, two progressive Southern editors stand out as exemplars of whites who stood for justice, not only in their editorials, but in their daily lives. John Popham, a dandy Southerner who refused to fly and thus drove thousands of miles all around the South to get his stories, pushed for a mild and optimistic treatment of Southern whites in the pages of The New York Times. Claude Sitton, Popham's replacement, was an amazing reporter, always on the scene, a Southerner with a conscience, reporting what mattered.

L. Alex Wilson's story is one of the noblest and heartbreaking in the book. A black reporter, Wilson suffered not only ridicule in the South, but was severely beaten in Little Rock by angry white thugs wielding bricks. Pictures of Wilson being kicked in the chest as a crowd of angry whites look on is featured in the center of the book. The photographs are startling. Wilson looks on, his face showing neither scorn nor fear. Those whites were pissed, because they felt inferior. I believe it.

This book is essential for any student of American media or the Civil Rights Movement - shocking, intense historical narrative of an important turning point in American history.

[Brad Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful work of history definitely deserving of the Pulitzer it earned. Nice coverage of the civil rights era though thru the lens of the media/press/photographers that covered it.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

It begins talking about the work of a Sweedish researcher in the '40s who wrote that the condition of black Americans in the South in the Jim Crow era would never improve without massive publicity. People outside the South, while morally sympathetic, would never rally around and demand social change unless the immoral, uncivil, and illegal conditions blacks suffered were portrayed graphically, bluntly, and provocatively. And that's how the author portrays how the press corps - starting with newspapers, and ultimately tipped through television - played a large role in mobilizing people around the country to support the civil rights movement.

The author was one of the newpapermen on the race beat, but he does not figure prominently in the account at all. The portrayal of the media often conflicts with how I view the media today. There are editorialists or commentators, and there are journalists. Both groups are discussed at length in the book. The commentators who write the editorials are the biased, inflammatory, controversial ones. Today, they get all the attention. The journalists who hunt down stories, investigate, and write about the facts are every bit as necessary for the public to understand the events around them, but often get out-shouted by the commentators who blast us with biases and half-truths.

I think one of the lessons from this book is that a purely editorial media cannot enable the public to understand an issue because of its independence from facts. We as media consumers must rely on factual event reporting and commentary, and learn to separate dogma and reality.