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n February 25, 1946, a black woman and her nineteen-year-old son entered a radio repair shop in Columbia, Tennessee, to demand the return of their radio. An argument ensued, and one of the white repairmen fell through a plate glass window. Whites gathered in the town’s square, calling for the black mother and son to be lynched. Fearing assault or worse, blacks armed themselves and shot out the streetlights for cover. Four white policemen, half the town’s force, responded to the sound of gunfire and were wounded as they entered the black neighborhood. Sixteen hours of rioting ensued, ending with the arrival of five hundred state militiamen and highway patrolmen. Two days later at the county jail, where those arrested during the riot were being held, two blacks were killed and a sheriff’s deputy and another black were wounded.1 During the Cold War, the Soviets were quick to publicize such racial incidents in the United States.2 Racial violence perpetrated by white Americans was the perfect foil to combat the U.S. government’s claim to be the defender of free rights for all people. Such incidents did indeed make Americans look like hypocrites at best, imperialists at worst. But how did the Soviets and the rest of the world find out about U.S. racial incidents such as the one in Columbia, a town with a population of just barely 12,000? While TASS, the official news agency of the Soviet Union, and Pravda, the official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, did have reporters in New York, that city was 790 miles away from the incident. Most of the information came from U.S. domestic media sources, especially the wire services.3 Covering Columbia firsthand were reporters and photographers from the two major Nashville dailies, the Tennessean and the Banner, a freelancer for the U.S. wire service United Press, and an Associated Press reporter. A photographer captured a powerful photograph for Life Magazine. The picture , which seemed to show a police officer kicking an injured black man on the ground, created a national stir after Time and the African American magazine Ebony published it. A second photograph, showing a casket INTRODUCTION 1 O 2 thE OPINIONS OF MANKIND defaced with the initials KKK, was printed first by the Communist Daily Worker of New York on March 17 and by the Washington Post two days later. The African American Chicago Defender editorialized that the incident had “all the earmarks of the Nazi pattern of terror and intimidation” and that the shootings in the jail were to be expected. “It was a hundred Negroes against thousands of armed trigger-crazy deputies anxious to taste blood.” Time and Newsweek, probably relying on files from wire services or stringers or both, also published articles about the turbulence and its aftermath.4 Protests flooded into the White House following the event. Attorney General Tom C. Clark ordered a federal grand jury impaneled to look into the affair, but it returned no indictments. The list of black defendants was narrowed, and the trial of twenty-five was shifted to nearby Lawrenceburg, whose reputation for racism produced nearly unanimous predictions of convictions. Instead, the all-white jury acquitted twenty-three defendants; only one man was convicted, and his five-year sentence was eventually reduced to a year of incarceration.5 Covering the trial in Lawrenceburg were journalists from the New York Herald Tribune, Chicago Tribune, Daily Worker, Pittsburgh Courier, Associated Press, United Press, and International News Service, as well as the New York Times and the Nashville dailies. Although the acquittals deflated the Communist message, the Daily Worker praised the black Tennesseans for standing up to “local Hitlers and lynch mobs.” Each of these media organizations was a potential source for international coverage of the riot and ensuing trial.6 Hoy, the Cuban Communist newspaper, for example, reprinted “Daily Worker dispatches on the Tennessee terror,” as the Worker noted.7 Other Communist organs no doubt picked up the story from Hoy or the Daily Worker, especially in Latin America, where Cuba’s Communist Party was a major supplier of anti-American propaganda.Almost certainly, however, most of the news from Tennessee went to the world via the U.S. wire services. With even the New York Times using Associated Press and United Press accounts in the opening days, it is unlikely that foreign correspondents did any better.8 The mistreatment of minorities in the United...

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