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

Journalism, it has been said, is the first rough draft of history.

In The Race Beat, Pulitzer prizewinning journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff have come as close as anyone could to a final, definitive draft of the history of the role of the press in the civil rights movement. Their research is exhaustive and their writing is compelling, resulting in a book that reads like a hybrid: part scholarly treatise and suspense novel, part adventure tale and Greek tragedy.

It sets the scene with a detailed and informative history of the Negro press in the U.S., long predating the twentieth century lunch counter and bus boycott and school desegregation activities popularly associated with the civil rights movement and describes the small band of southern white editors whose determination provided the leadership for their newspapers to take a stand against the segregation that had marked their region for centuries. From the fateful Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 through the summer of 1965 in Selma, AL, The Race Beat chronicles the evolution of how the press covered the civil rights movement and how the civil rights movement learned to use the press to its advantage. Most importantly, it provides context for understanding how the news coverage evolved, an element often lacking in other examinations of the movement.

Gene Roberts was himself one of the young reporters covering the race beat in the 1960s, and Hank Klibanoff, an Alabama native, is a managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, whose professional forebears were among the editors who fought the tide of southern racism. Their first-hand knowledge of the subject is, no doubt, important, but what allows them to write with authority is the exhaustive research that made The Race Beat possible and believable. The book is extensively footnoted, and the bibliography includes nearly 700 books, pamphlets, dissertations, master’s theses, research memoranda, articles from popular, scholarly and professional periodicals, newspaper articles, editorials, archival collections, oral histories and other interviews, personal papers, correspondence, speeches, panel discussions, presentations, broadcasts, and other recordings. The oral history interviews alone number more than one hundred, and the authors specifically thank Oral History Association members Mary Marshall Clark at the Columbia University Oral History Research Office, Lois E. Myers at Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History, and Charles Bolton of the Mississippi Oral History Program at the University of Southern Mississippi, among many others, for helping them to identify important oral history interviews in the collections. The interviews clearly provided a treasure trove, without which the book would be impoverished. Most remarkable is the way in which the hundreds of sources are stitched into a seamless whole, with an eye for detail that the best reporters always have.

Consider, for example, the scene in Little Rock, AR, at Central High School on the morning of September 4, 1957. CBS television and radio reporter Robert Schakne was among the newsmen watching as young Elizabeth Eckford approached the National Guardsmen outside the school. CBS ’ cameraman had gotten in place too late to film “the contorted faces and the yelling and the Confederate flag waving and the ‘Nigger Go Home’signs, ” the authors report. “When Schakne realized he didn’t have the footage, he did something that revealed the raw immaturity of this relatively new medium of newsgathering: he ordered up an artificial retake. He urged the crowd, which had fallen quiet, to demonstrate its anger again, this time for the cameras. ‘Yell again! ’ Schakne implored as his cameraman started filming” (160).

Benjamin Fine, The New York Times’ education reporter, who also was at Central High that day saw tears streaming down Eckford’s cheeks behind her sunglasses and thought of his own fifteen-year-old daughter. “His emotions carried him beyond the traditional journalistic role of detached observer. He moved toward Eckford and sat beside her. He put his arm around her, gently lifted her chin, and said, ‘Don’t let them see you cry ’” (161).

Thus, did the role of the press become part of the civil rights story, at a time when picture magazines like Life and Look were in full flower and television news was in its infancy, with the evening news on the three—count ‘em, three —networks lasting just 15 min. To contemporary students of journalism, it all seems so quaint, compared to today’s media environment with dozens of 24-h, so-called news channels and countless online sources of information, opinion, rumor, and ranting.

But as the authors make clear, the journalists and their sources in the civil rights movement were inventing something new. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. and others insisted that the civil rights movement was a nonviolent one. But he and his followers also clearly understood that it was going to take national and international news coverage to achieve their goals. By the early 1960s, when the focus of the movement was on Birmingham, AL, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, the city’s most outspoken Negro pastor, had figured out “ how easy it was to get segregationist forces in Birmingham to respond violently to peaceful but provocative demonstrations ” (304). Andrew Young, a top aide to King, was by then urging him to “develop a message that could fit into a one-minute television news broadcast” (305). And the Southern Christian Leadership Conference took to scheduling demonstrations in the morning “to accommodate television news crews, which had to finish shooting film by 2 p.m. to make the evening news” (311).

The importance of news coverage to the movement’s ultimate success was not lost on either the press or the civil rights activists themselves. John Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, recalled in an oral history interview in the Baylor University collection that he felt safe whenever reporters were watching and fearful when they were not. The movement succeeded, Lewis concluded, “because we had a group of men and women who were prepared to get up there to write the words or shoot the pictures, capture the sound. And I think that’s changed the face of the South and, in changing the face of the South, changed this nation once and for all” (407).