Chasing Newsroom Diversity: From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action

Introduction: The Black and White of Newspapers

introduction The Black and White of Newspapers The daily newspaper editors who met in Washington, D.C., in April 1948 should not have been surprised when James O. Eastland, a U.S. senator from Mississippi, used their convention podium to defend the South’s social tradition and valorize its racial hierarchy. An outspoken segregationist, Eastland had been invited onto the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ convention program as counterpoint to the civil rights reforms proposed by President Harry S. Truman, who sought to integrate the military, outlaw the poll tax, mandate fair employment, and make lynching a federal crime. In stating his case, Eastland implicated his white audience—particularly editors from Northern states who may have sympathized with racial reform—in the privilege whites enjoyed under segregation. Most important, Eastland construed the editors’ nearly all-white newsrooms as a sign of kinship with those, like himself, who meant to continue de jure segregation in the South.1 Eastland observed that the ASNE and its member newspapers practiced de facto segregation by not hiring journalists who worked for the black press, the network of black-owned weekly newspapers that served African American readers across the United States. “You are guilty of racial discrimination in the newspaper business,” he said. “There are thousands of Negro reporters in this country, yet the newspapers do not draw 10 per cent of their reporters from that race. Ten per cent of your executives are not Negroes. You are not to be condemned. It is your civil right to associate with, employ and work with whomever you please. Liberty is dead in this country when you are deprived of that right.”2 Mellinger_Chasing text.indd 1 10/24/12 4:28 PM Eastland’s attempt to sway the editors by pointing out their own hypocrisy could be dismissed as an artifact of America’s racist past but for the broader context of his remarks. By raising the issue of “racial discrimination” in newsroom hiring, Eastland framed continued separation of the races as an exercise of individual freedom for editors whose professional calling was anchored in the Bill of Rights. Notably, Eastland posited the all-white newsroom as the product of the daily newspaper editors’ conscious choice, not simply an incidental circumstance in a racially bifurcated society. Most significantly, however, Eastland emphasized the editors’ whiteness, which had been taken for granted as a condition of employment by daily newspapers since before the ASNE’s founding in 1922 and produced exclusions that leant impetus to the growth of the weekly black newspaper.3 By juxtaposing the white editor with the black journalist and black news executive, Eastland demonstrated that whiteness was a norm that depended on racial discrimination for its existence. In his references to “10 per cent,” Eastland highlighted the portion of the U.S. population that comprised African Americans and suggested that nondiscriminatory hiring would have produced newsrooms with a racial composition just 90 percent white.4 In other words, Eastland argued from the assumption that in an integrated newsroom, African Americans would be hired in proportion to their representation in the national demographic. While Eastland’s invocation of a racial quota was a rhetorical ploy rather than a policy recommendation, he foreshadowed by exactly thirty years the key strategy that progressive reformers within the ASNE, many of them Southerners , would pursue in attempting to dismantle the daily newspaper industry’s whites-only tradition in hiring. Eastland’s speech would be long forgotten when the ASNE board voted in 1978 to adopt Goal 2000, an affirmative action initiative to achieve racially proportional employment in daily newspaper newsrooms by the end of the twentieth century. As such, the senator’s remarks offer a point of departure for this historical analysis, which first explores the ASNE’s construction of a professional norm that marginalized journalists and editors who were not white, not male, and not heterosexual, and then traces the organization’s subsequent attempts to democratize newsroom hiring. Despite passionate advocacy by a series of ASNE leaders and the expenditure of unprecedented industry resources, the organization’s leadership would concede publicly in 1997—when nonwhites accounted for just 11.35 percent of the newsroom work force at daily newspapers compared to a nonwhite population of about 26 percent—that the parity hiring goal had been unattainable.5 This analysis, which traces 2 . introduction Mellinger_Chasing text.indd 2 10/24/12 4:28 PM the ASNE’s...