The Press and Race: Mississippi Journalists Confront the Movement

Introduction

Introduction David R. Davies For Southern newspapers as for American Southerners, the social upheaval in the years following Brown v. Board of Education were, as Time magazine put it on 20 February 1956, the "region's biggest running story since the end of slavery." The Southern press struggled with the region's difficult accommodation with the school desegregation ruling and with black Americans' demand for civil rights before and after. Desegregation would indeed prove a difficult story to tell. In Mississippi newspapers did no better. This volume illuminates the broad array of print journalists' response to the Second Reconstruction in Mississippi, a state that was one of the nation's major civil rights battlegrounds . The volume covers the press from 1954, when the Supreme Court struck down school segregation as unconstitutional, to 1965, the year Congress approved the Voting Rights Act. The period encompasses some of the most important media events of the civil rights movement— the South's resistance to school desegregation through the 19508 and i96os; the Freedom Rides to desegregate bus transportation in 1961;James Meredith's admission into the Universityof Mississippi in 1962; the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963; and the events of Freedom Summer in 1964. Press response was far from monolithic. A handful of Mississippi editors and newspapers defended blacks and challenged the racial mores of Introduction Mississippi society in the 19508 and early 19608, a time when extreme racism dominated the state. Others responded to the Second Reconstruction by redoubling their support of Mississippi's segregated society. Still others responded with a defense of blackAmericans' legal rights tempered with a defense of segregation. The shades of editorial opinion were multifaceted, illustrating a broader range of journalistic response than usually described by Northern reporters who reported the South at the time or by historians. Both groups have tended to divide journalists into two camps—the segregationists and the integrationists, the villains and the heroes. In fact, only a handful of journalists in the South, and only Pascagoula's Ira B. Harkey, Jr., in Mississippi, publicly proclaimed themselves as integrationists. And segregationist sentiment varied widely even among so-called "moderate" editors such as Hazel Brannon Smith of Lexington and Hodding Carter, Jr., of Greenville. In sum, both the villains of the segregationist press and the heroes of moderation were complex. This volume attempts to explain why. Susan M. Weill begins the volume with an overview of daily press response to three important challenges to the racial status quo in Mississippi —the Brown decision, Meredith's desegregation of all-white Ole Miss, and Freedom Summer. Defense of Mississippi's closed society was firm but nonetheless varied, she writes, through the three crises. CarylA. Cooper examines the segregationist Percy Greene of the Jackson Advocate^ Mississippi's dominant blacknewspaper through these years. David R. Davies and Judy Smith explore the staunchly segregationist Jackson Daily News and its outspoken editor, JimmyWard. Davies profiles J. Oliver Emmerich of McComb, the patriarch of the Mississippi press whose Enterprise -Journal ultimately helped end the bombings in south Mississippi in 1964. Laura Nan Fairley offers a thorough account of George McLean, Tupelo's renowned civic booster whose Tuf eloJournal steered the region away from racial turmoil toward civic improvement. David L. Bennett explores the complicated integrationist and Pulitzer Prize-winning Harkey and his Pascáronla Chronicle^ particularly his spirited and lonely defense of Meredith. Lawrence N. Strout chronicles the career of Wilson F. (Bill) Minor, still the dean of Mississippi's capital correspondents, who observed the breadth of the civil rights movement as the New Orleans Times-Pica4 Introduction yune's Jackson correspondent. Arthur J. Kaul explicates the Progressive mind of Hazel Brannon Smith of Lexington, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, a crusader against the elite power structure in Holmes County until she lost her newspaper in the 19808. And Ginger Rudeseal Carter explores the career of Mississippi's best-known journalist, Carter, and his Greenville Delta Democrat-Times. Mississippi's journalistic response to the civil rights movement can only be understood in the context of the national press' treatment ofblack Americans in this period. Before the Supreme Court transformeddesegregation into a national imperative, blackAmericanshad long been virtually invisible in the pages of the nation's daily press. By and large, blacks did not merit a mention in most white-owned newspapers unless they committed a crime or died a violent death. On the rare occasions when blacks did merit...