Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement

Introduction

xi Introduction For decades, a pocket-size news magazine published in Chicago and distributed nationally, often by kids before and after school, kept black America informed about the turbulent events that were about to change the lives of black and white Americans alike throughout the country. In 1951, black mega-publisher John H. Johnson introduced Jet magazine to barbershops, beauty salons, doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms, and social centers, until it quickly became a staple in black homes in every Southern backwater and Northern ghetto in America. By 1955, Jet had become the national chronicler of the simmering civil rights movement, and with a single issue that cast aside all the niceties of the mainstream press, emerged as an undeniable force behind the nonviolent revolution that was building. Throughout that decade and the next, young blacks sitting in at lunch counters, walking a gauntlet of taunting mobs to desegregate public schools, or riding interstate buses through the Jim Crow South to unjust prison sentences , would acknowledge that their defiance had been fueled at an early age by a photograph in Jet of the mutilated body of a fourteen-year-old black boy, dragged from his bed and murdered by white racists in the Mississippi Delta. Refusing to cave when Mississippi officials pressed for an immediate burial, Mamie Till Bradley had insisted on an open coffin funeral back home in Chicago, stating simply that she wanted to “let the world see” what she had seen. The weekly magazine became the “bible” for news about the movement. “If it wasn’t in Jet,” they’d say, “it didn’t happen.” And if it did happen, Jet, the first national news magazine to feature a young Montgomery, Alabama, minister, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on its cover, would tell you the truth about it. For the better half of a century, I was known more often as just “the man from Jet” than by my given name, as I reported on black America’s march to freedom from two of the most divergent viewpoints: the protesters on the ground, converging upon the courthouses, state houses, and legislatures to Introduction xii peacefully demand their constitutional rights, struggling to win the battle before others might take up the fight in suicidal desperation; and the men in the White House, the succession of U.S. presidents confronted with an unstoppable movement, and for one reason or another irrationally wishing it would go away. I was one of a small but dedicated cadre of black reporters and photographers whose stories and photographs in the black press finally drew the attention of mainstream media—and the world—to incidents of state-supported terrorism, as cameras caught public officials turning their backs on white mob violence, police siccing vicious dogs on peaceful protesters , powerful fire hoses slamming down women and children, and police horses galloping over prone bodies. The stories and pictures brought such a hue and cry from around the world, an embarrassed White House was finally shamed into action. As Washington bureau chief for Jet and its glossy sister, the monthly Ebony magazine, for more than fifty years, I reported on all the players, including ten U.S. presidents, until I retired in 2007. Since then, oceans away, the seeds of America’s civil rights movement seem to have taken root in unexpected places, inspiring another generation of dreamers. A Saudi woman courageously driving a car in defiance of local law is called the “Rosa Parks” of the Arabian peninsula. Under the banner headline, “Apparent torture of boy, 13, sparks protests in Syria,” The Washington Post reports a story that evokes the memory of young Emmett Till. In half-a-dozen or more Middle East countries, dreams of freedom erupt in nonviolent protests, and their message has a familiar ring: “Freedom—Now!” Just as the black American freedom movement gained tremendous momentum with the advent of network television, these protests have leapt continents via social networks and the Internet. Those movements, like ours, will spawn many heroes, most of them unsung, and tragically too many martyrs, most of them too young. It is to our heroes and martyrs that I dedicate this book. SHOCKING THE CONSCIENCE This page intentionally left blank ...