Product Description

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #90188 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-31
• Released on: 2006-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 528 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Faced with "a flying wedge of white toughs coming at him" as he interviewed a black woman after the 1955 Emmett Till lynching trial, NBC reporter John Chancellor thrust his microphone toward them, saying, "I don't care what you're going to do to me, but the whole world is going to know it." This gripping account of how America and the world found out about the Civil Rights movement is written by two veteran journalists of the "race beat" from 1954 to 1965. Building on an exhaustive base of interviews, oral histories and memoirs, news stories and editorials, they reveal how prescient Gunnar Myrdal was in asserting that "to get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people." The New York Times and other major media take center stage, but the authors provide a fresh account of the black press's trajectory from a time when black reporters searched "for stories white reporters didn't even know about" through the loss of the black press's "eyewitness position on the story" in Little Rock to its recovery with the Freedom Rides. Although sometimes weighted by mundane detail and deadening statistics, the book is so enlivened with anecdotes that it remains a page-turner. (Nov. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
A good case can be made that the period from the mid- 1950s to the mid-1970s was the Golden Age of the American press -- a period bracketed, roughly, by Edward R. Murrow's exposure of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's mendacity in the anti-communist cause in 1954 and the resignation of Richard Nixon from the presidency two decades later following the disclosure, primarily in this newspaper, of the sordid details of the Watergate scandal. Between those signal events, the press covered the Vietnam War with a dogged insistence on uncovering the truth -- in sharp contrast to the tame acquiescence with which it reported the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 -- as well as the extraordinary social and cultural changes that swept through the country during those years.

Among those changes, none were more important than those initiated by the civil rights movement, and in no other story did the press distinguish itself so admirably and effectively. The reporters who fanned out through the South beginning in the mid-1950s were determined, resourceful and courageous. In print and on the air, they awakened the nation to the terrible conditions in which countless black Southerners lived and the daily denial of the most basic rights to which they were subjected. The best of their journalism -- and much of it was exceptionally good -- took no sides and preached no sermons but simply laid out the facts, which were all the country needed to begin the long, complicated and difficult task of fixing things.

No doubt I am prejudiced in this view of the press's performance in the civil rights era because I was an exceedingly minor participant in it, not as a reporter but as an editorial writer. During my junior and senior years at Chapel Hill, I was the editor of the student newspaper when the sit-ins began in 1960 in Greensboro, 55 miles to the west in the North Carolina Piedmont, and I wrote often about this and other forms of protest, including the student boycott of Chapel Hill's two segregated movie theaters. Then, in 1964, I moved to the Greensboro Daily News and spent a decade there writing editorials, often, again, on matters relating to civil rights ranging from protests to federal legislation.

In doing this work, I relied, daily, on facts and narratives supplied by the reporters out in the field. Their work provided the essential information on which the nation conducted its debate over how to assure the civil rights of African Americans. I say without embarrassment that these reporters were my heroes then, and that reading this history of their work by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff takes me back to my youth in vivid and intensely personal ways. It was at once one of the most terrible times in the nation's history and one of the most enthralling. On the one hand, ordinary American citizens were being jailed, beaten and even murdered for simply attempting to exercise their most basic rights as citizens; on the other hand, there was a pervasive, almost palpable sense of possibility, an understanding that the nation was at last beginning to live up to the promises in its Constitution and a hope that a better country might emerge at the end.

The stories of these men -- and with the notable exception of Hazel Brannon Smith, who owned a few small-town papers in Mississippi and wrote bravely against the racist White Citizens' Council, they all were men -- may seem inside baseball for journalists, but they are essential to the history of the civil rights movement and thus of broad interest. The authors are well qualified for the task. Roberts, who now teaches at the University of Maryland, had a long and distinguished career during which he often reported from the civil rights front lines; so, too, did Klibanoff, now the managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who began his career working on three different small Mississippi papers. At times, their attention drifts away from the press and onto rehashes of familiar stories -- the murder of Emmett Till, the march in Selma, the mob violence at the University of Mississippi, the church bombing in Birmingham -- but these may be useful to younger readers for whom, alas, these events are ancient and perhaps unknown history.

The authors take their cue from Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish lawyer and political economist whose study of race in the United States, An American Dilemma, was the seminal book on its subject. Published in 1944, it painted a grim picture of the lives of black Americans and argued, passionately, as Roberts and Klibanoff put it, "that if the mainstream press told the southern racial story, the rest of the nation would be 'shocked and shaken' and demand sweeping changes." No one in the press deliberately or consciously set out to publicize the plight of African Americans, but events forced the media's hands, and ultimately exactly what Myrdal had urged came to pass.

It started slowly and uncertainly. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the South was terra incognita to the rest of the country. Newspapers did not cover events there -- the New York Times, usually the leader in such matters, did not appoint its first full-time Southern correspondent until 1947 -- and if white Americans thought about the South at all, they thought about "Gone With the Wind." Not until the murder of Till in Mississippi in August 1955 -- a 16-year-old visiting from Chicago, he was killed and thrown into a river by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman -- did the mainstream press begin to discover what was going on down South. The killing aroused intense interest in the Northern black press, and eventually the rest of the press caught on to the story as well. The acquittal of his killers was so obviously a perversion of justice that it called into question the entire judicial system of the South and left no doubt about the injustices to which it subjected blacks.

One of the white journalists who covered the trial was a white man from Alabama named William Bradford Huie, a freelance writer and occasional novelist of uncommon resourcefulness and guts. After the acquittal, he persuaded the killers to tell him their story -- what he persuaded them with was money -- then sold it to Look magazine, which published it in January 1956. It "was a detailed, narrative reenactment showing how [the killers] had beaten, tortured, killed, and submerged Till," and it shocked the nation. After this there was no turning back; the civil rights movement rose to the forefront and stayed there for years.

Some of the journalists who kept it there were Southern-born editors who defied local majority opinion among whites and wrote forthrightly, sometimes passionately, about the race question: Ralph McGill in Atlanta, Hodding Carter and P.D. East and Hazel Brannon Smith in Mississippi, Buford Boone in Alabama, Lenoir Chambers in Norfolk, Va., and, at the head of the class, Harry Ashmore in Little Rock. Few now remember their names except as they appear in histories of journalism. Ditto for the reporters: Claude Sitton and John Herbers of the New York Times, Robert E. Lee Baker of The Washington Post, John Chancellor and Sander Vanocur of NBC News, Joe Cumming of Newsweek, Simeon Booker of Ebony and Jet magazines, Carl Rowan of the Minneapolis Tribune, Howard K. Smith of CBS News, Ted Poston of the New York Post, Jack Nelson of the Los Angeles Times.

The most important of these was Sitton. He was 32 years old when, in 1958, the managing editor of the Times, a native of Mississippi named Turner Catledge, pulled him off the copy desk and sent him to Atlanta to cover the South: "The civil rights story needed a reporter who knew the region well, had the right accent, abided by all the rules, wouldn't get emotionally involved, wouldn't argue with anyone, wouldn't become the news, who would just write what he saw, wouldn't get beat, wouldn't get snookered, and was willing to give up his family, perhaps his life, for the story." Sitton was all that and more. He "set into motion a level of reporting that would establish the national standard for two decades." He was little known among readers, except those who remember bylines, but his fellow journalists were in awe of his tenacity, thoroughness and quiet, intense courage. For six years (he became national news director of the Times in 1964), he was the best reporter in the country; to me, in my early 20s, he was the exemplar nonpareil, the best that a journalist can hope to be.

There were un-Sittons, too. Thomas R. Waring Jr. of the Charleston News and Courier was "as forceful a spokesman for segregation as there was in the South"; Harry Ashmore said that "the News and Courier feels that what's wrong with this country is democracy." Both newspapers in Jackson, Miss., owned by the Hederman family, were "fervently segregationist." Grover Hall of the Montgomery Advertiser took a moderate tack at first but eventually aligned himself with George Wallace. In Richmond, James Jackson Kilpatrick of the News-Leader embraced the sham doctrine of interposition -- it held that the individual states could nullify federal laws they believed to be unconstitutional -- and egged Virginia on toward the "massive resistance" that left a lasting stain on the state.

Mostly, though, the journalists stuck to the facts, reporting and interpreting them thoroughly, fairly and honestly. As the years passed many of them became more and more sympathetic to the protesters whom they covered, but they kept their opinions and emotions to themselves unless they were commentators rather than reporters. They did us all -- their fellow journalists and their fellow Americans -- proud.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Before the civil rights movement, coverage of race was almost exclusively the purview of the black press, which reported on the plight of southern blacks facing brutality and Jim Crow laws and northern blacks facing a watered-down version of the same racism. Drawing on interviews, private correspondence and notes, and unpublished articles, Roberts, a journalism professor, and Klibanoff, managing editor of theAtlanta Journal-Constitution, describe the personal and professional difficulties faced by southern-born white reporters as they took up the coverage, mostly for northern publications. They chronicle the coverage of the Emmett Till case, Selma march, Montgomery bus boycott, and bombings and sit-ins that constituted the civil rights movement. Roberts and Klibanoff also recall the hatred and threats of violence against white reporters as they dared to report on the turbulence in the South. By retelling the civil rights story from the perspective of the white reporters who covered it, Roberts and Klibanoff demonstrate the profound changes the movement wrought not only on U.S. social justice but also on American journalism. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Absorbing and instructive
I have read a lot on the civil rights struggle, including Taylor Branch's trilogy, and Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger, and have appreciated all the reading I have done on that momentous struggle. But this account of how newspapers and television chronicled the exciting events told me a lot I did not know or had not remembered. The book is carefully footnoted and has a 26 page bibliography, in addition to the footnotes (thus avoiding the unfortunate lapse of some books which are well-footnoted but omit a bibliography). The book not only tells of newsmen and media sometimes going to great, even heroic lengths, to tell the story of the events in the clash between aspring blacks and the status quo, but also tells of the media which sought to uphold segregation. As with other books on the struggle, when one is appalled by the violence and murders which marked the history, it is some comfort to realize that in the end right triumphs. This book is an astoundingly interesting survey of an important aspect of the civil rights efforts of the 1950s and 1960s.

Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History
Outstanding effort by legendary editor Gene Roberts, widely admired for turning around the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1980s and leading it to multiple prizes in journalism, revisits, with co-author Hank Klibanoff, managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, both their own work in civil rights reporting and the work of colleagues to pen this precise and most interesting study of what journalists were and weren't doing when segregation was legal in the U.S.

Highly readable and fascinating history.

Free at Last, Free At Last, Thank God Almighty (almost) Free at Last
The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

-- Reviewed by Philip W. Henry
When the civil rights story began in the early 1960's, I was a freshman at a Northern College. So much was happening between 1963 and 1968 that it was possible to miss some of the real history unfolding outside "The Ivory Tower `while studying the past. Now, I'm trying to fill in some of the blanks in my education. "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation" is a good place to begin. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff were both intimately involved in covering the biggest stories of the South. Drawing on extensive interviews, and digging in previously unpublished documents and memoirs, they paint a fascinating portrait of the crisis of conscience and confidence that the civil rights story caused in the Southern Media Establishment.
The tensions developed in covering the race story were not just between White, Liberal, and often Jewish Northern News Organizations v. the Old South; but within the Southern Media as well. There were honest and decent Southern publishers and editors who decried the move toward Klan violence and barricaded school houses epitomized by Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. Ironically, many of the top editors of the supposed Yankee Press (especially The New York Times) were Southerners themselves. (Turner Catledge, one of the T imes's top editors, was from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were found murdered).
If anything propelled the Story of the South into the living rooms of the country it was TV News. The sight of Freedom Riders being beaten, firehosed and dragged away; and the four little girls in their church outfits killed in the cowardly KKK bombing of a Birmingham Church, inflamed the American conscience.

The Assassinations of Medgar Evers; the Birmingham Four; and the three young civil rights workers from the north and the refusal of local law enforcement to investigate the case added to the fray. The sheriff and his deputy were later indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in a case prosecuted by John Doar, the young Justice Department Lawyer who later gained fame in the Watergate Prosecution.

In one telling scene, Doar stands in front of a group of rebel yokels and confronts them. He could easily have been killed or lynched, but by the force of his conviction he prevailed. .

If there is some vindication out of all this, several cases believed to be so cold or so compromised that justice could never be served, have been solved. Medgar Evers's killing took thirty years to solve, but the failed fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith, who was spared by a hung jury earlier, paid a price thirty years later: (One Mississippi paper, unable to bring itself to claim De La Beckwith as one of "Ole Miss's Own," said: " Californian held in Murders." (He had spent his first five years in California)
"In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was finally convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001."

There are good guys and gremlins, of course. Robert Kennedy, never popular in the south, is portrayed as the loyal Attorney General to his brother, who never seemed to totally grasp the dimensions of the story. Justice Department Lawyer John Doar is a giant figure in the post-freedom riders killing trials. Moderate southern editors and publishers like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Hodding Carter of Greenville, Miss, where the three student volunteers were found murdered, kept their composure and focus despite financial and social pressure from conservatives. (Carter, in particular, began as a staunch segregationist but became more liberal).
"The Race Beat" is a valuable addition to the literature of Journalism and race relations in the United States.


There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (Vintage)There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (Vintage)