Confrontation, in black and white

JUST when you think there’s nothing left to say about the civil rights movement, especially after Taylor Branch’s prizewinning three-volume history of “America in the King Years,” a new book pulls you back in. “The Race Beat” is a fascinating history of how the media handled that story, from two reporters who have covered the South.

It might seem obvious now that civil rights was a big issue, but before the mid-1950s the white media didn’t cover African Americans, much less what we now think of as civil rights issues. In the South, blacks were regularly denied the vote, lynched and forced to live in misery -- but none of that was considered news by the New York Times, CBS News, Life magazine or the rest of the media, which tended to follow their lead. Editors had to decide to cover the story, and reporters had to get it right. There was nothing automatic about that, as Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff should know: Roberts, a former managing editor of the New York Times, covered the civil rights movement and the South for the paper; Klibanoff is managing editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. They describe the heroes of civil rights journalism and expose the failures of some reporters and the outright racism of others.

The mainstream media may have ignored civil rights issues, but the South -- and the nation -- had a thriving black press in the 1940s, black weeklies that “ridiculed white hypocrisy, spoke out bitterly against racial injustice” and covered civil rights politics in rich detail, the authors write. If some of this news could get onto the front page of Northern white newspapers, black editors and civil rights leaders believed, that might spark support for federal action against the horrors of Southern racism.

What made the mainstream media start reporting on those events? The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. The coverage was framed not in terms of blacks seeking justice, but rather of the high court seeking compliance with its ruling.

The authors fault the New York Times, which considered itself the national newspaper of record, for failing to cover the story, at least at first. The Times’ reporter in the South in the 1950s, John Popham, missed both big stories on his beat: the rise of the civil rights movement among blacks and the rise of massive resistance among whites.

This failure was not exactly a sin of omission. In 1956, two years after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, the paper ran an eight-page, 50,000-word “Report on the South,” a pullout section written by a team of 10 reporters. The bus boycotts in Montgomery, Ala., led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had been going on for two months; it didn’t get a mention. Instead, the story was about Southern progress toward school integration.

News coverage of school desegregation already had opened the door to stories about the South and racism. The first to make the national media was the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955. Till, a black teenager from Chicago visiting relatives, spoke to or whistled at a white woman in a store in the Mississippi Delta town of Money -- apparently to impress his friends. Three days later, he was abducted, and a few days after that, his body was found, horribly disfigured. The white woman’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were quickly arrested and charged with Till’s murder. For the black press, it was one more vicious racial killing in the region’s long, bloody history. Even so, the publication of a photo of Till’s mutilated corpse in Jet, a magazine with a national readership, left a searing impression on a generation of blacks.

White reporters from the mainstream media, including the New York Times, showed up in unprecedented numbers to cover the trial, including newsmen from all three TV networks, the authors write. Coverage of the speedy trial and acquittal of Bryant and Milam by an all-white jury left Northern white readers and viewers “shocked and shaken.”

After the trial, the national press left town, but one white writer stayed: William Bradford Huie, one of the book’s heroes. The Alabama native and bestselling author of books about World War II combat paid the two men a total of $3,150 to describe killing Till -- then Look magazine published Huie’s detailed narrative in January 1956. The mainstream media had assumed the story was the trial; to freelancer Huie, it was the press’ job to get the truth.

After the Montgomery bus boycott, the next big civil rights story was in Birmingham, Ala., where the police were cracking down on black demonstrators in 1960. The New York Times, realizing it had missed the boat on the first phase of the movement, had replaced Popham with the superb Claude Sitton in 1958, then in 1960 sent Pulitzer Prize winner Harrison Salisbury to Alabama. His first story ran on Page 1 under the headline “Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham.” He described “racism, reinforced by the whip, the razor, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police.” Police Commissioner Bull Connor and other locals filed a criminal libel suit against Salisbury and the Times. The newspaper soon faced $6 million in libel claims from Alabama public officials. The Montgomery Advertiser made it clear in a news story that this was a deliberate strategy to end the Times’ coverage of Alabama by driving its reporters out of the state.

The tactic worked. The New York Times lawyers insisted that its reporters stay out of Alabama unless and until the paper won the lawsuits -- and the editors, to their shame, agreed. Times reporters didn’t cover the state for 2 1/2 years -- a period that included sit-ins and the freedom rides, a challenge to segregated interstate buses, two of the most dramatic stories of protest in U.S. history. (The Supreme Court eventually ruled in favor of the Times, but not until 1964.)

The actions of the national press are only part of the story Roberts and Klibanoff tell. The Southern white press had its heroes -- and its villains. The heroes included Ralph McGill at the Atlanta Constitution and Hodding Carter Jr. in Greenville, Miss., at the Delta Democrat-Times. One of the worst was James J. Kilpatrick, editor of the Richmond News Leader, who proposed the strategy of resistance to school integration that was adopted by many of the region’s governors. Kilpatrick also was a defender of “the Southern way of life.” “Where is the Negro to be found?” he asked in a 1963 essay for the Saturday Evening Post. His answer: “He is still digging the ditch. He is down at the gin mill shooting craps. He is lying limp in the middle of the sidewalk, yelling he is equal. The hell he is equal.” The magazine’s editor refused to run the piece -- because that week Klansmen in Birmingham had bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls. (Kilpatrick changed his approach in the mid-1960s, gained fame in the 1970s as the conservative pundit on the “60 Minutes” segment “Point/Counter Point” and still writes a syndicated column today.)

The Birmingham bombing raised questions about bias and fairness: What kind of fairness was required in writing about the Ku Klux Klan killers? Howard K. Smith reported a historic 1961 broadcast for CBS News, “Who Speaks for Birmingham?” For the first time, black people were given equal airtime with whites. The blacks talked about the viciousness of Connor and his police and about the humiliations of segregation. The veteran journalist concluded the 60-minute documentary by quoting 18th century political philosopher Edmund Burke: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” CBS executives called that “editorializing” and insisted it be cut. In a memo to CBS Chairman William S. Paley, Smith criticized the network’s notion that “truth is to be found somewhere between right and wrong, equidistant between good and evil.” Paley called Smith’s argument “junk,” and Smith, who’d worked at CBS News for 20 years, quit in protest.

The book covers many other crucial topics -- segregation in the newsrooms of the mainstream media, the press’ lack of skepticism about President Kennedy’s role in the civil rights struggles, and the success of the FBI in using the media to spread the lie that King and the movement were controlled by communists.

It ends with the story of freedom riders who were arrested in Mississippi and held at the notorious state penitentiary in Parchman. John Lewis was one of them. Now a congressman from Georgia, he recently recalled the most frightening moment of his life, when a Parchman guard told them with a chuckle, “Ain’t no newspapermen out here.”

“If it hadn’t been for the media,” Lewis said, “the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song.” *