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Eugene Patterson was an editor for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution when he wrote this editorial of Sept. 16, 1963, a day after the notorious 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four children. The editorial is a classic in American journalism and probably the best of the 20th century.  

“A Negro mother wept in the street Sunday morning in front of a Baptist Church in Birmingham. In her hand she held a shoe, one shoe, from the foot of her dead child. We hold that shoe with her.

Every one of us in the white South holds that small shoe in his hand.

It is too late to blame the sick criminals who handled the dynamite. The FBI and the police can deal with that kind. The charge against them is simple. They killed four children.

Only we can trace the truth, Southerner — you and I. We broke those children’s bodies.

We watched the stage set without staying it. We listened to the prologue unbestirred. We saw the curtain opening with disinterest. We have heard the play.

We — who go on electing politicians who heat the kettles of hate.

We — who raise no hand to silence the mean and little men who have their nigger jokes.

We — who stand aside in imagined rectitude and let the mad dogs that run in every society slide their leashes from our hand, and spring.

We — the heirs of a proud South, who protest its worth and demand it recognition — we are the ones who have ducked the difficult, skirted the uncomfortable, caviled at the challenge, resented the necessary, rationalized the unacceptable, and created the day surely when these children would die.

This is no time to load our anguish onto the murderous scapegoat who set the cap in dynamite of our own manufacture.

He didn’t know any better.

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Judy Woodruff of PBS News Hour now anchors the show from home.

The visual design of television news is becoming less busy, says Hunter Schwarz in an article in  Eye on Design as the coronavirus has shifted us into new ground.

“Guests no longer speak to us in front of in-studio green screens with professional makeup and lighting, but are instead beamed in from home offices on laptop cameras.

Walter Cronkite, radio news anchor, made the switch to TV news in the 1940s, before green screens and chyrons.

Historically, the busy visual design with fast moving graphics has only been with us a few decades.  In the early years, Schwarz says,  TV news wasn’t much to look at.    “The guys who started off in the television news business were radio guys,” said Bill Kovarik, a professor at Radford University and author of Revolutions in Communication. “There were not a lot of visual artists to start out with.”

Setting type at the Chicago Defender, 1941.

Resistance to injustice, bearing witness to the suffering of the innocent,  never  lacking sympathy for the poor — these have always been among the  sacred duties of the press, and no newspaper has  performed  with more courage and intelligence than the Chicago Defender.

The announcement that the news organization will stop printing its 114-year old print edition, and switch to online-only publication, is not unusual in the news business these days, but it does mark the passing of an era and a moment for reflection on the status of the African American press.

When over 100 African Americans were killed and thousands of homes burned during in the East St. Louis riots in July, 1917,  only the African American press, especially the Chicago Defender, covered the eyewitness accounts of brutality by white mobs.  The same is true of many other major riots and incidents. Continue reading →

Scholars were astonished this year when the Libro de los Epítomes — a handwritten catalog of an early 16th century library — surfaced in a Danish library. The 2,000 page book was written by Ferdinand Columbus, the son of famed explorer Christopher Columbus, and scholars he hired. It was a catalog of a “universal library” collected in the early decades of the 1500s and located in Seville, Spain. The library apparently had 15,000 to 20,000 books, of which only a fraction have survived.

Apparently Columbus was interested in all kinds of literature, including not only the well known religious documents of the era and the usual Greek and Roman classics, but also newspapers, handbills, contemporary poetry and newly written books, many of which are unknown today.

It was an attempt, as one US National Public Radio story noted, “to circumnavigate the world of knowledge.” According to Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books:

“The major question about the library which this book will help us to answer is how the exponentially rising amount of information during the age of print changed the way people organize knowledge about the world. … This will just get us that much closer to seeing how all of this information that wouldn’t have circulated publicly before changed his ways of thinking about the world.

Father Charles Coughlin, American radio commentator and apologist for Nazi Germany.

By Michael J. Socolow  University of Maine,  Distributed by The Conversation 

Local television viewers around the United States were recently alerted to a “troubling trend” that’s “extremely dangerous to democracy.”  Sinclair Broadcast Group, one of America’s dominant television station owners, commanded its anchors to deliver a scripted commentary, warning audiences about “one sided news stories plaguing our country” and media outlets that publish “fake stories … that just aren’t true.”

So, is it time, as some commentators are suggesting, to restore the Fairness Doctrine… ?  I would argue that nostalgic calls for the restoration of a golden age of civil political discussion on America’s airwaves mistake what actually happened in those decades…

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How was the Holocaust possible? It’s the question often asked when considering genocidal crimes against humanity.  Was it something about German people? This was widely believed in the years following WWII, but not so much today. Alternately, do all people have destructive tendencies that may surface anywhere, at any time? If so, what are the conditions that breed genocide?

The usual historical examples note that in Germany in the 1930s,  newspapers like Dur Sturmer openly advocated extermination of Jewish people with some of the most virulent hate speech in world history.  For this,  Dur Sturmer editor Julius Streicher was executed  in 1946 under the Nuremberg principle that complicity in a crime against humanity is also a crime.  The same principle was applied to film makers like Leni Riefenstahl  and Fritz Hippler, who were were  imprisoned after the war.

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David Brooks has started a series of columns in the New York Times that he called Heroes of Democracy.  The columns are biographical but also insights into the ideas that explained and sustained the democratic momentum of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Thomas Mann

He starts with Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winning author of “Magic Mountain” and other novels, who fled the Nazis and came to America.  As Brooks said:

Democracy begins with one great truth, he argued: the infinite dignity of individual men and women. Man is made in God’s image. Unlike other animals, humans are morally responsible. Yes, humans do beastly things — Mann had just escaped the Nazis — but humans are the only creatures who can understand and seek justice, freedom and truth. This trinity “is a complex of an indivisible kind, freighted with spirituality and elementary dynamic force.”

Second in the series is John Stuart Mill, the 19th century philosopher who argued for freedom of speech in service to democracy.  Brooks said that to Mill:

John Stuart Mill

Real citizenship is a life-transforming vocation. It involves, at base, cultivating the ability to discern good from evil, developing the intellectual virtues required to separate the rigorous from the sloppy, living an adventurous life so that you are rooting yourself among and serving those who are completely unlike yourself.

Students of history, and anyone who cares about democracy, may want to stay tuned to David Brooks.  We’re taking bets on the rest of the list in history class here at Radford University.

Science and environmental journalism in history — An ongoing project by Prof. Bill Kovarik — is available at this link.