II Civil rights & the press

PART II:  The white press & civil rights 

NBC television news covers a civil rights demonstration at the Cow Palace, San Francisco, in 1964. Note the TV platform center right. Library of Congress.

In the years before and after the American Civil War, the White mainstream press was only rarely an instrument of empathy and reconciliation. Especially in the South, White mainstream newspapers had staunchly backed the”Jim Crow”  system, and many even  supported lynching in the early 20th century. 

As we have seen in Part I, white newspapers deliberately and directly fanned the flames of hatred in the 1906 Atlanta riot, the 1919 Elaine Ark. massacre and the 1921 Tulsa massacre.  The hatred was the product of a media system that made sure that racial bias was woven deeply into the fabric of civil discourse.

Brent Staples of the NY Times editorial board probably said it best:

Newspapers that championed white supremacy throughout the pre-civil rights South paved the way for lynching by declaring African Americans nonpersons. They embraced the language once used at slave auctions by denying Black citizens the courtesy titles Mr. and Mrs. and referring to them in news stories as “the negro,” “the negress” or “the n____r.”

They depicted Black men as congenital rapists, setting the stage for them to be hanged, shot or burned alive in public squares all over the former Confederacy. These newspapers entered their bloodiest incarnations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, inciting hellish episodes of violence during which white mobs murdered at will while sometimes destroying entire Black communities.

Occasional support for human decency 

Sometimes, especially in the North, 19th and 20th century newspapers hurled editorial thunderbolts at slavery,  lynching and Ku Klux Klan terrorism.

Pulitzer’s New York World for example published an expose of Klan terrorism and internal corruption in 1921,  As a result, the Klan never became the national organization that its leaders sought and its opponents feared, according to historian John T. Kneebone.

Similarly, in 1901, Mark Twain wrote an angry essay, The United States of Lyncherdom, opposing extrajudicial punishments that was carried in newspapers around the country.

Why has lynching, with various barbaric accompaniments, become a favorite regulator (punishment) in cases of “the usual crime” (sexual assault)  in several parts of the country? Is it because men think a lurid and terrible punishment a more forcible object lesson and a more effective deterrent than a sober and colorless hanging done privately in a jail would be? Surely sane men do not think that.

Unfortunately, Clemens was not brave enough to have it published during his lifetime.

With the support of many politicians, such as Teddy Roosevelt, the law began moving against lynching as the worst aspect of the old system.

But the law moved slowly, and it wasn’t until the end of World War II, when the logical consequences of racism were made clear in thousands of Nazi concentration camps,  that the American news media finally started changing its attitude towards African Americans.  Like the rest of the country, American journalists slowly came to see the logical link between the civil rights struggle and the Constitution’s  guarantees of freedom.

One reason for the abysmal state of prejudice in the US, according to a 1944 report by Swedish journalist Gunnar Myrdal, was the mainstream media’s “systematic tendency to leave the Negro out when discussing public affairs and to avoid mentioning anything about Negroes in the press except their crimes.” The African American press, Myrdal said, was in a good position to advocate its own cause.  And if the white press ever did tell the story, the rest of the nation would be “shocked and shaken” and would demand sweeping changes. Myrdal’s report can be read here at the Internet Archive.  A decade later, Myrdal’s prophecy came true. The white press began covering the civil rights movement, and the nation was shocked and shaken.

Swedish journalist Gunnar Myrdal

One pivotal event in civil rights history was the May 17, 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision by the US Supreme Court. The court unanimously decided that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” and that African American students had been “deprived of the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment.”

The response in the Southern press reflected the nation’s bitter divisions.  The Atlanta (Georgia) Constitution leading the way towards integration and racial reconciliation, while the Richmond (Virginia) Times Dispatch and Charleston SC Courier advocated “massive resistance” to the civil rights movement.

Public opinion was strongly galvanized the next year with the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicago resident visiting relatives in Mississippi. Till was brutally beaten, shot and dumped in a river in apparent retaliation for supposedly talking in a sassy way to a white woman.

His mother demanded that his body be sent home for burial in Chicago. When the coffin arrived, she had it opened “to show the world what they did to my baby.” Photos of Till’s horrifically beaten face were first printed on the front page of the Chicago Defender, and in Ebony and other magazines. “It gave a real picture to the brutality and terrorism against African Americans,” said Roland Martin, editor of the Chicago Defender, in 2005 (Goodman, 2005). Reporters from around the world attended the trial of his accused white murderers. Despite considerable evidence of guilt, the men were quickly acquitted by the racially prejudiced southern judicial system. The slaying brought “strong criticism of (Mississippi’s) white supremacy practices from other sections of the country,” a New York Times reporter wrote (Roberts and Klibanoff, 2007).

As African Americans pressed for equality with bus boycotts, lawsuits, lunch counter sit-ins and other nonviolent tactics, the mainstream press debated how to cover rapidly unfolding events.

The mainstream media settled into what seemed at first to be a gentlemanly debate over schools and desegregation. But by misreading the sentiments of political extremists in 1955, the Times “failed to see that the extremes would soon be in control,” said Gene Patterson and Hank Klibanoff in The Race Beat, a 2006 Pulitzer-Prize winning history of civil rights news coverage.

The incident that set the country boiling in 1957 involved the integration of the Little Rock, Arkansas,  High School.  Screaming white protesters confronted students who were brave enough to enroll that year.

Then, on his way to file a story, black reporter L. Alex Wilson was savagely beaten by the white mob.  Photos of the incident ran on front pages around the world, and President Dwight Eisenhower ordered the national guard into Little Rock to restore order.

Freedom summer 1964 

Mainstream news coverage of the civil rights movement increased in 1964 following the disappearance of three men (two white and one black) on the evening of June 21, 1964. The three were in Mississippi for the Freedom Summer voter registration drive organized by the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE),  and had been held in a Neshoba County jail before disappearing.

Assuming the three men might have been murdered, searchers began combing the swamps and byways looking for their bodies, and in the process, found eight more bodies of  people who had been murdered. One body had a CORE t-shirt.  But the mainstream news media at the time, and subsequent media (such as the movie Mississippi Burning),  focused on the hunt for the white victims — and not the many other black victims.

 New York Times advertising libel lawsuit

One of the most important media-related issues from the Civil Rights era involved a lawsuit filed against the  New York Times in 1960 and decided  in favor of the Times  in 1964.

The suit emerged in response to a fund-raising effort by a group of Southern ministers who purchased a full page advertisement in the Times under the headline: “Heed their Rising Voices.” The ad included a descriptions of events that may have had minor inaccuracies. Although he was not even named in the article, Louis B. Sullivan, police commissioner of Birmingham, AL, sued the Times for libel and won at the state court level. However, the US Supreme Court reversed the Alabama court decision, and cleared the way for media coverage, not only of the civil rights issue but of government in general.

“We consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials,” the Supreme Court said in its 1964 opinion in New York Times v. Sullivan.

Southern mainstream press bitterly divided on civil rights    

The White mainstream press, like the country, was bitterly divided on the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s. Editors James J. Kilpatrick and Virginius  Dabney of the Richmond, Virginia, Times Dispatch, along with others such as Thomas Waring of the Charleston, South Carolina, Post-Courier, were advocates of   “massive resistance” to integration and encouraged Southerners to fight for “states rights.” Their staunch and powerful defense of racial separation launched political careers but foreclosed the possibility of racial reconciliation.

More temperate Southerner editors advised gradual change. These included Atlanta Journal editor Ralph McGill, Greenville, Mississippi, editor Hodding Carter, and Little Rock editor Harry Ashmore.

Atlanta editor Ralph McGill insisted that the job of the media was to report within the frame of “civil rights” rather than “race war.”

Ralph McGill was especially known for crafting carefully balanced editorials to depict the civil rights movement as a sometimes uncomfortable but necessary and even inevitable process—a process that would help build a South that would be, he said,  too busy and too generous to hate. After an Atlanta bombing, McGill wrote in a 1959 Pulitzer prize winning editorial: “This . . . is a harvest of defiance of the courts and the encouragement of citizens to defy law on the part of many Southern politicians.”  McGill also urged journalists to cover the rising demands for equality as a struggle for “civil rights” — a term we take for granted today, but which at the time struck journalists as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, it was far better than the alternative term and self-fulfilling prophecy:  “race war.”

McGill’s protege, Gene Patterson,  wrote a front page editorial after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968  in the Atlanta Journal.  He called on white Americans to cease “the poisonous politics of hatred that turns sick minds to murder.  Let the white man say, ‘No more of this ever,’ and put an end to it—if not for the Negro, for the sake of his own immortal soul.”

Between the 1950s and 1980s, ultra-conservative southern editors resisted any coverage civil rights rallies or demonstrations.  For example, the 1963  “Children’s Crusade” in Birmingham, Alabama, was only marginally covered by the Birmingham News. (See APA 2013  interview with Klibanoff).

In some Southern newspapers, reporters would be told to attend a civil rights rally but “report only on the violence” and not what demonstrators had to say.  (The author, Bill Kovarik, speaks here from personal experience).  If a news reporter turned in a civil rights story, it would often be killed.  When that happened, Southern reporters knew that they could circumvent their editors and send their stories to the New York Times, and a glance through the Times during the civil rights era shows a large number of stories without bylines. (This is one reason why the Times was a target in the NY Times v Sullivan libel case).

Racist editors had their own circumventing tactics.  If a racist speaker such as William Shockley had a minor speaking engagement somewhere, racist editors would insist on Associated Press “complementary coverage.” When speeches on the same topic kept getting covered, it gave the impression that speakers like Shockley were far more important than they really were. White editors at the Charleston SC News & Courier were particularly fond of this tactic.

Shockley courted the press in other ways, in the late 1970s advocating a plan of voluntary sterilization for anyone of low IQ, most of whom, he asserted, would be African Americans.  In a 1980 interview with Atlanta Journal science writer Roger Witherspoon, Shockley openly described his admiration for Nazi eugenics programs. When Witherspoon published his remarks,  Shockley sued for libel.  The judge in the trial — a former staffer for Sen. Herman Talmadge — directed a verdict in favor of Shockley. However, the jury returned with a penalty of only one dollar, in effect, overturning the judge’s instructions.   Moments after the verdict was read, a man in the courtroom crumpled up a bill and threw it at Shockley, yelling, “Here’s your dollar, you damned Nazi.” (Witherspoon, 1980, 2018).

Witherspoon also remembers that newspapers and broadcast stations, as a business, often used discriminatory employment practices and excluded black reporters. And while most of the press covered the violent suppression of civil rights in the South, most ignored the quieter but more pervasive discrimination and racism of the north.

After widespread rioting in 1968, triggered in part by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.,  newspaper editors realized that they did not have the resources to cover the views of the black community. At the Detroit Free Press, for example, editors and reporters began reflecting that after all their reporting efforts, in 1968 and during the Detroit riots the year before,  “still nobody knew who the rioters were and why they had rioted.” (Phillip E. Meyer, “A Newspaper’s Role Between the Riots,” Nieman Reports, 1969)  One response, Meyer said, was to initiate polling, a tactic that became known as precision journalism. Another was to broaden the diversity of newsrooms and increase hiring — a long, slow process. (See Poynter’s 2016 article on newsroom diversity).  Another point that distinguished the Free Press coverage was the  financing of independent autopsies for  victims of the Algiers motel incident.

Southern TV and the WLBT case 

Television and radio deliberately blocked civil rights coverage in the US, especially in the South. The inevitable confrontation led to the 1969 Supreme Court case,  Office of Comm. of United Church of Christ v. FCC., in which  civil rights groups challenged the FCC’s licensing practices in Mississippi — and won. It’s an interesting story:

Rev. Everett Parker helped challenge WLBT’s FCC license.

In 1954, a group of civil rights activists began studying the pattern of racially biased news and public affairs programming. The Jackson, Miss. Chapter of the NAACP filed repeated complaints with the FCC about one particularly racist television station, WLBT in Jackson. Requests for a public hearing when the station license came up over the years were consistently turned down by the FCC.

When WLBT applied for what it thought would be a routine renewal of its broadcasting license in 1964, the church and a coalition of civil rights leaders formally challenged the license. Headed by Rev. Everett Parker, the group charged that the station blacked out nationally-produced civil rights news about nearby events; had promoted race-hating points of view without balance or regard for the Fairness Doctrine; and refused to feature African American speakers in any context, even on Sunday morning church service broadcasts.

The WLBT response was typical for stations whose licenses were challenged: It ginned up a list of all its public service activities from its log books, including service to the African American community. Usually complaints would stop at this point, and in effect be buried in red tape. But the coalition had an ace up its sleeve– it responded that the station’s log books were highly inaccurate, and presented evidence from a detailed content analysis, which had been kept secret up until that point. When the FCC approved the WLBT license, The church appealed the decision to a federal court, but the attorneys did not really expect to win both the case and the much larger battle over FCC’s regulatory procedure. Yet in 1966, the appeals court ruled that the FCC would conduct public hearings on the license and that the citizens would have standing before the FCC.

The court decision, written by Judge Warren Burger (who would later become the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court) eloquently restated the longstanding tradition of broadcast regulation:

“A broadcaster is not a public utility … but neither is it a purely private enterprise like a newspaper or an automobile agency. A broadcaster has much in common with a newspaper publisher, but he is not in the same category in terms of public obligations imposed by law. A broadcaster seeks and is granted the free and exclusive use of a limited and valuable part of the public domain; when he accepts that franchise it is burdened by enforceable public obligations. A newspaper can be operated at the whim or caprice of its owners; a broadcast station cannot. After nearly five decades of operation the broadcast industry does not seem to have grasped the simple fact that a broadcast license is a public trust subject to termination for breach of duty… Under our system, the interests of the public are dominant. The commercial needs of licensed broadcasters and advertisers must be integrated into those of the public. Hence, individual citizens and the communities they compose owe a duty to themselves and their peers to take an active interest in the scope and quality of the television service which stations and networks provide and which, undoubtedly, has a vast impact on their lives and the lives of their children… The 1964 renewal application (for WLBT) might well have been routinely granted except for the determined and sustained efforts of Appellants (the church coalition) at no small expense to themselves. Such beneficial contribution as these Appellants, or some of them, can make must not be left to the grace of the (Federal Communications) Commission.” (United Church of Christ v FCC, 1966).  For more on the Civil Rights WLBT story, see this National Archives publication.  

The role of the broadcast media, simply as a witness, made a difference.  For example, film of the 1965  Selma march,  showing police beating helpless non-violent demonstrators, had an enormous impact on US and world opinion.  So, too, did entertainment TV,  and stars like Nichelle Nichols in the 1960s series “Star Trek” had a positive impact.

Conclusion

In the end, the success of the nonviolent civil rights movement was closely connected with the media’s ability to witness events and share them.  “If it hadn’t been for the media—the print media and the television—the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings, a choir without a song,” said civil rights leader John Lewis in 2005 (Roberts and Klibanoff, 2006). Eventually, even conservative editors like James Kilpatrick admitted that they had been wrong about civil rights, and the South changed.

Ironically, the African American press that once stood alone in supporting the civil rights struggle became less financially successful even as the struggle for mainstream respectability become more successful.  In April of 2019,    Johnson publications, parent company of Ebony and Jet Magazines, filed for bankruptcy. A few months later, the Chicago Defender switched to all web delivery and stopped publishing the newspaper.

In witnessing the suffering of American civil rights demonstrators, and elevating the issues above simple violence in order to contemplate democratic paths to cultural evolution,  many components of the news media – including both black and white newspapers —  came to be regarded as vital elements in the long and difficult process of national reconciliation.  It was (and is) a process that, despite its many imperfections, stands as an enduring example of the value of a free press and its contribution to long-term social stability.

By Bill Kovarik, extended from an original subchapter of Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age  (Bloomsbury, 2016).  Thanks to Roger Witherspoon for critical comments and suggestions. 

* Often called the “mainstream” press, the term “white” press is more appropriate because the press was in fact segregated, north and south, through 1978, when the New York Times settled a race and gender discrimination lawsuit. Even afterwards,  separate but unequal status remained for African American reporters, who were not allowed to cover certain issues such as civil rights in the US and apartheid in South Africa at the New York Times and other newspapers.  By 1984, another discrimination lawsuit at the New York Daily News led to settlements and raises around the country.  However, minority representation in American newsrooms is still an issue in the third decade of the 21st century. 

References    

Web resources for civil rights and the U.S. media

  1. History of the Black Press,  In 1827 a group of prominent free African American citizens from states along the Eastern seaboard met in the New York City. It was the beginning of Freedom’s Journal, the first newspaper published by black Americans.
  2. Afro-American Press, by Irvine Garland Penn, 1891, Wiley & Co., Springfield, MA.  Free pdf of the original summary of the ‘golden age’ of the African American press.  Shortly after this book was published, black newspapers were burned out in Memphis, TN,  Wilmington NC, Tulsa OK, and Detroit MI.
  3. African American Newspapers in Virginia, Library of Virginia archive
  4. Accessible Archives, African American newspapers, exemplary archive by a non-profit group
  5. The Black Press and the fight for racial justice (JHistory Podcast)
  6. Reporting Civil Rights – a book and web site
  7. Following the Color Line, Ray Stannard Baker, 1908 — A famous book about race relations in America in the early 20th century.  Much of the difficult content has been played down. Note, for example, that A. L. Manley, editor of the Wilmington NC Daily Record, a daily black newspaper burned down in the city’s race riots in 1898, was interviewed by Baker ten years later while working as a janitor in Philadelphia. Baker never even mentions why Manley had to leave Wilmington.
  8. Son of the Rough South –  Karl Fleming’s book about racial violence in Los Angeles.
  9. Dan Rather, Covering the Civil Rights Movement (1998 remarks)
  10. David R. Davies, The Press and Race (Mississippi and the 1950s civil rights movement)
  11. Does your news organization owe African Americans an apology? Poynter Institute, October 2019.
  12. Resources for Race, Violence and Journalism, Chris Daly (Boston University), 2020.
  13. Educational Resource List (Books, Podcasts, Films), Broadcast Education Association June 2020

Background articles  

19th century journalists and publications

  1. William Lloyd Garrison’s introductory editorial in The Liberator, Jan. 1, 1831.
  2. Confessions of Nat Turner, 1832
  3. Without Pity or Remorse: excerpt from Edward Abdy’s America, published in 1836,  with extensive comments on slavery.
  4. Frederick Douglass, autobiography,1845
  5. Abolitionist interviews with escaped slaves, Canada,1850
  6. Frederick Douglass’ 1852 Democratic Convention speech
  7. New York Times reporter Frederick Law Olmstead tours the slave states, 1856
  8. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (full text)
  9. Excerpt from Running A Thousand Miles For Freedom by the escaped slaves William and Ellen Craft (London, W. Tweedie, 1860).
  10. Narratives of slavery (University of Virginia )
  11. Narratives of slavery (Library of Congress)
  12. A letter to my old master, 1865, by  Jourdon Anderson.  “… As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you…” 
  13. Benjamin Lundy, Quaker abolitionist and publisher of the   Genius of Universal Emancipation 
  14. John Russwurm and Freedom’s Journal profiled here. Also interesting is this biographical sketch by Jonathan Wilfred Wilson.
  15. Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895) Editor of North Star,  charismatic pro-Northern anti-slavery lecturer See Writings
  16. William Lloyd Garrisson (1805 – 1879) — Editor of The Liberator, led the radical end of the abolitionist spectrum. He denounced churches, political parties, even voting because the system supported slavery. He believed in the dissolution (break up) of the Union
  17. Henry Grady (1850 – 1889) — Atlanta Constitution editor , predecessor of McGill, advocated “New South” but downplayed racial turmoil in the 1870s and 80s.

20th century journalists and publications 

  1. W.E.B. DuBois, founder of The Crisis magazine in Nov. 1910, talks in this hour and a half long interview about his education and his life’s  work.  “I think I made the people of the United States realize just what the negro problem was and what they had to do to solve it.”
  2.  John H. Johnstone, (1914-2008)  publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines, winner of 1996 Presidential Medal of Freedom, Ambassador to Kenya and Ivory Coast.
  3. Louis Austin  (1898–1971)   “Louis Austin and the Carolina Times: A Life in the Long Black Freedom Struggle” By Jerry Gershenhorn, UNC Press, 2018.
  4. Ida Bell Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) famed African-American journalist who fought lynching in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

  5. Oscar Micheaux (Jan. 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) author and film producer, based in Roanoke Va.

  6. John Mitchell Jr. (July 11, 1863 – December 3, 1929)  American businessman, newspaper editor, African American civil rights activist, and politician in Richmond, Virginia, particularly in Richmond’s Jackson Ward, which became known as the “Black Wall Street of America.”

  7. Ralph McGill (1898 – 1969) — Publisher of the Altanta Constitution won the Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for his editorials, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964 for courageous stand.   See the documentary film: Dawns Early Light: Ralph McGill and the segregated South (Center for Contemporary Media, Inc., c1988) McGill wrote about meeting WEB DuBois in a 1965 Atlantic magazine article.
  8. In 1959, a white American journalist,  John Howard Griffin dyed his skin black and traveled for six weeks in the South.  His stories about the day-to-day prejudice and hardships facing black people were turned into one of the great books of all time, Black Like Me.ho
  9. Let Us Praise Famous Writers: Reese Cleghorn by Dallas Lee.
  10. Hank Klibanoff, interview with Alabama Public Radio, 2013.
  11. Virginius Dabney (1901 – 1995) — Editor of the Richmond Times Dispatch in the 1950s who advocated massive resistance to integration and equal rights.
  12. “How the White press wrote off Black America,” by Brent Staples, NY Times, July 10, 2021.
  13. Library of Congress Civil Rights oral history project, and  site searched for “journalists.“
  14. Louisiana Public Broadcasting “Folks” 1983 history of the black press.

Radio, television and civil rights

  1. Soldiers without swords, a 1999 PBS documentary.
  2. A force more powerful,  a film tracing the history of non-violent movements, including the US Civil Rights movement and India’s satyagraha movement, along with Nelson Mandala’s South African movement and others.  This may be the most important video a young person could see to understand the significance of the role of non-violent advocacy and media in positive social change.
  3. John Beecher – Audio recordings of Civil Rights leaders UT Austin.
  4. Civil Rights and the Press video, produced by the Newseum, Washington DC.   This is the typically heroic version of the press, not inaccurate on its face, but certainly incomplete.
  5.  History of the black press, SPJ Virginia Pro Chapter zoom video, 2021.

Civil rights worldwide

  1. Mahatma GandhiSouth Africa, India, 1869 – 1948; also see George Orwell’s Reflections on Gandhi, 1949.
  2. Ken Saro-Wiwa, Nigeria, 1948 – 1995
  3. Gerry Ortega, Philippines, 1963 – 2011
  4. Muhammed Syaifulla, Ardiansyah Matra’is, Indonesia,
  5. The moral obligation of India’s media, by Manu Joseph, July 4, 2013. “The Indian news media, especially the mainstream English-language publications whose consumers are largely the privileged and the fortunate, is not as interested as it should be in the nation’s bewildering social issues.”
  6. The role of the news media in the Apartheid Era in South Africa,  Edward Bird and Zureida Garda, an excellent example of content analysis.