Download The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation AudioBook Free
This is the account of how America awakened to its competition problem, of what sort of nation that longed for unity after World Warfare II emerged instead to see, notice, and learn about the shocking indignities of racial segregation in the South - and the brutality used to enforce it. It is the story of how the nations press, after decades of ignoring the condition, came to identify the importance of the civil protection under the law struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic reports event of the twentieth century. Attracting on private correspondence, records from secret conferences, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the news and datelines to show what sort of dedicated cadre of newsmen - first dark reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and professional photographers from the countrywide press and the broadcast multimedia - revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its residents to do something. We watch the dark press move bravely in to the front row of the confrontation, and then be attacked and placed from the action. Following the Supreme Courts 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the Souths mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters project South for the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the School of Alabama. We witness some southern editors getting started with the call for massive level of resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a couple of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for conformity to national mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate causes were prepared to push the region in to the mainstream. The rate quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the limitations of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered classes in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being established afire, fire hoses and pet dogs in Birmingham, and long, anxious marches through the rural South. For most journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they sensed, and the violence they found were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting country-wide outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other major reports organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional account into a countrywide drama.
