5-19-08, 9:39 am

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation By Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff New York, Vintage, 2006.

The gripping drama of the skillfully written narrative in The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff reveals a generally untold angle of the civil rights movement: the press that covered it. Roberts is a veteran of the New York Times cadre of civil rights reporters, and Klibanoff is a Southern reporter. Their combined talents in researching, conducting interviews, and writing this impressive book earned them the Pulitzer Prize.

The narrative begins in the late 1940s, examining the newspapers of the North and South who covered what would become known as the 'race beat.' Initially important African American-owned newspapers like the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Amsterdam News, the Birmingham World, and the Baltimore Afro-American had a monopoly on civil rights stories (though Roberts and Klibanoff acknowledge, in passing, the role of the Communist press in its coverage as well). Indeed, many of these papers were responsible for the massive migration of African Americans out of the South in the first half of the 20th century.

But the majority of African Americans remained in the South, seeking equality, a means of earning a living or getting ahead economically that often confronted the apartheid like conditions of Jim Crow. Indeed, apartheid was so prominent that stories that African American Southerners read in Black newspapers were almost guaranteed not to be read by whites.

Thus when the Montgomery bus boycott was launched by the NAACP and the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1955, the Black newspapers were crucial in spreading the word about it and information on carpool alternatives to the city's segregated buses. Whites elites in Montgomery were astonished by the duration of the strike and the organization of the city's Black residents. If only they had followed the African American press, the whole boycott would not have initially seemed so spontaneous.

Black reporters had an inside scoop when it came to the subsequent struggles over desegregating the regions schools as well, at least at the beginning. When the African American community prepared the arduous task of integrating Little Rock High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, it was led in part by a family that owned The Arkansas State Press. Black reporters from across the region and the country could count on meeting with the families, getting the scoop on the tactics of the integration plan, and even played a role in helping the students get into the school on their first day safely.

One of those reporters was L. Alex Wilson, a highly respected reporter from the Memphis Tri-State Defender. On the day the Little Rock Nine were set to enter the school as hundreds of pro-segregation whites stood outside the school menacingly, whipped up by a demagogic Governor Orval Faubus, Wilson walked toward the crowd to conduct interviews for his reporting. The crowd turned on him, not knowing who he was and because of his skin color assuming he was aiding the integration process, attacked him. Other reporters and photographers jumped into action clicking their cameras and calling in what they saw to their editors. Turns out the melee distracted the mob from another part of the school campus, where the African American youngsters drove safely up the school and entered the building.

But the attack on Wilson severely damaged him physically, and he never fully recovered from the wounds. He would die just a couple years later at the age of 51.

For many white reporters the events they covered were a turning point in how they viewed the issue they were covering. Many struggled to remain 'objective,' but quickly found they had become sympathetic to the struggles of the African American people for freedom and equality and disgusted by the demagoguery and violence of the segregationists. Black reporters, however, found they had fewer chances to cover events without being dragged into the story when violence erupted. Pro-segregation whites who viewed mob violence as their best tactic for stopping desegregation would often just as easily target white reporters.

Roberts and Klibanoff provide excellent narratives of the reporting that took place during the Montgomery bus boycott, the trial of the Emmett Till lynchers, the Little Rock integration efforts, James Meredith's efforts to get into the University of Mississippi, the Freedom Rides, and many more important stops along the way to ending Jim Crow. The book includes several dozen photos of the incidents and individuals involved in these stories. In so doing, the authors help us relive a painful but necessary chapter in American history, but deliver new tales about the men and women, both Black and white, who courageously brought the news to the American public, often facing harm or even death.

The book is replete with detailed discussions of how journalists, photographers, TV reporters, and newspaper editors from all regions of the country struggled with how to cover the civil rights movement. It even details the special efforts of a handful of Southern newspaper editors who either favored ending Jim Crow or who were disgusted by the violence or the segregationists thumbing their noses at the law of the land.

Readers should not be overly surprised that Roberts and Klibanoff fail to adequately report the class angle of the racist system in the South (or in the country generally). White landowners and capitalists enjoyed extra profits by keeping a huge section of the Southern population under Jim Crow. Cheap labor and a divided working class by race ensured the profits would roll in and that white elites would always control the reigns of power in the name of white supremacy.

Indeed, class prejudices occasionally are leaked, as Roberts and Klibanoff here and there bemoan the failure of the 'better class of whites' to reign in the violent tendencies off the 'rednecks' and hooligans. Nevertheless, The Race Beat is an extremely important book that deserves study, especially for those who have become chagrined or even disgusted with the way our modern media has so often failed us: from accurately reporting in the lead-up to the Iraq war to its refusal to continue to cover the 'race beat.'

Finally, Roberts and Klibanoff use the disturbingly anachronistic word 'Negro' to refer to African Americans. Presumably, they do so to recreate the atmosphere and style present in the time period they study, but this isn't explained in an author's note or preface. The descriptions and photos and analysis are far more successful in taking the reader back in time, and the use of that term actually does more to jolt the reader out of sync with the aim of the narrative. On that score, the authors fail.