Journalism's Finest Hour

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Authors: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
Publisher: Knopf
Pages: 518
Year: 2006
Price $30

Book Review:

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Knopf) by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff is a history of race journalism in America.

During the segregation era, national newspapers assigned reporters to report on black issues in the South. The Emmett Till murder, integration at the University of Mississippi, and peaceful civil rights demonstrations led by Dr. Martin Luther King were big news events but most southern newspapers either refused to report on them or reported biased accounts of the events.

After the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional in 1954, reporters flocked to the South to cover integration and resistance to it. Some states voluntarily integrated; Mississippi and Alabama refused. When Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett to integrate schools, Barnett said, “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration. We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”

Alabama Gov. George Wallace was equally defiant. When ordered to integrate the University of Alabama, Wallace stood in the doorway of the registrar’s office to prevent two black students from enrolling. He stepped aside after federal officials read him a statement from Attorney General Kennedy.

“Reporters were drawn to [Wallace] like biologists are drawn to the unexpected emergencies of an old virus they believed had been exterminated,” the authors write.

Roberts and Klibanoff hold the view that civil rights victories in the South were a joint effort by Dr. King and other leaders and the reporters who covered the speeches, marches and killings. They prove their view in this excellent book.

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Jim Patterson, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, is an award-winning journalist based in San Francisco.