Contributed by Tanya (Toni) DeMello MPA '08

Hank Klibanoff, the managing editor of news at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Gene Roberts, a professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland following 18 years as the executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer, provided a firsthand account of the civil rights movement that many have read only in books. In February, both came to the Woodrow Wilson School to share their personal involvement and work in reporting on the civil rights struggle in the United States. On the front lines of the media side of the civil rights movement in the southern U.S.—a region where both grew up—they, and others, had the determination to report on a struggle that changed the face of this nation.

Co-authors of the book The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Random House, 2006), they tell the story of the nation’s press, who—after decades of ignoring the problems of racial segregation, indignities, and injustice—slowly came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Klibanoff opened the discussion by sharing how the “media” story began in New York City in the mid-1930s, when the Carnegie Corporation decided that the one big issue with which America was not dealing was race. Carnegie commissioned a study on race relations in the U.S., with the hope of having a comprehensive, thorough examination of the issue. Carried out on a large scale, chaired by an independent, well-known Swedish Social Democrat, Gunner Myrdal, and co-directed by prominent African-American intellectual Ralph Bunch, work began in a post-World War I America still mired in the Great Depression. Klibanoff noted that Myrdal was shocked by the revelations of deep racism by those he interviewed, as evidenced by his admission: “This is more than I ever could have imagined, I’m horrified by what we are finding.”

One defining event for Myrdal, said Klibanoff, was his mid-study return to Sweden with his family, precipitated by the events occurring in Europe just prior to World War II. While there, he sees something that puts into perspective what he had been seeing in the American South. In Europe, under the mere threat of Hitler’s advance, governments collapsed; and one of the first institutions silenced upon their collapse was the press. In 1996, with the publication of his book (co-authored with his daughter, Sissela Bok), An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Transaction Publishers), Myrdal crystallized this in what he called an “American creed”—that Americans have a strong belief in the core values of justice and fair play, but they easily can be led astray.

Essentially, said Klibanoff, Myrdal concluded that no one understood the depth of racism’s grip in the South because no one was writing about it other than a vigorous and assertive—but largely non-influential—black press. Since the southern press was predominantly segregationist, it would be up to the members of the northern press to come to the South to discover the shocking conditions. Only then would people be shocked and shaken enough to begin to demand change. Quoted Klibanoff from the book, “to get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people.”

Klibanoff also outlined how the New York Times was the first national paper to set up a bureau in the South and begin reporting on the story. He noted that “The Times’ leadership…was southern leadership. The South was a relevant story to them.” Little by little, the nation began to see—first through the genteel, hopeful reporting of stories of the desire for change, to the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision striking down racial segregation, to the shocking story of the killing of three civil rights workers—how Black Americans consistently had their basic human rights violated with no recourse to redress these violations.

But, it was during the trial for the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Negro boy from Chicago, that the world finally saw a shocking example of the danger, prejudice, and inequality that was predominant in the South. Gene Roberts emphasized how this trial was the turning point in bringing the civil rights struggle to the forefront of American consciousness.

Both reporters gave powerful and moving accounts of their personal stories and their witness to the progress of the civil rights movement, and left a powerful impression on those in attendance. Klibanoff, in particular, was sincere and reflective when discussing particular instances of violence. “1957 is Little Rock. Little Rock is enormously important. Arkansas, by southern standards, was relatively progressive. Little Rock looked as if it were on a course toward becoming integrated. Everyone was on board. When he had run, Governor Orville Faubus was on board. At the last minute, the segregationists got to Faubus, changed his mind, and everything changed…and it turned into a street brawl, a mess, it was violence…the Black press, which had the front row seat of the story….they were on their way to Central High on the day the nine black students are getting in, they just got the living hell beat out of them.”

“In The Race Beat,” said Klibanoff, “we certainly do not stop at Little Rock. We march through history with these great cataclysms—at Ole Miss, at Birmingham, at Selma, and the failure to have a cataclysm in Albany, Georgia.”

When Roberts began, he stated softly but clearly the reason he had come to speak. “I have vivid memories of the civil rights era,” he said. “My first real brush with it, as a reporter, was in northern Virginia in 1958. As part of the massive resistance to the school desegregation efforts, the state of Virginia seized control of six high schools and junior high schools in Norfolk rather than admit 14 black children to the schools. More than 6,000 white students were put out of school by the closing; parents in Norfolk rushed around starting ‘speakeasy’ schools in church basements. Schools were closed for four months.

When they finally reopened under heavy court pressure, I was assigned to one school that had over 2,000 white students and one lone black 15-year-old girl. And we forget, all these years later, what incredible courage it took to be the first black children to go to all white schools… I remember how after all of the white students were brought into the school…they would bring the black student up in a car, and she would go on her own to the school. There was about a one-block walkway from the car to school. She got about halfway, then just suddenly froze. Trembling all over. It seemed to me the trembling went on forever; it was probably a minute or two. And then she stuck out her chin, pulled her arms against her side, and propelled herself the last half block…I will never forget her courage.”

Roberts recalled that when he graduated from college, it was the same month as the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court. “Knowing I was going into journalism, I fully expected desegregation to be the story of my career. But for the first few years, it didn’t seem this way.” By 1960, he noted, even a state such as North Carolina, which considered itself “desegregated,” actually had managed to desegregate only three schools with a handful of Black students.

Perhaps one of the most memorable moments of the evening was when Roberts was asked by a member of the audience to share his impression of Dr. Martin Luther King. He paused for a few moments and responded, “He truly was all of the things that you have heard—he was so wise, so eloquent, he was a visionary. But, to me, my best memory of him was that when he’d talk to you so eloquently—he’d be eating popsicles. You know, those double stick popsicles? He was trying to lose weight and he loved those popsicles. He just loved them. And you had this incredible visionary talking to you, and I remember him talking and happily eating those popsicles.”

The stories of these personal moments, as well as their interviews with other participants and correspondents from this period of time, are the basis of The Race Beat. On that evening in February at WWS, both Roberts and Klibanoff expressed how they, and others, were moved, inspired, horrified, awakened, and enabled to use the news media to build up a sense of moral outrage that would eventually move the nation.

They spoke with both awe and humility about how it felt to watch Dr. King speak in churches and then see the people mobilize to fight together for the protection of their rights. They watched people with very little in their pockets give all that they had to the civil rights struggle, and they watched them unite for a cause that was about the protection of their very lives.

Those of us who were in attendance on that evening in February, listening to Roberts and Klibanoff speak so intimately, were witness not only to the struggle and victory of the civil rights movement, but also to the deep respect these reporters had for the men and women that gave their lives for it.