Pulitzer Prize winner: "The Race Beat"

[Sequoia]

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
by Gene Roberts (Author), Hank Klibanoff (Author)



From Publishers Weekly
Faced with "a flying wedge of white toughs coming at him" as he interviewed a black woman after the 1955 Emmett Till lynching trial, NBC reporter John Chancellor thrust his microphone toward them, saying, "I don't care what you're going to do to me, but the whole world is going to know it." This gripping account of how America and the world found out about the Civil Rights movement is written by two veteran journalists of the "race beat" from 1954 to 1965. Building on an exhaustive base of interviews, oral histories and memoirs, news stories and editorials, they reveal how prescient Gunnar Myrdal was in asserting that "to get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people." The New York Times and other major media take center stage, but the authors provide a fresh account of the black press's trajectory from a time when black reporters searched "for stories white reporters didn't even know about" through the loss of the black press's "eyewitness position on the story" in Little Rock to its recovery with the Freedom Rides. Although sometimes weighted by mundane detail and deadening statistics, the book is so enlivened with anecdotes that it remains a page-turner. (Nov. 21)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

amazon.com
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Mr. Roberts pulled in Mr. Klibanoff — a fellow Southerner who is now a managing editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution — to work on the book because “like me, he thought it was a story that needed to be told.”

“My span in journalism now covers a bit over 50 years,” said Mr. Roberts, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, who covered civil rights for The New York Times, “and I never encountered a story quite like this one. It was long-running, it had emotional impact and it was probably the most important domestic story of the 20th century.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/arts/pulitzer2007.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[EFerrari]

1. I want to read this. BookTv had a panel and one of these authors

-- can't remember which one -- did a great presentation.

[Sequoia]

2. I read it; it's really good.

Seems the south had a news blackout and many yankees didn't know what was really going on down there until the Emmet Till incident.

[EFerrari]

3. I was 9 in 1965 and didn't learn about Emmet Till

until I read Gwendolyn Brooks in college.