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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 070.4493058
EAN num: 9780679735656
ISBN number: 0679735658
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 544
Printing Date: September 04, 2007
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: September 04, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 70606
Studio: Vintage
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An unprecedented examination of how news stories, editorials and photographs in the American press—and the journalists responsible for them—profoundly changed the nation’s thinking about civil rights in the South during the 1950s and ‘60s.
Roberts and Klibanoff draw on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—black and white—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings that compelled its citizens to act. Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an extraordinary account of one of the most calamitous periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.
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Rated by buyers 
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At its heart, The Race Beat is a thoroughly researched, well-written explanation of how democracy and justice cannot survive without a free, vigilant press.
Yet, the book is hardly a benediction of the American news media: One of the core conflicts throughout is how conservative Southern editors, publishers and station owners collaborated with segregationist politicians and white civic groups. While a few editors in the Deep South braved public backlash, canceled subscriptions and death threats to do the right thing, most did not.
Some, like The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, made it their mission to undo the civil rights movement. That paper, for instance, placed a photo of some litter found on a D.C. street the day after Martin Luther King's famous march on Washington, giving it the headline, "Washington Is Free From Trash." (It would be another two decades or so before The Clarion-Ledger would exorcise its racial demons.)
That's just one of many nauseating episodes described in The Race Beat in which many Southern media fought against justice instead of protecting it. And Roberts and Klibanoff do a tremendous job of telling the story of the storytellers, and bringing them to life, warts and all, across two pivotal decades, give or take.
If I have one criticism, it's that the last two chapters are a little rushed. The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marks the book's climax, and the subsequent tumult -- including race riots in the North and the assassination of Martin Luther King -- gets just two, relatively brief chapters. The book is about 450 pages if you don't count the extensive bibliography and acknowledgments. It wouldn't have hurt to give it another hundred pages.
But overall, The Race Beat is a remarkable achievement. It's an absolute must-read for every journalist and is highly-recommended for anyone else.
Rated by buyers -
This book taught me much about the Black (Negro) press in America, and how the rise of the Civil Rights movement paradoxically sent that journalistic milieu into permanent decline. Happily, the reason for this decline was due to the corresponding sucess in achieving electoral and judicial equality for people of color. This is also a book full of informative tidbits; did you know that the same James Kilpatrick you see on TV was a racist and opponent of Civil Rights legislation? He doesn't talk about that much, these days--and he's never apologized. This is a useful and well-written book; I recommend it!
Rated by buyers -
To me, this book was less a civil right's history, though that certainly serves as an excellent backdrop, but more of a detailed account showing the unsurpassed importance of free speach and a free press to the cause of liberty and democracy. It serves to illustrate the power of the truth, and although America's treatment as a whole of blacks has been shameful until just recently, it makes me proud to be an American where the entire social order can change without violent revolution.
Rated by buyers 
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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
-- Reviewed by Philip W. Henry
When the civil rights story began in the early 1960's, I was a freshman at a Northern College. So much was happening between 1963 and 1968 that it was possible to miss some of the real history unfolding outside "The Ivory Tower `while studying the past. Now, I'm trying to fill in some of the blanks in my education. "The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation" is a good place to begin. Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff were both intimately involved in covering the biggest stories of the South. Drawing on extensive interviews, and digging in previously unpublished documents and memoirs, they paint a fascinating portrait of the crisis of conscience and confidence that the civil rights story caused in the Southern Media Establishment.
The tensions developed in covering the race story were not just between White, Liberal, and often Jewish Northern News Organizations v. the Old South; but within the Southern Media as well. There were honest and decent Southern publishers and editors who decried the move toward Klan violence and barricaded school houses epitomized by Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus and George Wallace. Ironically, many of the top editors of the supposed Yankee Press (especially The New York Times) were Southerners themselves. (Turner Catledge, one of the T imes's top editors, was from Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were found murdered).
If anything propelled the Story of the South into the living rooms of the country it was TV News. The sight of Freedom Riders being beaten, firehosed and dragged away; and the four little girls in their church outfits killed in the cowardly KKK bombing of a Birmingham Church, inflamed the American conscience.
The Assassinations of Medgar Evers; the Birmingham Four; and the three young civil rights workers from the north and the refusal of local law enforcement to investigate the case added to the fray. The sheriff and his deputy were later indicted by a Federal Grand Jury in a case prosecuted by John Doar, the young Justice Department Lawyer who later gained fame in the Watergate Prosecution.
In one telling scene, Doar stands in front of a group of rebel yokels and confronts them. He could easily have been killed or lynched, but by the force of his conviction he prevailed. .
If there is some vindication out of all this, several cases believed to be so cold or so compromised that justice could never be served, have been solved. Medgar Evers's killing took thirty years to solve, but the failed fertilizer salesman Byron De La Beckwith, who was spared by a hung jury earlier, paid a price thirty years later: (One Mississippi paper, unable to bring itself to claim De La Beckwith as one of "Ole Miss's Own," said: " Californian held in Murders." (He had spent his very first five years in California)
"In 1994, thirty years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, Beckwith was again brought to trial based on new evidence concerning statements he made to others. During the trial, the body of Evers was exhumed from his grave for autopsy, and found to be in a surprisingly good state of preservation as a result of embalming. Beckwith was finally convicted of murder on February 5, 1994, after living as a free man for three decades after the killing. Beckwith appealed unsuccessfully, and died in prison in January 2001."
There are good guys and gremlins, of course. Robert Kennedy, never popular in the south, is portrayed as the loyal Attorney General to his brother, who never seemed to totally grasp the dimensions of the story. Justice Department Lawyer John Doar is a giant figure in the post-freedom riders killing trials. Moderate southern editors and publishers like Ralph McGill of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution and Hodding Carter of Greenville, Miss, where the three student volunteers were found murdered, kept their composure and focus despite financial and social pressure from conservatives. (Carter, in particular, began as a staunch segregationist but became more liberal).
"The Race Beat" is a valuable addition to the literature of Journalism and race relations in the United States.
Rated by buyers -
The Civil Rights Movement of the `50s and `60s was a significant and well-known period of American history. But have you ever thought about why it is so well known, or even why it had so much success?
The Race Beat is a story, not only of the well-known players of the Civil Rights Movement, but also the men who covered it in the media. These men poured their hearts and souls into covering the stories that would make the people of the United States stand up and take notice of the injustices being done in the name of "separate but equal," "justice," and "liberty." Many of these men had battled against Hitler over his racial elitism. Once they came home, they were quick to jump into the front lines of our own battle for racial equality before we descended into the depravity that Hitler is known for.
This is a fascinating insider's look at how the civil rights battle was brought to the forefront of the United States' attention. Blending well-known events with the stories of the men who were there writing about it, you get a whole new perspective of what these men were feeling and fighting for. Not just as outside observers, but compatriots.
This book is well written and well researched, but it is slow to start. I picked it up expecting the jump into the civil rights movement, but found myself in the `40s as they laid the groundwork for what the journalists were to become. It is also heavily journalist-centric. That is to say, there are references the non-journalists among us won't understand. But all in all, it is a great read.
Armchair Interviews says: If you are looking for a new perspective on the civil rights movement, this book is for you.
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