A Review of
Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation (Roberts and Klibanoff 2007)
By Ashley Justinic
“Negro Jailed Here for ‘Overlooking’ Bus Segregation.” That is the headline that ran in The Montgomery Advertiser when Rosa Parks historically refused to move to the colored section of a city bus. The nonchalance of the wording perfectly captures how unsuspecting the press was of the force of change that was about to sweep the United States in the mid-1950s.
Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff covers all the landmarks of the Civil Rights movement but fills in the gaps like no other book has before. Immaculately researched, the book is academic yet has a sly sense of story. Each paragraph has its own payoff, whether it be a neatly packaged bit of insight or description of a small-town courthouse. This makes the informative book truly engaging.
What probably earned Race Beat the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in History though, is its contribution toward understanding the role the press played in the Civil Rights movement. We see how at first, newsrooms were indifferent to stories of racism in the South. Northern newspapers especially found the events to be regional and non-newsworthy. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, for instance, “neither [The New York Times nor The Washington Post] would send its own staff until twelve weeks after the boycott began” (Roberts and Klibanoff, 2007, 128).
In time, this stance changed as the press gave credence to events which couldn’t be ignored any longer. The nation hungered for accurate coverage of what were then known as “race stories.” After Emmett Till’s murder and the confrontation at Little Rock High School, quality coverage was in demand: “In a gothic region where pervasive inhumanity had become a pervasive condition and custom, the reporters and photographers were becoming witnesses, transmitters, and agents of change” (Roberts and Klibanoff, 2007, 196).
Considering the topic, it’s fitting that both authors have worked at southern newspapers. Roberts worked for various North Carolina newspapers in his early career. Amazingly, Roberts was a reporter who covered many of the events in the book. In an interview, he recalls seeing Martin Luther King, Jr speak for the first. Time. “I came away with the feeling...that we weren’t just going to see token change, that we were going to see massive change” (Investigating Power, n.d.).
Klibanoff was profoundly affected by writing the book. He left the Atlanta Journal-Constitution until 2008, stating in an office memo “I feel I have another big chapter to write, and I don't want to wait til it's too late” (Atlanta Business Review 2008). He went to Emory, where he leads The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Case Project which since 2011 has sought to “examine Georgia history through the prism of unsolved or unpunished racially-motivated murders [from] the modern civil rights era” (The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Case Project, n. d.).
The authors’ Southern connections did not escape The New York Times reviewer and historian Raymond Arsenault, who noted the benefit of them having worked on both sides of the Mason- Dixon Line. He claims this produces “a richly textured and balanced narrative that reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the news media, as well as the personal and contingent factors…” (Arsenault 2007). He lauds the book for a being a new contribution to the understanding of civil rights and reporting.
Race Beat is a must read for any journalist or lover of history. It’s nothing you have read before, because this story has not been told before. Just as the press finally did its job in holding up a mirror to the ugliness of racism and segregation, so too does this book hold up a mirror to the harm unequal reporting can do to a society.
References, Chicago Style
Altanta Business Chronicle. 2008. “AJC Managing Editor Hank Klibanoff steps down.” Last Modified June 24, 2008.
https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2008/06/23/daily48.html?page=all.
Arsenault, Raymond. 2007. “The News from Little Rock.” Review of Race Beat, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. The New York Times, January 21, 2007.
Investigating Power. n. d. “Covering King.” Accessed November 4, 2018.
https://investigatingpower.org/gene-roberts/.
Roberts, Gene and Hank Klibanoff. 2007. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York: Knopf.
The Georgia Civil Rights Cold Case Project. n. d. “About.” Accessed November 2, 2018.
https://coldcases.emory.edu/about/.
