The Race Beat

September 11, 2006
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.

February 25, 2008
This Pulitzer-winning chronicle of the role the news media played in shaping the civil rights movement makes its belated audio debut. Richard Allen undertakes the vocal depictions of the players from across the race-relations spectrum with tremendous skill. He manages to portray characters instead of caricatures as the sweeping real-life drama unfolds. Given the length of the recording and the density of the material, listeners should find it particularly helpful that Allen repeats the last few sentences of the previous disc at the start of each new CD. The solid production follows the authors' straight-ahead narrative approach. Journalism students and history buffs with at least some grounding in both the conventions of the news business or the civil rights era are the natural core audience. Others may wish to familiarize themselves with more general resources before tackling such an ambitious offering. A Vintage paperback (Reviews, Nov. 9, 2006).