JACKSON - Some historians have written that we reporters who covered the civil rights struggle as it unfolded across the Southern landscape over three explosive decades were part of American journalism's finest hour.
Journalistic veterans of the civil rights "wars" waited anxiously for someone, hopefully from our ranks, to produce a highly readable account that captured in full dimension how our reportage etched the story of the civil rights struggle into the conscience of this nation.
The wait has been worth it. Now, after years in the making, two of the profession's ablest craftsmen, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, have produced "The Race Beat," a comprehensive, wonderfully anecdotal narrative account that does honor to us news people, both white and black, who reported, often at personal risk, the civil rights struggle.
In 460 pages, Roberts and Klibanoff have deftly woven from a massive number of personal interviews, oral histories, notes, documents and correspondence a definitive story of courageous journalism during this historic era that remarkably reads with the flow of a novel.
Roberts, a North Carolina native, is the old hand of the two "Race Beat" authors. Gene appeared on the scene to cover the civil rights story in the late 1960s as New York Times correspondent out of the Times' Atlanta bureau.
A short round-faced guy who spoke little as he doggedly pursued a story, Roberts was famous for suddenly becoming silent for several minutes in a conversation, and then picking up right at the point he stopped talking. Reporters feared riding in a car with him at the wheel because he would suddenly start concentrating out the side window rather than looking ahead.
After a stint covering the Vietnam War for The Times, the paper moved him up to become national editor where, some former staffers say, he revolutionized the Times' national coverage. The Philadelphia Inquirer hired him to become executive editor, a post he held for 18 years, during which The Inquirer racked up 17 Pulitzer prizes. After another brief stint at the New York Times, Roberts became journalism professor at the University of Maryland.
Hank Klibanoff, an Alabama native, is now managing editor for news on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I consider him "one of my boys," dating back to the middle 1970s when as a rookie reporter he took over the Capitol bureau in Jackson for the Biloxi Sun-Herald. For six years we worked side by side - or as friendly competitors - and it was obvious he was headed for a distinguished career in journalism.
After working under Roberts at The Inquirer in a wide range of positions, among them business editor and deputy managing editor, Klibanoff took over the Journal-Constitution post.
Klibanoff obviously tucked away in his notes virtually every morsel I told him about my civil rights coverage when - it seems now like eons ago - he interviewed me for the book.
Examples:
- That 300-pound Clarence Strider, the swaggering sheriff who was a central character for reporters covering the 1955 Emmett Till murder trial, had painted his name S-T-R-I-D-E-R, one letter per roof, on the seven tenant houses along the driveway leading to his plantation house.
- That I had sought solace in a pew of St. Peter Catholic Church before I could write my story about Jackson police bludgeoning a white Tougaloo professor who joined blacks in a 1963 voting rights protest, and officers jerked tiny American flags from black children lined up for the march.
"The Race Beat" goes on to relate how Strider segregated the 50 white reporters covering the Till trial from the handful of black journalists he finally allowed in the courtroom at the insistence of Circuit Judge Curtis Swango. Strider let white journalists sit in chairs inside the courtroom railing opposite the jury. Black reporters were put at a table outside the railing where Till's mother and Michigan Congressman Charles Diggs sat.
The appearance of a half-dozen black journalists at the Till trial marked the first known instance reporters from the Negro press were publicly evident in coverage of a major news event in Mississippi. I had gotten to know James Hicks of the Amsterdam News on several civil rights stories, but regrettably I had never met some of the other notable figures from the Negro press who had battled for years to tell the story of racial discrimination to a broader audience.
