OXFORD — John N. Herbers was described by his daughter last week as “the Forrest Gump of journalism” because he was on the scene of so many momentous events the last half of the 20th century.
Among the stories Herbers covered as a reporter, first for two now-defunct Mississippi newspapers and then for United Press International and The New York Times, were:
The execution of Willie McGee, a black man who had been convicted of raping a white woman in 1951; the 1955 trial of Emmett Till’s killers; numerous major civil rights stories of the 1960s, including the death of four black girls in a Birmingham, Alabama, bombing; the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County; marches and riots in Selma, Alabama, and St. Augustine, Florida.
Herbers also was dispatched by the Times to cover John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination in Dallas and was covering Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign when Kennedy was mortally wounded by an assassin in Los Angeles. In the next decade, he wrote the front-page story in the Times, topped by a giant headline: “Nixon Resigns.”
Anne Farris Rosen, Herbers’ daughter, was at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics at Ole Miss to discuss the book, “Deep South Dispatch, Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist.”
Rosen, an award- winning journalist herself, is an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism. She assisted her father in writing the book, published this year by the University Press of Mississippi.
Herbers, who died last year at age 93, began his reporting career in 1949 at the Morning Star in Greenwood, a newspaper that no longer exists.
A native of Memphis, he graduated from high school in Brownsville, Tennessee, in 1941, served as a combat infantryman in the Pacific during World War II, and, after the war, was educated at Emory University, graduating in 1949 before landing the job in Greenwood.
Two years later he moved on to the Jackson Daily News. In 1952, he went to work for the United Press, later to become United Press International, and by 1953 was bureau manager in Jackson.
It was in Jackson, heading the wire service bureau, that Herbers began covering early civil rights activists such as Medgar Evers, filing stories that previously had gone unreported for the most part.
Herbers joined the staff of The New York Times in 1963 as a civil rights correspondent in Atlanta, covering stories in Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.
From 1966 to 1968, he was stationed in Washington, covering Congress as well as presidential campaigns. In 1969, he became the Times’ urban affairs national correspondent and reported on city riots, anti-Vietnam demonstrations and college campus upheavals. During the administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, Herbers was a White House correspondent for the Times. Before he retired, he had worked as the Times’ assistant national editor, deputy Washington bureau chief and national correspondent.
I was acquainted with Herbers when, just out of college, I worked for the Jackson State-Times, and Herbers’ United Press office was in our building.
In reading his book and some of his articles, I was reminded of what a good reporter he was and how he differed from today’s media stars and even some of his own day.
His reports were completely objective without interjections of his own opinion.
His memoir shows that his sympathies, as a native Southern white who grew up taking segregation for granted, shifted in favor of the civil rights movement the more he covered it. But his reporting remained objective.
He talked and dressed like the average Southerner when he was covering civil rights, and he endeavored only to report the story, not become a part of it.
But his articles on civil rights activities, especially the early ones when he was with UPI in Jackson, were anathema to most whites, including executives at many of the broadcast stations and newspapers served by UPI.
The prevailing opinion of pro-segregation Southern whites at the time was that the more news coverage civil rights workers received, the more successful they would be in challenging “our way of life.”
They were correct in one respect. News coverage of the reaction to the civil rights movement — including murders, bombings of churches and homes, along with other injustices to African-Americans, such as denial of voting rights and equal access to public accommodations — ultimately led to the success of the movement.
• Charles M. Dunagin is the retired editor and publisher of the Enterprise-Journal in McComb. He lives in Oxford.
