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Newspapers constructed their own realities during the Civil Rights Movement, writes Steve Hallock
Newspapers constructed their own realities during the Civil Rights Movement, writes Steve Hallock of Point Park University.
Nostalgia of the 1960s — the Beatles, Stones, Joni and Dylan, free love, tooling the mountain highways in muraled VW vans, Jimi and Janis, body paint, mind-altering drugs — has become a popular and commercial pastime: Ah, what a strange trip it’s been, we of that era like to muse. And so much fun.
But nostalgia has this way of coloring the past through rosetinted granny spectacles, especially considering those who experienced the most brutal, ugly part of that era — the lynchings, the beatings, the snarling dogs, the high-pressure fire hoses, the police clubs, the unfulfilled promises of justice, the fear and courage of living a black life. The ‘60s were ugly times for those who marched in 100-degree humidity down asphalt highways under a glaring sun toward an elusive goal, equality, that remained always just beyond the horizon.
My research for my new book — “A History of the Civil Rights Movement Through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Volume I” — explores this movement through major newspaper coverage of some significant events in this crusade for justice and equality. I spent three years prowling Southern libraries to peruse newspaper microfilm, studying, analyzing and writing about the reporting and editorializing of four Northern mainstream newspapers, five in the South and three in the West. It was fascinating to see how the different newspapers reported and commented editorially on the same events and people, how the dissimilar cultures of the North and South produced remarkably diverse interpretations — or, in the language of communication theorists, how they constructed reality to suit a political or ideological stance.
It is helpful to remember that newspapers were the dominant source of information for Americans then; even the reportage of the nascent television industry took its cues from the major newspapers. In the South, particularly, these newspapers usually had no competing publications to offset or complement their coverage. So what they reported represented, for their readers, reality and truth. The findings of these analyses, though not necessarily surprising, are striking examples of how language and story treatment can offer vastly different narratives.
For example, in the 1957 Little Rock crisis over attempts to integrate a high school, while the Northern press urged compliance with the 1954 Supreme Court ban on segregation of public schools, The Birmingham News in an editorial called attempts by a local African-American who had been beaten and hospitalized in an effort to enroll his daughter in an all-white school “deplorable.” The newspaper argued that “it was most unwise to take this action in advance of orderly handling of the matter” — orderly being, as the editorial concluded, “a way recognizing adequate authority for the states.”
When Gov. Orval Faubus dispatched troops in defiance of a federal court order that the nine African-American students be enrolled, the Southern press, in straight-news reports and on the editorial pages, supported Faubus’ argument that he had sent troops to the high school not to block the African-American students from entering, but, in the argument of The Richmond News Leader, “to preserve public peace.”
The Detroit Free Press, though, saw it differently: “If it wasn’t for the ridiculousness of the set of circumstances that Gov. Faubus has set in motion, we might conclude that he is a badly frightened man … so frightened that he felt it necessary to call out the National Guard, superseding the Little Rock police, to prevent nine Negro kids from entering a high school under a policy of integration approved by the school board and, assumedly, by a majority of Little Rock’s citizens.”
When President Eisenhower was considering using federal troops to enforce desegregation in Little Rock, The Birmingham News urged violent opposition. “Great numbers of Southerners doubtless have come to believe that strong public resistance by demonstration, perhaps even to the point of resort to force in some cases, offers the only alternative to the onward march of integration,” argued the newspaper in an editorial. “Good citizens certainly do not want violence, but many do not see how their deep convictions can be served, their opposition to integration made effective, merely by verbal protest and legal maneuver.”
The News Leader in Richmond urged resistance in language reminiscent of pre-Civil War states’-rightist and nullification proponent John C. Calhoun: “Let us talk of defiance! And if there is to be defiance let it come now. Let it come bravely. Let it come with a sureness of conviction that the South is right and our oppressors are wrong. We do not conceive it ‘defiance’ to hold to what is lawfully ours. We count it, rather, loyalty, fealty, obedience to law that was law before Earl Warren was born. On that certainty, whatever the consequences may be, let us take our stand. And pray God, let us never surrender.”
Newspapers in North and South framed the civil rights demonstrations as a law-and-order issue, citing constitutional authority. But they were calling on different sections of the Constitution in making their arguments — the pre-Civil War 10th Amendment, setting forth the rights of states, for the Southern press, and the 14th, the post-Civil War amendment guaranteeing equal rights to all citizens, for the Northern press.
When African-Americans staged peaceful marches, The New York Times editorialized that “this struggle is being waged by a responsible Negro leadership on the principle of non-violence, through ‘freedom marches,’ boycotts, ‘sit-ins’ and other protest demonstrations. It has erupted in violence only where local authorities defied both moral and Federal law to ‘keep the Negro in his place.’ Therein lies the significance of the ‘battle of Birmingham.’”
The News Leader, though, following the terrorist bombing of the hotel that housed the leaders of the Birmingham crusade, personified the issue — a common tactic of the Southern press — by casting Martin Luther King, Jr., and a local reverend, rather than the bombers, as the villains responsible for the violence in that city, asserting in language almost justifying the bombing that if they “did not know what they were doing when they began agitation in that sorrowful city, they know now. Human beings may be manipulated by organizers; but passions are greater than even Dr. King.”
King was a favorite target of the Southern press, which labeled him as a terrorist and a communist dupe, while the Northern press hailed him as a martyr in the Gandhian tradition of civil disobedience. But King was not the only African-American martyr of the crusade. Following the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi, The Pittsburgh Press argued that Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett “bears heavy responsibility for this crime. When the chief executives of states, such as Mr. Barnett and Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, openly defy the law and the courts, what should they expect of fanatics whose passions they have aroused and encouraged?”
The Southern press, though, bemoaned the publicity boost that the murder of Evers would lend to the movement: “The assassination of Medgar Evers will not deter this Negro agitation for an instant; it will serve merely to give the movement new speed and fervor,” argued The News Leader. “In this slaying of Medgar Evers the assassin created the NAACP’s first true martyr. The act should be worth a million dollars to them. Out of Evers’ death, the NAACP, which had been faltering as an organization, will gain a whole new lease on life.”
The battles of the headlines over these stories produced strikingly different interpretations of events, Southern headlines depicting the freedom-riders, for example, as agitators and terrorist armies of invaders, the Northern press portraying them as peaceful freedom-seekers, crusaders and victims of violence. The biggest civil rights event of the era, the 1963 March on Washington, drew predictably differing arguments on the Northern and Southern editorial pages, but it would be hard to outdo The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., whose headline on top of the story about the cleanup in Washington after the marchers had gone home read: “WASHINGTON IS CLEAN AGAIN WITH NEGRO TRASH REMOVED.”
Many of the civil rights events evoked comparisons to the Civil War. In stark contrast to Northern newspapers’ editorial urgings in 1962 that James Meredith be allowed to enroll at the University of Mississippi, an editorial in The News Courier of Charleston called, as had The Birmingham News at Little Rock, for armed uprising: “The only antidote for tyranny is revolution. This country was founded in revolution by men who believed that liberty from time to time had to be nourished with the blood of patriots.”
As I write in the conclusion of my book, in an argument that remains relevant in today’s political and media landscape, how we use language is important. “Is it any wonder, then, that residents of these Southern communities, receptors of a reality manufactured to represent a world and culture under attack from invading, communist-inspired agitators intent on disrupting a way of living and believing — is it any wonder that many of them responded violently to what they perceived to be an armed incursion, an attack on them and their well-being — an attack that necessitated a violent response, as urged by some editorials calling for insurrection? The Southern press, and some organs in other regions of the nation, share responsibility for the violence and deaths because of their distortion of truth and fact.”
As we are seeing again, more than a half century later, words do matter.
Steve Hallock is director of the graduate program for the School of Communication at Point Park University. He is the author of the recently released book, “A History of the Civil Rights Movement Through Newspaper Coverage: The Race Agenda, Volume I,” published by Peter Lang.