MAINSTREAM JOURNALISM AND THE BLACK STRUGGLE FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES

In their Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Race Beat, Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff deliver a stirring account of how White, mainstream journalists focused public attention on the Black struggle for civil rights in the South in the 1950s and 1960s. But that triumphal storyline is a distinct anomaly in the history of the press and the long Black quest for equality in the United States. From the early republic through the present, White journalists in the North and West have often led the fight to limit Black gains. Over the past two decades, historians have deepened our understanding of the civil rights campaign by highlighting the work of Black activists and journalists who paved the way for the mass movement of the 1960s. It is now time for journalism historians to excavate the long and disreputable struggle by the mainstream White press to prevent the rise of just such a movement.