The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

by Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff

4.34 · rating details · 214 ratings · 45 reviews

This is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize...moreThis is the story of how America awakened to its race problem, of how a nation that longed for unity after World War II came instead to see, hear, and learn about the shocking indignities and injustices of racial segregation in the South—and the brutality used to enforce it.

It is the story of how the nation’s press, after decades of ignoring the problem, came to recognize the importance of the civil rights struggle and turn it into the most significant domestic news event of the twentieth century.

Drawing on private correspondence, notes from secret meetings, unpublished articles, and interviews, veteran journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff go behind the headlines and datelines to show how a dedicated cadre of newsmen—first black reporters, then liberal southern editors, then reporters and photographers from the national press and the broadcast media—revealed to a nation its most shameful shortcomings and propelled its citizens to act.

We watch the black press move bravely into the front row of the confrontation, only to be attacked and kept away from the action. Following the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision striking down school segregation and the South’s mobilization against it, we see a growing number of white reporters venture South to cover the Emmett Till murder trial, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the integration of the University of Alabama.

We witness some southern editors joining the call for massive resistance and working with segregationist organizations to thwart compliance. But we also see a handful of other southern editors write forcefully and daringly for obedience to federal mandates, signaling to the nation that moderate forces were prepared to push the region into the mainstream.

The pace quickens in Little Rock, where reporters test the boundaries of journalistic integrity, then gain momentum as they cover shuttered schools in Virginia, sit-ins in North Carolina, mob-led riots in Mississippi, Freedom Ride buses being set afire, fire hoses and dogs in Birmingham, and long, tense marches through the rural South.

For many journalists, the conditions they found, the fear they felt, and the violence they saw were transforming. Their growing disgust matched the mounting countrywide outrage as The New York Times, Newsweek, NBC News, and other major news organizations, many of them headed by southerners, turned a regional story into a national drama.

Meticulously researched and vividly rendered, The Race Beat is an unprecedented account of one of the most volatile periods in our nation’s history, as told by those who covered it.(less)

Hardcover, 528 pages

Published October 31st 2006 by Knopf

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Sep 01, 2010

Stephanie Patterson rated it

In The Race Beat, the authors give us a history of how the press covered The Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. Television had a tremendous impact making it possible for just about everyone to see what was actually happening in Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma.

The book starts with the publication of Gunnar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma." Myrdal saw the importance of the press in making any change in race relations possible Before anyone outside the American...moreIn The Race Beat, the authors give us a history of how the press covered The Civil Rights Movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. Television had a tremendous impact making it possible for just about everyone to see what was actually happening in Little Rock, Birmingham and Selma.

The book starts with the publication of Gunnar Myrdal's "An American Dilemma." Myrdal saw the importance of the press in making any change in race relations possible Before anyone outside the American South could protest segregation they needed to understand that it existed and the impact that it had on black people The book essentially concludes with the passing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. It talks about the protests and riots of the late 1960s when blacks wanted not just equality but power, but this only accounts for a few pages.

We also get to see how often the press gets things wrong--most notably when John N. Popham, the New York Times correspondent in the South, assures his bosses that Southerners are distraught about the murder of Emmett Till and that race relations will work themselves out.

After the attempt to desegregate the schools in Little Rock, Mr Popham is proven wrong and almost every news organization has to cover demonstrations and protests differently Television, which allows everyone to see what's happening, comes into its own. One of the most arresting scenes in the book occurs when a young John Chancellor invites angry whites who are intimidating him to do whatever they like but also to keep in mind that what happens will be picked up by his microphone and go everywhere.

Admittedly, one of the reasons I liked this book so much is that I remember the scenes it describes: Bull Connor using dogs and high power water hoses to keep protesters at bay, the thousands of people at the March on Washington and Lyndon Johnson ending his speech urging the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with "We shall overcome."

It also makes one wistful for a time when reporters seemed better informed and more concerned with ideas than personalities(less)

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Mar 16, 2010

Patrick Sprunger rated it

Shelves: favorites, american-history

The subtitle of The Race Beat reads: "The press, the civil rights struggle, and the awakening of a nation."

The genius of Jim Crow (and key to its longevity) was its ability to operate undetected. Many of the defenders of the fortress segregation of the South lent support without ever knowing the true shape of the institution. Most Southerners were like people with their noses pushed up to the edge of an iceberg. From their vantage point, they had no way of knowing the hu...moreThe subtitle of The Race Beat reads: "The press, the civil rights struggle, and the awakening of a nation."

The genius of Jim Crow (and key to its longevity) was its ability to operate undetected. Many of the defenders of the fortress segregation of the South lent support without ever knowing the true shape of the institution. Most Southerners were like people with their noses pushed up to the edge of an iceberg. From their vantage point, they had no way of knowing the hulk's true size and shape. This does not absolve them from all complicity, but it does explain how good people can balance a great evil in their collective heart. In short, a great many people didn't actually see how bad segregation was.

Likewise with people living outside the South.

One of the first tactics of the civil rights movement was to gain a high visibility in the media. Unfortunately, fortress segregation was not going to be changed from within. The stormtroopers of segregation lacked the foot soldiers' ambivalence and took a more aggressive role in advancing their cause of white supremacy. Without publicity, all those clashes in the cities of the former Confederacy would have resulted in nothing more than bloodshed and broken bones. It was important that the scenes be published to audiences elsewhere in the country. Only then, only through top-down legislation and federal protection would Jim Crow be spun out.

Whether the scenes portrayed were the contents of condiment bottles being emptied onto the heads of students waiting for service at a lunch counter, children marching past pickets to attend school in Little Rock, churchgoers pinned to the wall by high pressure fire hoses in Birmingham, or the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, the documentary evidence of segregation galvanized the decency of the country.

To do so placed organizers like the NAACP and SCLC in harm's way. Fortunately, there was another important corps of news men and women who braved physical violence to report a story of great moral and national importance. This, more than the actual narrative, is the point of the authors' work in The Race Beat.

In many ways, the generations to come of age after 1965 are as ambivalent and misunderstanding about fortress segregation as those Southerners who lived in its huge lee. Though I have since studied the civil rights era and Southern politics, I grew up one of those people. I found The Race Beat a startling lens back to a generation we are in danger of forgetting.(less)

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Jul 14, 2009

Kate rated it

Recommended to Kate by: Paul bought this for me at the Newseum-- thanks!

This book was very thorough and exhaustive in tackling its subject.

It examined the role of the larger black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, and the Pittsburgh Courier, and the black press in general, as well as a focusing on a number of more moderate to liberal mainstream newspapers in Little Rock, Atlanta, and elsewhere. (It also highlighted the most pro-segregation papers, like the Richmond News-Leader and both Jackson, Mississippi, papers.) It al...moreThis book was very thorough and exhaustive in tackling its subject.

It examined the role of the larger black newspapers, such as the Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American, and the Pittsburgh Courier, and the black press in general, as well as a focusing on a number of more moderate to liberal mainstream newspapers in Little Rock, Atlanta, and elsewhere. (It also highlighted the most pro-segregation papers, like the Richmond News-Leader and both Jackson, Mississippi, papers.) It also very briefly touched on the role communist and socialist papers played in covering the story.

The Race Beat examined the civil rights struggle as it grew slowly after World War II, including the legal fight for school integration, through the trial of Emmett Till's killers, the battle to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, lunch-counter sit-ins, the struggle of blacks registering to vote, James Meredith's enrollment in Ole Miss, the freedom rides, and concludes with the marches at Selma, Alabama.

The authors were somewhat critical in pointing out some of the press' errors, for instance:

"Most newspapers and the emerging journalism on television showed their propensity to cover the hot and simple story, not the complex one; they were drawn to the raging fire, not the slow burn..." so most media missed the first weeks of the Montgomery Bus Boycott because reporters were in Tuscaloosa following the story of a young black woman attempting to enroll in the University of Alabama. (She was deterred after only a few days of classes by violent mobs of white protesters.)

The book also discussed the role of television and the importance of the images it carried into people's homes, the obstacles both black and white reporters and photographers faced in doing their jobs - which frequently included the threat of extreme physical danger and violence, why some chose to intervene in stories they were covering, how both the civil rights activists and law enforcement came to work with and use the media to shape their message, and more.

I definitely recommend this as an interesting read.(less)

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May 19, 2009

Ash rated it

Recommends it for: students, Southerners, reporters, media professionals

Shelves: history, what-i-study

The first 100 pages or so of this book are s-l-o-w. In part because the Southern press in the 1940s-1960s was a very large group with several key players (an era before media consolidation) the authors have to spend a lot of time setting up the people who will make the next 300 pages fascinating reading. If you can slog through all the names and "who ate lunch with whom and when" stuff you'll be in for a fascinating explanation of how the press augmented the Civil Right's Movement an...more

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Jul 31, 2010

Andypants rated it

Shelves: history, journalism

This book should win the pulitzer prize for "most mention of the pulitzer prize". In between the continual shoutouts and overexposed back-of-house reporting details, there is hidden a really quite good accounting of newspaper, tv and magazine coverage of the civil rights movement. I share with the authors the opinion that there would have been far more and worse violence in this era had the reporters not been covering it as well as they did. Those reporters and editors were heroes....more

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Dec 31, 2011

Open Door Baltimore added it

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this 2006 book is a modern history classic. Set in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, the book focuses on the struggles and courage of American journalists, many of them Southern and many of them white, as they championed the cause of expanded civil rights for all Americans. With careers on the line and death threats in the air, these journalists made the correct moral decision to awaken the nation on the pages of their newspapers and magazines. The seve...more

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Jul 08, 2010

Lauren rated it

Two things that always make me inclined to like a book even more than I normally would: (1) When it lives up to a friend’s recommendation, and (2) When it lives up to the awards it has received. This book is a well-deserved winner of the Pulitzer Prize, but it is by no means an easy read, and I never would have found it if not for a friend’s recommendation. I began this book in December 2009 and had to return it to the library when I was about a quarter of the way through it. I finally got aroun...more

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Jun 18, 2010

Matt rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: pulitzer-prize-winners, history, audiobooks, african-american-history

It begins talking about the work of a Sweedish researcher in the '40s who wrote that the condition of black Americans in the South in the Jim Crow era would never improve without massive publicity. People outside the South, while morally sympathetic, would never rally around and demand social change unless the immoral, uncivil, and illegal conditions blacks suffered were portrayed graphically, bluntly, and provocatively. And that's how the author portrays how the press corps - starting with news...more

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May 11, 2008

Jesse rated it

An impressive achievement. Covering how the media covered the civil rights movement actually has a whole lot to tell us, not least in revealing how concerted the invisibility was at the most basic level: there were no national media with bureaus in the South until 1947, when the NYT stationed someone there, and not a second one until the LA Times in 1965. So for years the whole movement was left to the vagaries of whatever liberal-minded editors might wish to actually talk about what was going o...moreAn impressive achievement. Covering how the media covered the civil rights movement actually has a whole lot to tell us, not least in revealing how concerted the invisibility was at the most basic level: there were no national media with bureaus in the South until 1947, when the NYT stationed someone there, and not a second one until the LA Times in 1965. So for years the whole movement was left to the vagaries of whatever liberal-minded editors might wish to actually talk about what was going on in their worlds, the northern black press (which, of course, got elbowed out of the way once bigger, richer white media deigned to get interested), and mostly just plain ignorance of the whole thing. Not that anyone else had much to be proud of: Neil Henry's recent American Carnival talks about how the LA Times had not a single black reporter when the Watts riot hit and so had to send someone from the copy room (most of the reporters didn't even know where Watts was), cites some horrifying editorials in papers in Washington and Chicago that helped stoke race riots in 1919, and also mentions studies showing how often black criminality was the only thing covered in the media. The argument here, which R & K save for about page 405 of 407, is that a few liberal Southern editors essentially filled the void left by the failure of Southern politicians--to present and deal with the world as it was, to offer a reasonably respectable portrait of reality, to allow a forum for solutions reached by some sort of community consensus. And it's pretty compelling anecdotally, maybe the best being when John Chancellor is in the Mississippi delta right after the Emmett Till case and is asking a local black woman what she thinks. A herd of rednecks thunders toward him, and all he can think of to do is hold up his tape recorder and tell them they can do what they want, but the whole world will know. That distracts them enough to give him time to hop in a car and flee. Guess it was too new a technology for someone to realize that they could just smash it.

That book also illuminated Dan Jenkins' Saturday's America, which is an out-of-print compendium of 60s football pieces, mostly I think from Sports Illustrated. A few Northern ones, but mostly good ol' boys from Texas (the wave of Texas writers who went North in the 70s, Willie Morris observes in his memoir of editing Harper's, were so exotic and frontiersmanish as to seem Australian) and environs doing their thang, along with a bunch of old school, Southern-sheriff coaches. They come across as the kind of authoritarian, pro-war (though the only mention of Vietnam in the entire book is Bear Bryant noting that many of his players will probably end up there), pro-American, anti-long-hair types whose opinions are totally predictable before they open their mouths. The only black player who gets any time is OJ Simpson, who's played off against the white UCLA QB right before a big game in which he runs for like 200 yards. So it's an unwitting illustration of the authors' point about the invisibility of certain issues at this time. Those issues are more on view in Jenkins' Semi-Tough, #7 on Sports Illustrated's top 100 sports books, which talks more about race and may well be the filthiest book I've ever read. Honestly--it's like Terry Southern's Blue Movie or Candy, but with occasional bits of football to break up the sex. But mostly a lot of really filthy sex. And farting. Which was clearly very popular with the 1973 Steelers with whom Roy Blount (sort of immortalized as the singer Elroy Blunt in Semi-Tough) lived with for a year, in the excellent and vivid About Three Bricks Shy of a Load--they could discuss and quote one character's productions with affection and respect--but which was also not covered that much in the media. For which we can probably all be thankful.
(less)

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Jan 17, 2008

Michael rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This book has two important utilities. The first and more shocking is a as a new look at the brutal violence and racism of the deep South in the United States in the mid-century. Though much of this might be just a rehash for some readers with a firm knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, many of the anecdotes and events were new to me. The details of the Emmett Till trial were never clear to me before this. The authors render the court room so clearly, through first hand accounts from acti...moreThis book has two important utilities. The first and more shocking is a as a new look at the brutal violence and racism of the deep South in the United States in the mid-century. Though much of this might be just a rehash for some readers with a firm knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement, many of the anecdotes and events were new to me. The details of the Emmett Till trial were never clear to me before this. The authors render the court room so clearly, through first hand accounts from activists and reporters, that I felt I was reading a long lost Harper Lee story.

School desegregation plays a large part in this narrative. Before Little Rock, there were intensely violent standoffs on the campuses of Southern Universities. Autherine Lucy stands out as a brave woman, far ahead of her time, pushing herself and her country. Many of the governors in the South come off as caricatures of intolerance and brashness. Faubus sounds like a comic character out of Voltaire.

All the sheriff's deputies with their 2nd grade education, driving the black journalists out to the state line, telling them they got five minutes to cross that border. They all crop up, time and time again in the two decades of the major events of the Civil Rights Movement. Whether they're beating down black students, or knocking out white journalists, a vast network of people in Alabama and Mississippi showed themselves to be ignorant and intolerant on a personal and institutional scale that still troubles us today.

The other strain, the focus of the book really, is the story of the journalists, North and South, black and white, who followed the Civil Rights Movement. Klibanoff and Roberts set this amazing story as a narrative that starts with a Swedish scholar, Gunnar Myrdal, who lived in the South for years and chronicled the conditions of its black citizens. Myrdal knew that if the treatment of the black by Southern whites ever got the "publicity" - his word - it needed that the mass of Americans, those Americans who in the 30s and 40s had no idea of the extreme injustice of the South, would be forced out of their complacency, their ambivalence. Myrdal was right, but it would take far too long for that publicity to reach the critical mass necessary to motivate a substantial number of Americans.

Harry Ashmore and Ralph McGill, two progressive Southern editors stand out as exemplars of whites who stood for justice, not only in their editorials, but in their daily lives. John Popham, a dandy Southerner who refused to fly and thus drove thousands of miles all around the South to get his stories, pushed for a mild and optimistic treatment of Southern whites in the pages of The New York Times. Claude Sitton, Popham's replacement, was an amazing reporter, always on the scene, a Southerner with a conscience, reporting what mattered.

L. Alex Wilson's story is one of the noblest and heartbreaking in the book. A black reporter, Wilson suffered not only ridicule in the South, but was severely beaten in Little Rock by angry white thugs wielding bricks. Pictures of Wilson being kicked in the chest as a crowd of angry whites look on is featured in the center of the book. The photographs are startling. Wilson looks on, his face showing neither scorn nor fear. Those whites were pissed, because they felt inferior. I believe it.

This book is essential for any student of American media or the Civil Rights Movement - shocking, intense historical narrative of an important turning point in American history.(less)

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Nov 06, 2007

Alice rated it

Shelves: read-in-2007

The Race Beat tells the story of the press, its coverage of the civil rights movement, and its importance in effecting change by bringing to the nation's attention the wrongs of segregation. The argument was compelling, exciting, not too I'm-banging-you-over-the-head, and ... it made an important point about the importance of the press.

The writing was easy to read, elegant, but nothing extraordinary. It was the content that hooked me. The stories within the larger story were fa...moreThe Race Beat tells the story of the press, its coverage of the civil rights movement, and its importance in effecting change by bringing to the nation's attention the wrongs of segregation. The argument was compelling, exciting, not too I'm-banging-you-over-the-head, and ... it made an important point about the importance of the press.

The writing was easy to read, elegant, but nothing extraordinary. It was the content that hooked me. The stories within the larger story were fascinating.

Just a few highlights:
* the Emmett Till trial
* the [attempted] enrollments of Autherine Lucy and J. Meredith
* coverage of the Little Rock Nine
* the role of the press in protecting riders in the Freedom Rides
* the Alabama libel suit against Salisbury and the New York Times (which threatened freedom of the press)
* reporter Chancellor fending off a bunch of thugs with the threat that the whole nation would know about it
* coverage of the Selma to Montgomery march

Really, I could go on. The book is chock full of stories of amazing courage - of people standing up to mobs, and reporters who broadcast their stories to the world.

For me, the only drawback of the book was that the authors named a LOT of names and a LOT of newspapers. In spite of their best efforts to provide interesting personal details about each editor/reporter/photographer named, and backstory on each paper or magazine, I couldn't for the life of me remember who Emory Jackson, or Virginius Dabney, or Lenoir Chambers was. And what's the difference between the Clarion-Ledger and the Atlanta Constitution again, and what's their position on the race issue...?

(A few colorful characters did emerge from the rest of the pack, though, including interposition-theorist Kilpatrick, segregationist Waring, NYT reporter Sitton, hot-headed Bull Connor, and stubborn politician George Wallace. Look for them especially.)

All in all, a worthy and important read about a fascinating time period in American history.(less)

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Jun 20, 2007

Skip rated it

Recommends it for: All Southerns and especially journalists

This book could be thought of as one of the definitive accounts of the Civil Rights movement in the South.
It exposes the insolence, cruelty and insular nature of this part of the country up until the mid-60s. Some would argue little has changed. Maybe so. But my faith in humanity says much has changed, and part of what moved this region from lynchings to some sense of Lincoln, was opening the place up and telling the stories. And it was reporters – black and white – who did it, and often ...more

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Feb 16, 2009

Jonah rated it

This was an incredible book. It won the Pulitzer Prize for History Book a few years back and it's especially timely as I was reading it pre-Obama and post Obama's election. It's a history of the Civil Rights movement in the South. Not only was it a more detailed review of all the riots and demonstrations that I had learned, it places the history in an interesting context by telling the stories of the reporters sent to cover the struggle and the difficulties these reporters (mostly White) had ...more

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Apr 10, 2011

David rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: read-history

If you have to read this for a class or otherwise study this book, don't try to beat the system by listening to the audiobook instead, because bewilderingly long lists of people and newspapers go whizzing by fairly frequently. They're hard to keep track of.

But for personal edification while driving, cooking, or exercising, this audiobook is first-rate. However, vivid descriptions of beatings and other assorted violent mayhem are wince-inducing, which might draw odd looks from the pe...more

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Oct 01, 2007

Phayvanh rated it

Recommends it for: journalists and anyone else interested in the struggle

Shelves: reviews, 2007, reportage

This is such a wonderful and engaging account of the press that helped me to understand the dynamics of media, policy, and public opinion in a way I hadn't thought of it before. It's a chronological account of press coverage, taking into account the movers and shakers in the media world and Southern politics. Gives a lot of attention to the smaller African-American papers.

I encountered this books while working at the bookstore. A local newspaper editor special ordered a copy and I...more

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Mar 03, 2009

Cecile rated it

Shelves: academic

Won the Pulitzer, so it must be good. It's a bit hard to get into if you are not a whiz when it comes to remembering a long string of people and place names. I probably gave this a lower rating than I should have because I have some issues with Klibanoff's stance on photojournalistic ethics. He's a nice guy, though, so maybe I'm just being contentious...

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Jul 29, 2011

Jim Talbott rated it

· review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

A very engaging look at the role of the press in the civil rights struggle... Additionally, watching the enormous variance in the interplay between activists, politicians, police, and the press from one locale to another gives you tremendous insight into the power of civil society institutions to moderate or inflame the worst tendencies in a population.

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Jul 24, 2009

matthew rated it

I have always been fascinated by the civils rights movement, and this was a nice addition to it. The book focuses on the importance of journalists and their shifting views in the movement. A pulitzer prize winner in the history category, I think it is worth the read, although some parts were a little slow.

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Apr 23, 2009

Stew rated it

I had always wanted to read a history book about the Civil Rights era. As a journalist, this angle on the story appealed to me. This is a thoroughly researched book that gives both sides of the story. From the dedicated black and white journalists who came from the north, to the southern segregationist editors and reporters who ended up "on the wrong side of history."
While told in a straightforward "history book" style, there are nevertheless harrowing scenes that make ...more

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Jan 28, 2009

Chuck Jackson rated it

A great, great book. Looks at how journalism covered the civil rights struggle and both changed it and was changed by it. Looks at how broadcast journalism began to come of age during this era.

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Apr 27, 2011

Tory rated it

another one that I learned a great deal from. the media, even then, was a force, and surprisingly, the LA times in particular because it was so disconnected from the emotions and people involved.

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Apr 05, 2008

Leigh rated it

This Pulitzer-prize winning book takes a new approach to the history of the Civil Rights Struggle for African-Americans, by focusing on the newspapers and journalists who first wrote -- often at great personal cost -- about this important period in American history. A riveting story and full of great characters: The heroes who are flawed, hesitant, unsure but also hold fast to their moral visions; the villains: smart, canny, ruthless; and the tragic figures who saw what was happening but didn'...more

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Dec 18, 2011

Cwelshhans rated it

One of the best books I've read in a long time. Really hard to put down, incredibly informative, and a unique (but very important) way to consider the civil rights movement.

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Dec 23, 2009

John rated it

Highly engaging book on the role of journalism in advancing the cause of civil rights in the US during the 1950s and 1960s. A Pulitzer Prize winner, if I recall correctly.

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Oct 14, 2009

Kathleen Spearman rated it

As with most things I lived through, I really had no notion of the details of the civil rights movement. And the struggle continues, sadly.

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Apr 04, 2009

Justin rated it

Excellent. Brilliant reporting, compelling writing, important history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction, and well deserved.

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Nov 22, 2009

Tom rated it

An excellent, detailed account for the Civil Rights movement from the perspective of the journalists who covered it.

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Nov 25, 2010

Zach rated it

A great account of the roll the press played in the civil rights movement. Details a variety of editors, reporters and photographers and their coverage of school integration, civil rights leaders and voting rights. It is written chronologically from events in the forties through the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. I would have liked to see more information on the black press (which gets some attention), but overall a great book.

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Jan 11, 2010

Dennis Henn rated it

Not as good as "Parting the Waters," but this book won a Pulitzer for a reason. Detailed without being tedious, Roberts captures plenty of the tension that roiled the South during the fifties and sixties. As a reader, I felt a bit of the danger reporters and protesters must have felt as angry, empowered law enforcement agents meted out injustice. It is hard to imagine the depth of our depravity and our ability to hate.

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Sep 01, 2011

Nicholas P rated it

very well written book. as long and as thorough as it was, it was very exciting at many parts. glad i decided to read this book.

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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

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Books by Gene Roberts

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Trivia About The Race Beat: Th...

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Other Editions (9)