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 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.