A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week 196

Influenced by the movement’s media savviness and its careful staging of protests – and, of course, by many whites’ overt racial antipathy and violence – journalists typically presented white southerners as inimitably racist and correspondingly outside of the US mainstream. Americans saw moving and still pictures of white southerners assaulting black and white protestors. News media frequently contrasted these ferocious whites with images of dignified, peaceful black civil rights protestors. For nonsoutherners, the message was clear: the South and its white inhabitants were abnormal and hostile to American ideals of equality.

— from the section “Reporting the Vicious South” in the chapter “The Many Faces of the South” in The South of the Mind: American Imaginings of White Southerners, 1960 – 1980 by Zachary J. Lechner

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