Roberts, Gene, and Hank Klibanoff. The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation. New York, New York: Knopf, 2006.
In 1963, the United States watched as violent protests and events in the American South unfolded the Civil Rights Movement, a story and era that became challenging, yet important for th¬¬¬¬e media and press to cover. The Civil Rights movement become a mass effort, mainly focused in the South, for African Americans in the United States to achieve access to the same opportunities and basic rights that white Americans had. With many restrictions implemented upon African Americans during this time through segregation and Jim Crow laws, issues involving voting rights, education and social segregation
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As they trace and describe the history of the many newspapers that covered the Civil Rights Movement, the authors describe the importance of television and news broadcasts that brought the Selma riots, the Little Rock crisis, the sit ins and so much more to the attention of families at home. Photographers, as well, were important in documenting these events very close in …show more content…
This “American conscience” was described in Myrdal’s An American Dilemma as the American creed in which Americans had a common set of values that “embodied” concepts of equality for everyone. Even before the Civil Rights movement, the black press in the United States were the only ones who reported on anything relating to race, especially racial injustice while the mainstream press (composed of white Americans), ignored these journalists and the issues that they had attempted to reach out to the public. It wasn’t until the violence in the South had spread, the Brown vs. Board of Education case became a controversy and other historical Supreme Court decisions came about, that nation finally focused their attention to the issues pertaining to civil rights; the black press documented these issues long enough until the white press and the nation listened. Civil rights activists and segregationists were now at