The Race Beat Summary

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, The Race Beat, was a novel written by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff; who were both American journalists and editors. The Race Beat was written based on the time period of the Civil Rights Movement. The centralized idea of this novel was to show how racism was finally brought forth and acknowledged as a whole from the nation. This idea was presented from both televised media and printed media. The way The Race Beat was organized was through a bunch of collected interviews, unpublished articles, notes from secret meetings, and even private correspondences. Through this research, a novel was able to be put together chronologically to show the importance of the role of press in showcasing the Civil Rights

The Southern press, the Northern press, and the Black, or Negro, press. The Southern press were strongly segregationist, if there were any reports or journalists that were sympathetic, that could lead to violence from the public. The Northern press went to the Southern press first for their word on how the stories were being told. Not until they started to do their own research and send journalists down to cover the stories did they unveil the truth about what is truly happening. They start to increasingly become more sympathetic towards the movement. The Negro press was considered the inner circle of the civil rights movement. They were the voice for the black people all around. They would usually be front and center to cover stories, but at times, the white journalists would be preferred because the blacks would either be constricted from entering an area, or the words from the white press caused a larger

They suffered through abuse, many were threatened, beaten, and sometimes even killed for trying to cover the movement. There were documented pictures in this novel that shows how black journalists took abuse but never fought back in Little Rock in 1957. Editor L. Alex Wilson was one of the victims at the event along with some of his fellow journalists. They were in Little Rock to cover the story of the first group of nine black students enrolling in Little Rock Central High School, also known as Little Rock Nine. He was kicked, strangled, bruised, and battered, and while all this was going on, Relman (Pat) Morin, who was a reporter, filed stories of what was currently going on and while he was reporting the stories, his phone booth was attacked with him inside of it. Another reporter who was reporting the event for the New York Times was Benjamin Fine. He was a white man who famously sat down next to Elizabeth Eckford, who was one of the nine, and told her not tell let them see her cry. Roberts and Klibanoff presented a case where the press shows how whites and blacks can interact in a civil humane manner. The Race Beat not only shows an insight on how the press evolves to promote the awareness of the Civil Rights movement, but also how the Civil Rights movement learned to use the press to their