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Reporting Civil Rights, Part Two: American Journalism 1963-1973
From A. Philip Randolph's defiant call in 1941 for African Americans to march on Washington to Alice Walker in 1973, "Reporting Civil Rights" presents firsthand accounts of the revolutionary events that overthrew segregation in the United States. This two-volume anthology brings together for the first time nearly 200 newspaper and magazine reports and book excerpts, and features 151 writers, including James Baldwin, Robert Penn Warren, David Halberstam, Lillian Smith, Gordon Parks, Murray Kempton, Ted Poston, Claude Sitton, and Anne Moody. A newly researched chronology of the movement, a 32-page insert of rare journalist photographs, and original biographical profiles are included in each volume
Vivid reports by Robert Richardson and Bob Clark capture the nightmarish Watts and Detroit riots, while Paul Good records the growing schism in 1966 between King's nonviolence and Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" advocacy. Joan Didion and Gilbert Moore cover the Black Panthers; Garry Wills and Pat Watters chronicle the traumatic aftermath of King's assassination and the failure of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign; Willie Morris and Marshall Frady assess the early 1970s South; Tom Wolfe caustically explores new forms of racial confrontation; and Richard Margolis depicts post-integration consciousness among African American college students.
Singly or together, "Reporting Civil Rights" captures firsthand the impassioned struggle for freedom and equality that transformed America.
Vivid reports by Robert Richardson and Bob Clark capture the nightmarish Watts and Detroit riots, while Paul Good records the growing schism in 1966 between King's nonviolence and Stokely Carmichael's "Black Power" advocacy. Joan Didion and Gilbert Moore cover the Black Panthers; Garry Wills and Pat Watters chronicle the traumatic aftermath of King's assassination and the failure of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign; Willie Morris and Marshall Frady assess the early 1970s South; Tom Wolfe caustically explores new forms of racial confrontation; and Richard Margolis depicts post-integration consciousness among African American college students.
Singly or together, "Reporting Civil Rights" captures firsthand the impassioned struggle for freedom and equality that transformed America.
986 pages, Hardcover
First published January 6, 2003
About the author
Clayborne Carson
91 books45 followersClayborne Carson is professor of history at Stanford University, and director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute. Since 1985 he has directed the Martin Luther King Papers Project, a long-term project to edit and publish the papers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
February 8, 2023
A Priceless Documentary Of America's Struggle For Civil Rights -- 2
This book is the second volume of the Library of America's documentary, journalistic history of the Civil Rights Movement. The first volume covers the years 1941-1963 and takes the story up to the March on Washington in August, 1963. The second volume covers a shorter time span, 1963 - 1973 with an equally momentous series of events. Volume II is easily important enough for its own short notice and review here.
The centerpiece of the two volumes is the March on Washington which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Indeed, the 1963 March, led by Dr. King, may be the watershed event of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. The three eyewitness accounts of the March presented in this book offer three different perspectives. The 1963 March, and the moment of idealism, justice and peace it has come to represent pervades and suggests worlds of commentary upon the rest of the volume.
The articles in this book have an emphasis on Congressional action. In 1964, following the 1963 events in Birmingham, Alabama and the 1963 March, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which, in time, would effectively end segregation in the South. In 1965, following events in Selma, Alabama and the March from Selma to Montgomery Alabama, Congress enacted voting rights legislation which at long last fulfilled the promise of the 15th Amendment to protect the voting rights of black people. The events in Selma, and the manner in which they galvanized the nation are well documented in this book.
The history recounted in this volume is marked by assassination, violence and discord. There are two major assassinations highlighted in the book. The volume describes Malcom X's break from the Black Muslim movement and his assassination in February, 1965. A great deal of space is given to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1965 and to its tragic aftermath.
Much space is given to the violence that haunted the struggle for Civil Rights. In particular, many articles discuss the murder of three young Civil Rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney during June, 1964. These murders involved the FBI in a massive manhunt which ultimately led to the conviction of Klansmen and of local law enforcement officials.
There is a great deal of material in the volume on the riots in Watts and Detroit and on the rise of Black Power and the Black Panther movement.
Many articles draw excellent portraits of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, including Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and, of course, Dr. King.
There are pictures of dusty roads and small towns in the South with portrayals of places both before and after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement. There is a suggestion in more than a few articles that the South may have, given its past, an ultimately easier time of moving towards a unified, racially egalitarian and united society than will the North. Time still needs to tell whether this is will in fact be the case.
The two Library of America volumes on the Civil Rights Movement are invaluable guides to the most important social movement of 20th Century America. They will show the reader how the Civil Rights Movement became an essential component in the formation of the American dream and the American ideal.
Robin Friedman
This book is the second volume of the Library of America's documentary, journalistic history of the Civil Rights Movement. The first volume covers the years 1941-1963 and takes the story up to the March on Washington in August, 1963. The second volume covers a shorter time span, 1963 - 1973 with an equally momentous series of events. Volume II is easily important enough for its own short notice and review here.
The centerpiece of the two volumes is the March on Washington which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year. Indeed, the 1963 March, led by Dr. King, may be the watershed event of the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. The three eyewitness accounts of the March presented in this book offer three different perspectives. The 1963 March, and the moment of idealism, justice and peace it has come to represent pervades and suggests worlds of commentary upon the rest of the volume.
The articles in this book have an emphasis on Congressional action. In 1964, following the 1963 events in Birmingham, Alabama and the 1963 March, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which, in time, would effectively end segregation in the South. In 1965, following events in Selma, Alabama and the March from Selma to Montgomery Alabama, Congress enacted voting rights legislation which at long last fulfilled the promise of the 15th Amendment to protect the voting rights of black people. The events in Selma, and the manner in which they galvanized the nation are well documented in this book.
The history recounted in this volume is marked by assassination, violence and discord. There are two major assassinations highlighted in the book. The volume describes Malcom X's break from the Black Muslim movement and his assassination in February, 1965. A great deal of space is given to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1965 and to its tragic aftermath.
Much space is given to the violence that haunted the struggle for Civil Rights. In particular, many articles discuss the murder of three young Civil Rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi: Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Cheney during June, 1964. These murders involved the FBI in a massive manhunt which ultimately led to the conviction of Klansmen and of local law enforcement officials.
There is a great deal of material in the volume on the riots in Watts and Detroit and on the rise of Black Power and the Black Panther movement.
Many articles draw excellent portraits of the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, including Malcom X, Stokely Carmichael, Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Jesse Jackson, and, of course, Dr. King.
There are pictures of dusty roads and small towns in the South with portrayals of places both before and after the victories of the Civil Rights Movement. There is a suggestion in more than a few articles that the South may have, given its past, an ultimately easier time of moving towards a unified, racially egalitarian and united society than will the North. Time still needs to tell whether this is will in fact be the case.
The two Library of America volumes on the Civil Rights Movement are invaluable guides to the most important social movement of 20th Century America. They will show the reader how the Civil Rights Movement became an essential component in the formation of the American dream and the American ideal.
Robin Friedman
April 28, 2012
The first volume of the Library of America RCR tracks the rising energy of the Civil Rights Movement; volume 2 chronicles the decline into the chaos of the late 60s. It's a depressing read, but there's nothing that can be done about that; it's simply what happened. I would have liked just a bit more indication that the critiques of the chauvinism of the Black Power Movement were beginning as the story unfolded; see Toni Cade's anthology The Black Woman for the supplement. But most of the problems I have with the collection have to do with the fact that it really ends in 1970 rather than 1973 (the last couple of essays are essentially a token coda). I'd really like a third volume, which covers the transiton from Civil Rights to Black Power (both aspects of the longer African Americna Freedom Movement). It would have been nice to have had an excerpt from Eldridge Cleaver or Gwendolyn Brooks' Report From Part One.
Quibbles aside, an absolutely indispensable source for anyone intersted in a crucial phase of American history.
Quibbles aside, an absolutely indispensable source for anyone intersted in a crucial phase of American history.
January 26, 2008
The second part of the Library of America's two volume anthology of journalism on the Civil Rights movement is as excellent as the first part. This volume covers the March on Washington, the slaying of three Civil Rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the desegregation marches in Birmingham, Selma, St. Augustine, and other southern cities, the riots in Watts, Harlem, Newark, and Detroit, the rise and fall of Black Nationalism (SNCC, Malcolm X, the Panthers), King’s efforts to focus on economic justice and involvement in the anti-war movement, the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the first reportage on life in the South after desegregation. Like the first volume, the mix of contributors is rich; the freshness of the reporting compelling, with only a few false notes (Tom Wolfe’s too hip by half schlock journalism). Should be required reading for all.
May 2, 2010
My S.F. Chronicle review from 2003:
To try to reckon with the power of this remarkable, two-volume collection from the Library of America, "Reporting Civil Rights," it might be helpful to do a little thought experiment: Imagine what it would do to George W. Bush to read these two fat volumes.
The question is not whether the book would change Bush. Oh no. That much is certain. The question is whether, in a real sense, he could even survive the experience. Bush, like many Americans, has staked much on a good-natured lack of awareness of what it is like to live at the opposite end of the power spectrum from the one he has always known. Bush's charm, such as it is, rests on the impression he conveys of being eminently comfortable with this stunted perspective. He seems to like who he is, in short, and not to fear all that he fails to be.
No one who reads -- not skims -- all 1,982 pages of this kaleidoscope of writings on America's greatest struggle of self-definition can come away without a deeply humbling sense of that human quality that most unites us all: the certainty that we all have a knack for fooling ourselves and finding ways to justify everything from petty slights to grievous harm.
The point is not to pick on Bush. Nor is it to kick fresh life into that pathetic old zombie, white liberal guilt. The ultimate subject of this collection is not the ways in which some of us have failed others but rather the way that we as a people have failed ourselves. It's a theme not without relevance here at the outset of the 21st century.
"Buchenwald was one of the worst things that ever happened in the entire history of the world," James Baldwin wrote nearly 40 years ago in "Nobody Knows My Name." "The world has never lacked for horrifying examples; but I do not believe that these examples are meant to be used as justification for our own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes."
Baldwin, it may go without saying, is one of the stars of this collection of 188 pieces of writing, some of them book excerpts, but most newspaper and magazine journalism. That is because the tone of pain and outrage and hard-
won clarity that defines his work comes across here differently than when it stands alone. Here it comes almost as a relief, after so many numbing and disturbing details, rather than a challenge.
What the collection can offer the reader is something no mere book can: membership (albeit it only honorary, or provisional membership) in a community.
No reader, especially no white reader, can ever really know what it felt like to be forced to the back of the bus, or whacked on the head or just plain ignored. But by getting to know the people who played the major roles in the civil rights struggles of the '40s, '50s and '60s, a reader can at least come a little closer to gaining a lasting sense of what those struggles meant and how they can never really be over.
Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple," wraps up the collection with a 1973 New York Times Magazine article in which she explores a variation on this theme. "When Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter were first seen trying to enter the University of Georgia, people were stunned: Why did they want to go to that whitefolks' school? . . . I had watched Charlayne and Hamp every afternoon on the news when I came home from school. Their daring was infectious."
The reader might not have watched on television but can claim an intimate knowledge of what Hunter's experience was like. Her account of her 1961 experiences has a simplicity and ingenuousness that makes its small, human details more powerful and unforgettable. The night a mob gathers outside her dorm room, and someone breaks her window with a Coke bottle, sending shards of glass all over her clothing, she finds herself musing not on hate but human kindness.
"(O)ne of the most genuine persons it has been my good luck to meet came down and began talking to me," she writes. "Though it was clear that she herself was nervous, she did all she could under the circumstances to take my mind off what was going on. . . . After she had left I wondered how many people, myself included, would have had the courage to do what she had done."
Much later, a weary Stokely Carmichael pauses in 1967 to look back at all the battles fought earlier in that difficult decade. He talks to Gordon Parks about the fatal church bombings in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, and by this point, those are much more than buzzwords to the reader. The 15 sticks of dynamite tossed into the 16th Street Baptist Church that year killed four young girls -- Cynthia Wesley, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Addie Mae Collins, 14. Claude Wesley wandered around after the blast, looking for his daughter, done up like the others in her Sunday best, and finally went to the hospital.
"They asked me if my daughter was wearing a ring," Wesley told reporter Karl Fleming. "I said yes, she was, and they pulled her little hand out and the little ring was there."
Carmichael also talks to Parks about the famous murder of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., the next summer, and again the names Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Cheney are much more than mere bits of data. We can almost see, again, the look on Sheriff Lawrence Rainey's face as Schwerner's widow, Rita, sits down with him in his car, and even though he won't look at her or address her directly, tells him: "I feel that you know what happened. I'm going to find out if I can. If you don't want me to find out, you'll have to kill me."
As Carmichael talks to Parks, who was with Malcolm X's widow and children the night he was killed, the reader starts to feel, like actual physical pressure, the weight of these and so many other inhuman episodes.
"Stokely recalled how in Montgomery he had broken after seeing a pregnant black woman knocked head over heels by water jetting from a fire hose, and other men and women being trampled by police horses," Parks notes. " 'Suddenly, ' he said, rubbing his eyelids, 'everything blurred. I started screaming and I didn't stop until they got me to the airport. That day I knew I could never be hit again without hitting back.' "
From there it was a short step to black power and a distancing from King's nonviolent strategies, and another short step to Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers ("Every time you go execute a white racist Gestapo cop, you are defending yourself," Newton tells the Times Magazine in 1967.)
Hitting back meant full-scale rioting -- with fires, snipers and looting -- in Watts and other L.A. neighborhoods, in Newark, N.J., and, most horrifically,
in Detroit, all of which is painstakingly recorded here. Bob Clark, covering the Detroit riots for Ebony, is arrested, even though he has a press pass, and tells of sadistic beatings in the filthy cell where he and the others are kept,
and of a black sniper in their midst, telling them, "Man, I got four of them" -- meaning white people, most likely police officers -- "last night! I sat up there with my bottle of wine and they didn't know what was happening."
The collection is not without flaws. Despite the obvious care and debate that went into choices about how much attention to give which people and events, Malcolm X somehow gets short shrift. To cite the space given to him, only seven lines are required in the index; the King references occupy 54 lines.
A February 1965 Village Voice interview with Malcolm, shortly before his death, offers a moving portrait of his complexities. "I care about all people, but especially about black people," he says. "I'm a Muslim. My religion teaches me brotherhood, but doesn't make me a fool."
That's not to take anything away from the collection, merely to note that anyone who takes it seriously -- and that ought to be everyone -- can't help but have strong feelings about the choices that shaped it.
Overall, though, the vastness of the panorama surveyed is a statement unto itself. Not only the famous civil rights episodes of the '60s, but also glimpses of the '40s and the '50s, add up to the readerly equivalent of a headache. It's too much! Too many petty put-downs and slights. Too much pointless and cowardly violence. Too much gradualism, and way too many deaths. But that, of course, is just the point:
"For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there," King tells David Halberstam in May 1967, a year before he was killed. "Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society,
a revolution of values."
Or, as Fanny Lou Hamer tells Jerry DeMuth in May 1964, "All my life I've been sick and tired. Now I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
A reader knows what she means.
Steve Kettmann, a former Chronicle reporter, lives in Berlin and reviews regularly for The Chronicle.
This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
To try to reckon with the power of this remarkable, two-volume collection from the Library of America, "Reporting Civil Rights," it might be helpful to do a little thought experiment: Imagine what it would do to George W. Bush to read these two fat volumes.
The question is not whether the book would change Bush. Oh no. That much is certain. The question is whether, in a real sense, he could even survive the experience. Bush, like many Americans, has staked much on a good-natured lack of awareness of what it is like to live at the opposite end of the power spectrum from the one he has always known. Bush's charm, such as it is, rests on the impression he conveys of being eminently comfortable with this stunted perspective. He seems to like who he is, in short, and not to fear all that he fails to be.
No one who reads -- not skims -- all 1,982 pages of this kaleidoscope of writings on America's greatest struggle of self-definition can come away without a deeply humbling sense of that human quality that most unites us all: the certainty that we all have a knack for fooling ourselves and finding ways to justify everything from petty slights to grievous harm.
The point is not to pick on Bush. Nor is it to kick fresh life into that pathetic old zombie, white liberal guilt. The ultimate subject of this collection is not the ways in which some of us have failed others but rather the way that we as a people have failed ourselves. It's a theme not without relevance here at the outset of the 21st century.
"Buchenwald was one of the worst things that ever happened in the entire history of the world," James Baldwin wrote nearly 40 years ago in "Nobody Knows My Name." "The world has never lacked for horrifying examples; but I do not believe that these examples are meant to be used as justification for our own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes."
Baldwin, it may go without saying, is one of the stars of this collection of 188 pieces of writing, some of them book excerpts, but most newspaper and magazine journalism. That is because the tone of pain and outrage and hard-
won clarity that defines his work comes across here differently than when it stands alone. Here it comes almost as a relief, after so many numbing and disturbing details, rather than a challenge.
What the collection can offer the reader is something no mere book can: membership (albeit it only honorary, or provisional membership) in a community.
No reader, especially no white reader, can ever really know what it felt like to be forced to the back of the bus, or whacked on the head or just plain ignored. But by getting to know the people who played the major roles in the civil rights struggles of the '40s, '50s and '60s, a reader can at least come a little closer to gaining a lasting sense of what those struggles meant and how they can never really be over.
Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple," wraps up the collection with a 1973 New York Times Magazine article in which she explores a variation on this theme. "When Hamilton Holmes and Charlayne Hunter were first seen trying to enter the University of Georgia, people were stunned: Why did they want to go to that whitefolks' school? . . . I had watched Charlayne and Hamp every afternoon on the news when I came home from school. Their daring was infectious."
The reader might not have watched on television but can claim an intimate knowledge of what Hunter's experience was like. Her account of her 1961 experiences has a simplicity and ingenuousness that makes its small, human details more powerful and unforgettable. The night a mob gathers outside her dorm room, and someone breaks her window with a Coke bottle, sending shards of glass all over her clothing, she finds herself musing not on hate but human kindness.
"(O)ne of the most genuine persons it has been my good luck to meet came down and began talking to me," she writes. "Though it was clear that she herself was nervous, she did all she could under the circumstances to take my mind off what was going on. . . . After she had left I wondered how many people, myself included, would have had the courage to do what she had done."
Much later, a weary Stokely Carmichael pauses in 1967 to look back at all the battles fought earlier in that difficult decade. He talks to Gordon Parks about the fatal church bombings in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, and by this point, those are much more than buzzwords to the reader. The 15 sticks of dynamite tossed into the 16th Street Baptist Church that year killed four young girls -- Cynthia Wesley, 14, Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, and Addie Mae Collins, 14. Claude Wesley wandered around after the blast, looking for his daughter, done up like the others in her Sunday best, and finally went to the hospital.
"They asked me if my daughter was wearing a ring," Wesley told reporter Karl Fleming. "I said yes, she was, and they pulled her little hand out and the little ring was there."
Carmichael also talks to Parks about the famous murder of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., the next summer, and again the names Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Cheney are much more than mere bits of data. We can almost see, again, the look on Sheriff Lawrence Rainey's face as Schwerner's widow, Rita, sits down with him in his car, and even though he won't look at her or address her directly, tells him: "I feel that you know what happened. I'm going to find out if I can. If you don't want me to find out, you'll have to kill me."
As Carmichael talks to Parks, who was with Malcolm X's widow and children the night he was killed, the reader starts to feel, like actual physical pressure, the weight of these and so many other inhuman episodes.
"Stokely recalled how in Montgomery he had broken after seeing a pregnant black woman knocked head over heels by water jetting from a fire hose, and other men and women being trampled by police horses," Parks notes. " 'Suddenly, ' he said, rubbing his eyelids, 'everything blurred. I started screaming and I didn't stop until they got me to the airport. That day I knew I could never be hit again without hitting back.' "
From there it was a short step to black power and a distancing from King's nonviolent strategies, and another short step to Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers ("Every time you go execute a white racist Gestapo cop, you are defending yourself," Newton tells the Times Magazine in 1967.)
Hitting back meant full-scale rioting -- with fires, snipers and looting -- in Watts and other L.A. neighborhoods, in Newark, N.J., and, most horrifically,
in Detroit, all of which is painstakingly recorded here. Bob Clark, covering the Detroit riots for Ebony, is arrested, even though he has a press pass, and tells of sadistic beatings in the filthy cell where he and the others are kept,
and of a black sniper in their midst, telling them, "Man, I got four of them" -- meaning white people, most likely police officers -- "last night! I sat up there with my bottle of wine and they didn't know what was happening."
The collection is not without flaws. Despite the obvious care and debate that went into choices about how much attention to give which people and events, Malcolm X somehow gets short shrift. To cite the space given to him, only seven lines are required in the index; the King references occupy 54 lines.
A February 1965 Village Voice interview with Malcolm, shortly before his death, offers a moving portrait of his complexities. "I care about all people, but especially about black people," he says. "I'm a Muslim. My religion teaches me brotherhood, but doesn't make me a fool."
That's not to take anything away from the collection, merely to note that anyone who takes it seriously -- and that ought to be everyone -- can't help but have strong feelings about the choices that shaped it.
Overall, though, the vastness of the panorama surveyed is a statement unto itself. Not only the famous civil rights episodes of the '60s, but also glimpses of the '40s and the '50s, add up to the readerly equivalent of a headache. It's too much! Too many petty put-downs and slights. Too much pointless and cowardly violence. Too much gradualism, and way too many deaths. But that, of course, is just the point:
"For years, I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there," King tells David Halberstam in May 1967, a year before he was killed. "Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society,
a revolution of values."
Or, as Fanny Lou Hamer tells Jerry DeMuth in May 1964, "All my life I've been sick and tired. Now I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired."
A reader knows what she means.
Steve Kettmann, a former Chronicle reporter, lives in Berlin and reviews regularly for The Chronicle.
This article appeared on page M - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article...
December 9, 2023
A good sampling of contemporary or near contemporary journalism and commentary on the civil rights movement covering the March on Washington and the next ten years.
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