The Race Beat
The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff
Alfred A. Knopf
518 pp., $30

It is impossible to read a history of press coverage of the civil rights movement without reflecting darkly on today’s era of secret surveillance, clandestine prisons, and prosecutorial threats against newspapers that expose government misdeeds. As the struggle in the South illustrated, only when reporters throw spotlights on the ugliest behavior does the conscience of the country begin to stir. Only when the press is relentless at portraying awful truths, even in the face of danger, will that conscience mobilize for change. That’s how it works in an open political system that owes its allegiance to an informed people. The authors of the First Amendment sure had it right.

Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff draw no parallel between then and now, but every gracefully written page of The Race Beat prompts big thoughts about the nature of America. With each gripping story of racial confrontation, every meticulous reconstruction of the perverse misuse of law, every account of vile acts committed by the segregationist press and courageous efforts by a few white southern editors, this probing book reverberates with large lessons in democracy and justice.

Roberts and Klibanoff begin with Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist and parliamentarian, who recognized in the early 1940s, as he completed researching An American Dilemma, that “a great many Northerners, perhaps the majority, get shocked and shaken in their conscience when they learn the facts.” He put his conclusion in italics for emphasis: “To get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people.”

But major American news organizations did not examine racial issues until racially charged violence erupted in the South. “The...

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