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When four black students at North Carolina A&T College in Greensboro, N.C., deliberately and defiantly challenged Jim Crow laws by refusing to leave the white lunch counter at a Woolworth’s, they ignited the modern civil rights movement. The date was Feb. 1, 1959.
At the time, the South was already reeling under tremendous pressure as its white citizens desperately defended and tried to hang on to its separate but definitely unequal segregated way of life. The turmoil of the previous decade – the lynching of Emmett Till, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Brown v. Board decision and other legal battles, including the Little Rock school integration – gave way to even more tragic and monumental events during the decade of the 1960s.
The country’s developing television media found themselves deeply in the midst of fast-paced changes occurring nationwide; indeed, the landscape and results would have been radically different had it not been for the press. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., acknowledged as much when he said that, "Without the media, the civil rights movement would be a bird without wings.
I was a member of that media class – albeit, the much poorer cousin to the major press – during that period, a young reporter, recently out of Ohio State University's journalism program and working at the Atlanta Daily World, the city’s black paper. The World's other full-time reporter, John H. Britton, Jr., and I enjoyed a lofty perch to view the movement, good relations with its leaders and young fighters from the paper's offices on
Auburn Avenue. We met many of the students, and made some lasting relationships and friendships, as they passed through town on their way to the battlegrounds in south Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the points of heavy resistance by whites. Some of them never returned alive, or came back with broken bodies and battered psyches, lives altered forever. Many became politicians, professors and even members of the preacher class that they criticized during the movement;
they were the future leaders in communities across the country.
On our watch, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., brought his ministers and
headquarters of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to Atlanta from Montgomery; just a few steps from the Daily World, while the more militant youngsters of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) set up shop diagonally across the street. To publicly display their early contempt for SCLC, a large painting of King greeted visitors to SNCC offices. It was tagged, “De Lawd.”
Thus, Britt and I had easy access not only to the legitimate movers and shakers of the movement, but also to the hangers-on, friends, fans, foes, groupies, all of whom made their way to and through Atlanta at some point, including Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, comedian Dick Gregory and singer-actor Harry Belafonte. The city reminded me of London's role in World War II as a staging ground for the battles on the European continent. Along with our other close colleague, city editor George Coleman, we partied with the leaders, the kids and other visitors; we dined and drank with them at restaurants and juke joints in Atlanta’s thriving black community – B.B. Beamon’s, Jenkin’s Steak House, Royal Peacock (the nightclub where we caught James Brown, Jimmy Reed, Gene Chandler and Sam Cooke) and Henry’s Grill on Auburn Avenue; and across town on up-and-coming Hunter Street, Frazier’s, Pacschal’s, Alex’s Bar-B-Cue, Parmesan House and Busy Bee. We also frequented the Town Club at University Motel, Railroad Men’s Club, Lincoln Country Club and the Builders Club, and various branches of American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars clubs around town. And, we danced at Magnolia Ballroom, where we also caught Nina
Black Press Tackled
Tests of Ethics, Competition with
Major Media During the Movement
g By Paul Delaney